San Francisco's two best-known Bavarian drinking spaces are run by the same people, which almost nobody mentions, and they are about as different as two bars serving the same beer can be. One is a small outdoor yard behind a fence in Hayes Valley. The other is an enormous hall on the waterfront with the Golden Gate Bridge in the windows. Choosing wrongly between them is easy and entirely avoidable.
Two bars with the same owners can still be completely different nights out, and the listings never explain which is which. Tell Karpo what kind of evening you are after and get the rooms near you that fit it.
The small one, and its awkward hours
Biergarten on Octavia Street is a compact Bavarian beer garden in the middle of Hayes Valley — communal benches, gravel underfoot, a hatch rather than a bar, and no roof. The food is deliberately narrow: pretzels, pickles, several kinds of sausage and sandwiches served in pretzel-knot buns. It is not trying to be a restaurant.
The hours are the thing to internalise, because they are unusual and they catch people out constantly. It opens at four on weekdays and closes at eight. Friday runs three until nine, Saturday one until eight, Sunday one until seven. That is an afternoon bar with an evening attached, not a night out — and the Sunday close at seven in particular has ended a lot of plans that were only just starting.
The upside of the short schedule is what it does to the crowd. This is a place people go to after work and before dinner, in daylight, which is a genuinely underrated way to drink and one that San Francisco is better suited to than it admits.
The large one, and the view
Radhaus occupies Building A at Fort Mason Center and is enormous — a proper hall with high ceilings, long communal tables and panoramic windows onto San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Same team, the Hulme brothers, and a Californian reading of modern Bavarian cooking rather than a straight reproduction of it, with the Bavarian beer list taken entirely seriously.
It opens at noon, which is the other significant difference. A lunch is possible here and is arguably the best use of the room, because the view is the product and the view requires daylight. Wednesday and Thursday run to nine, Monday and Tuesday to eight, and the weekend runs later.
Fort Mason itself is a decommissioned army post turned arts centre, so the setting is a row of enormous piers and warehouse buildings on the water at the foot of the Marina. The scale of the buildings is the point. A beer hall needs volume to work — the noise has to have somewhere to go — and this is one of the few rooms in San Francisco with enough of it.
- Biergarten, 424 Octavia Street, Hayes Valley: outdoors, no roof, 4-8pm Mon-Thu, 3-9pm Fri, 1-8pm Sat, 1-7pm Sun
- Radhaus, Building A, Fort Mason Center: indoors, opens at noon daily, closes 8pm Mon-Tue and 9pm Wed-Thu
- Same team behind both; Bavarian beer taken seriously at each
- Biergarten is snacks and sausages; Radhaus is a full kitchen
- Fog and wind decide this, not the menu
Let the weather choose
This is the actual decision procedure and it is more reliable than any review. Biergarten is entirely outdoors. San Francisco afternoons in the western half of the year are frequently clear and still until about four and then not, and Hayes Valley sits in a corridor that funnels the afternoon wind. A warm September Saturday at two o'clock here is one of the best hours the city offers. The same yard at seven in July, in fog, with the wind up, is an endurance exercise that people go through anyway because they have already ordered.
Radhaus is indoors with the water on the other side of the glass, which means the weather becomes scenery rather than a factor. Fog rolling in past Alcatraz while you are warm and eating schnitzel is the correct way to experience a San Francisco summer, and it is precisely the day on which the outdoor option fails.
The corollary is that the two are not substitutes for one another at all. They are the same idea built for opposite conditions, by people who clearly understood that this city has two climates within four miles of each other.
What is around each
Hayes Valley is the more useful location for a night that continues. Biergarten sits in the middle of a dense few blocks of restaurants, bars and shops, with the Opera House and Davies Symphony Hall a short walk east — an early drink here before a performance is one of the neighbourhood's standing arrangements, and the eight o'clock close is much less of a problem when the next thing starts at half past seven.
Fort Mason is the opposite: a destination rather than a corridor. There is very little immediately outside except the water, the Marina Green and the path west towards Crissy Field and the bridge, which is either the drawback or the entire appeal depending on what you wanted from the evening. It also has parking, which is close to unheard of, and the 30 and 49 buses run nearby. A walk along the waterfront afterwards is the natural end to it, and the reason to go early enough that there is still light for one.
Practical notes
Biergarten, 424 Octavia Street, Hayes Valley: an outdoor Bavarian beer garden open 4pm to 8pm Monday to Thursday, 3pm to 9pm Friday, 1pm to 8pm Saturday and 1pm to 7pm Sunday, serving pretzels, pickles, sausages and pretzel-bun sandwiches. Radhaus, Building A, Fort Mason Center: a large indoor Bavarian beer hall from the same team, open from noon daily with panoramic views of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, closing at 8pm Monday and Tuesday and 9pm Wednesday and Thursday. Pick the outdoor one on a still, clear afternoon and the indoor one when the fog is in.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #HayesValley #FortMason #BeerGarden #Oktoberfest #BarsAndNightsOut #SFBars #GermanFood #Bavarian #SFEats #GoldenGate #SFRestaurants #ThingsToDoSF #Pretzels
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know which beer gardens near you are outdoors, which have a roof, and which close before you finish work? Ask Karpo what is open around you tonight and pick by the weather rather than the photos.
