The Bold Italic’s 2020 Awards
This article is part of The Bold Italic’s 2020 Awards, which celebrate the Bay Area’s small businesses and local residents who have hustled and shown creativity throughout 2020. See all the award winners here.
If restaurants have been hit hard by Covid-19 restrictions (which they have), bars have been hit even worse. As the lowest notch on the totem pole considered essential, it look the longest for our local watering holes to get the green light to reopen this year. And when they did, they needed to find a way to create outdoor space and offer food to their guests under new guidelines.
But when they did, so many of our favorite pubs and cocktail havens went all out upgrading patios and building beautiful new parklets to create outdoor drinking oases.
Zeitgeist, an iconic beer garden in the Mission that’s been around since the 1970s, was already known for its spacious beer garden. When Covid hit, it had that to its advantage — but it also went above and beyond to make things even safer by adding floor-to-ceiling plexiglass between table and new systems to keep people socially distanced.
Finding that much outdoor space in San Francisco to drink is unusual — which is why our readers chose Zeitgeist as the winner of Bar with the Best Outdoor Seating in SF as part of our 2020 Awards.
Founded in 1977, the beer garden is a historic legacy business known for Bloody Marys, margaritas, and over 60 craft beers. During the pandemic, they’ve not only provided a safe spot to relax, but also offered that space to other organizations and worked with local comedians.
We caught up with Lara Burmeister, president of Zeitgeist, to ask her about Zeitgeist’s journey through 2020. Read that interview below — and see which other bars with outdoor seating were nominated.
The Bold Italic: How have you managed to stay afloat this year?
Lara Burmeister:
Since the business has been in operation for 43 years now, we were lucky enough to have had the time to reinvest in and keep earnings within the business in order to weather a rainy day. It has been a very tough year, our worst ever, but we are committed to making it through to the other side of this pandemic by being agile and smart about how we spend resources.
In June, we flipped around our business model and have been tinkering with it ever since. For over 40 years, we’ve been a high-capacity bar with five staff members behind the bar, serving customers across the bar top, often with a large crowd of 50 or more people standing in line. We could have had 300 people mingling in the backyard at any given time. This year, we have switched to a full table-service restaurant model that serves roughly 120 people at our peak times. Luckily, given some technology upgrades we had already invested in in January, we were able to switch to the table service model, with a dedicated seater, [and] four servers taking orders at the tables. We’ve been happy that on average drinks get out to the customers in less than three minutes of ordering. The staff has been amazing to work with — they have flexed themselves in how we do work and they have brought so many helpful business ideas and improvements for this challenging period.
Since July, we have partnered with other SF organizations to make our beer garden space available to them to help us all get through this. From July through October, we partnered with Four Barrel Coffee for “Zeitcafé” to create a much-needed café experience for San Franciscans on Thursday mornings. In November, we launched a weekly live stand-up comedy show with House People, hosted by Darlene Bereznicki and Orion Levine, each Sunday night. In January, we will be launching a partnership with Burma Love for Monday through Friday lunch service with a specialty menu from them paired with our full bar menu. We have also offered the garden space to nonprofit organizations to host fully distanced private small business events in our off-hours.
Zeitgeist has always been a unique place in SF. For us who run it, we are extremely proud of the institution it is. Many people have said it’s the first bar they ever went to in SF or it’s where they met their partner. For us, it’s a place that’s authentic, unapologetic, and fierce(ly kind). We are very serious about keeping our staff and the public safe by following the rules. Time and again, a customer might feel treated gruffly by a staff member, as we are not shy about reminding people of their responsibility when they enter our beer garden. But from our vantage point, in a pandemic, it’s what we have to do to operate safely. We feel confident that we are doing our absolute best to offer a safe outdoor dining experience during the pandemic. After a recent scare, where we were informed our staff may have been exposed to Covid, all of the current staff members were tested and all 14 tests came back negative. That was a very reassuring moment for us and we feel confident that our safety protocols are working.
Tell us about your outdoor area and how you planned it for the Covid era.
