Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
Hidden Gems & Odd Finds picks in San Francisco.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
Braden Montgomery Scoreboard Glow in North Beach Corners
A strange-room city culture guide that turns a hot search into niche corners, odd interiors and visually specific side quests.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Bar Inside a Converted Shipping Container in Dogpatch
Three welded shipping containers form a neighborhood bar where corrugated steel walls meet rotating tap handles. When the industrial doors slide open, the line between inside and outside disappears entirely.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
Vintage Poster and Print Shops in the Haight
Haight-Ashbury's poster dealers trade in psychedelic concert bills, vintage advertising art, and counterculture ephemera—proof that San Francisco's print tradition runs deeper than nostalgia.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
SF Oddball Record Shops in the Mission and Outer Sunset
Six San Francisco record shops specializing in everything from 78 RPMs to dub, Latin grooves, and vintage soul—each one curated with enough obsessive depth to justify the fog-softened trek.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Cocktail Bar Sleeping Inside San Francisco's Old Newspaper Building
The basement of San Francisco's Hearst Building once ran the presses for the San Francisco Examiner. Now it's Local Edition — bar top is marble salvaged from Hearst Castle, the walls are covered in front pages from another century, and vintage printing press equipment lines the floor where type was once set. The best time to arrive is the window just before the Thursday crowd fills it in.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Cocktail Bar in the Former Printing Room of the San Francisco Examiner
Local Edition occupies the basement of San Francisco's historic Hearst Building, where the presses for The Examiner once ran. Opened in April 2012 by the team behind Bourbon & Branch and Rickhouse, it's a candlelit cocktail bar and jazz room lined with vintage typewriters, pre-1970s newspaper clippings, and a marble bar top sourced from Hearst Castle itself. The printing floor survived the newspaper. The drinks have been making a compelling case for that decision ever since.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Prohibition-Era Speakeasy That Still Requires a Password
On Jones Street in the Tenderloin, Bourbon & Branch has been operating without a sign since 2006 — inside a building that ran an illegal bar throughout Prohibition. You need a password to get in. The house rules are not suggestions. Here is why manufactured difficulty might be the most respectful thing a bar can do for drinking.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Bar Hidden Behind a Password and a Bookcase
At 501 Jones Street, an unmarked door opens onto Bourbon & Branch — a 2006 cocktail bar occupying an actual 1921–1923 speakeasy. The password is not theatre; it is the filter. Here is what the building has been lying about for a century, why the password works as an attention protocol rather than security, and when to go.