In April and May, the managers got together and started brainstorming how we could reopen to meet the protocols we were anticipating would come out from the city. After ideas from circular sandboxes placed six feet apart to getting rid of all of the picnic tables, one manager realized that we could get a much higher capacity by reorienting the picnic tables and placing six-foot-by-seven-foot partitions between each table. So in the first week of June, we installed 15 partitions, repurposing aluminum-framed glass doors to create solid barriers between each table.
We have an extremely competent staff that work very hard and take their jobs seriously. We have committed to each other as a team [so] that we will place each other’s health as the number one priority in this period. So we have taken the protocols very seriously and enforce them strictly with our customers.
How are you holding up now, heading into another month of shelter-in-place?
Honestly, it’s tough. On the business of course, but even more so on the staff. It seems that as the months have gone by, the general public has forgotten how much the service industry depends on them. With the tipping system in the U.S., it’s important that restaurant and bar frontline workers are supported through the closure and generally for the length of the pandemic. We are doing what we can, but with the business model the way it is and the uncertainty of the future, we have to make sure we can make it through another six-plus months of not even breaking even.
At the same time, we think the shelter-in-place is the right thing to do. We have been expecting and planning for another shutdown since July’s increase in cases. We feel confident that we can get up and running on day one of the lifting of the stay-at-home order.
How can people help support your business?
There are the things people can do for us during this time:
- Donate to the business through our online store. The donations collected through the online store will go to support the current front-end staff who depend on tip income to supplement their wages.
- Buy our merchandise through our online store.
- Show up in January when we reopen. Our merchandise helps bring in some income to cover rent, the energy costs of cooling our 200-keg capacity beer cooler, and other fixed costs we can’t get rid of during this closure.
- Stay home, please do the right thing, so that we can get back and running on January 4. A further extension of the shelter-in-place will be devastating to the restaurants and bars in SF.
- Buy tickets to the comedy shows in January to support the comedians.
- Even if you hate us and hope we go under, please consider donating to your favorite bar or restaurant. They need you.
Other nominees for the Bar With the Best Outdoor Seating in San Francisco
1. Evil Eye
This Mission cocktail den is known for its moody indoor space and high-quality, artistic drinks. The drinks are still delicious, but the indoor mood has shifted to a pleasant, bustling parklet on Mission Street.
2. The Page
The Page Bar is a beloved dive bar in the Lower Haight with no frills, an exposed brick wall, and lots of animal heads on the wall. So what’s a dive bar to do in Covid times? Build a parklet and welcome the light.
But the Page didn’t just build an ordinary parklet—it added faux brick wallpaper, a fireplace with books on the mantle, a Christmas tree, and string lights. They also partner with The Little Chihuahua next door to offer food.
Page Bar owner Bob Wait told TBI he’s been wanting to do outdoor seating for a while and hopes one positive of this time will be “some formal recognition from the ABC that a bar operating outside can be a positive influence, not something to be feared.”
3. The Beehive
The Beehive is a ’60s-inspired neighborhood cocktail bar in the Mission that “channels free-spirited, funkier times,” which we at TBI are all about. They’ve brought their Mad Men vibes outside to a fun, bright blue parklet with walls and plenty of distance.
Looking ahead to 2021, Tristen Philippart De Foy, general manager of The Beehive, says “we would love nothing more than to get back to facilitating great memories and putting smiles on our guests’ faces by serving them great cocktails and delicious snacks.”
In the meantime, you can support them by stopping by their takeout window or placing an order to go.
4. Slate Bar
Slate Bar in the Mission has not only built an awesome parklet, but also teamed up with Chile Lindo (a restaurant known for its amazing empanadas) to hold Off the Beaten Track at 16th and Capp, a weekly event series that brought in local musicians to play live music every Friday night. The event is the winner of our Most Creative Outdoor Dining Award.
Slate Bar was nominated for this category in its own right for its parklet, which provides a safe space for people to drink outside on 16th street. “As a sole owner of the bar, this time has weighed heavily: Between the horror of the pandemic, the ever-changing regulations from the city and the state, the struggles of keeping an outdoor public parklet clean and safe, and the financial despair of all small businesses in San Francisco, all I can turn to is occasional glimmers of joy and the shared humanity of people reaching out in kind ways (socially-distanced, of course),” Slate Bar Owner Patty West told The Bold Italic.
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