Every NFL city has two kinds of football bar. The first belongs to the home team and needs no explanation: in San Francisco that is most of the city on a Sunday afternoon, red and gold, nothing to arrange. The second kind is stranger and more interesting. It belongs to a team that plays three thousand miles away, it fills with people who moved here for work and never changed allegiance, and it exists almost entirely because one room decided at some point to become the place. At the bottom of Potrero Hill, at 100 Connecticut Street, the Connecticut Yankee has been that room for New England for a very long time.
Road-team bars run on their own calendar, and the one that matters is whichever game starts at 10am your time. Tell Karpo which team you follow and which part of San Francisco you can get to, and get back the bars that actually open for your kickoff rather than the ones that merely have the game on.
What a road-team bar actually is
The distinction matters more than it sounds. A bar that merely has the game on will put your team on a corner screen with the sound off and the local broadcast winning the room. A bar that belongs to your team will have the sound up, the whole floor watching the same thing, and a hundred and fifty people who groan in unison. Co-owner Tony Cooney has put the claim about as plainly as it can be put — that there is no bigger Patriots bar on the West Coast, and that it gets bonkers for games. On an ordinary Sunday the room runs somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty people.
That is a useful number to hold onto, because it tells you what kind of plan you need. A hundred and fifty people is not a queue-down-the-block situation and it is also not a stroll-in-at-kickoff situation. It is a room that is comfortably full twenty minutes before the game and uncomfortably full at kickoff, which means the whole question of whether your Sunday is good or bad comes down to a single decision made an hour earlier.
The building is older than the team
The Yankee dates to 1907, which puts it among the small set of San Francisco bars that opened in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and never stopped. You can feel it in the proportions — a low room, dark wood, a long bar, the kind of floor plan that predates the idea of a sports bar as a format with sightlines engineered into it. Screens were added to a room that was not designed around them, and the consequence is that there are genuinely better and worse seats rather than a uniform grid of televisions. The walls carry the other half of the identity: Patriots, Red Sox and Celtics gear layered up over the years until the decor stopped being decor and became a filing system.
This is also why the place works on days that have nothing to do with football. A room built as a neighbourhood bar in 1907 is still a neighbourhood bar on a Tuesday. There is a patio, dogs are welcome on it, and the Wednesday trivia night has its own regulars who could not tell you who plays tight end.
Sunday mechanics
The posted hours are 11am to 11pm Sunday through Wednesday and 11am to 1am Thursday through Saturday. Read that against the NFL schedule and the arithmetic is immediately obvious: the 1pm Eastern window is 10am here, which is an hour before the door officially opens. Game-day openings for the early window are handled differently from the everyday schedule, and they are the single thing worth confirming before you set an alarm. If you are planning around a 10am kickoff, check what time the room is opening that particular Sunday rather than assuming either the posted hour or an early one.
For the 4pm Eastern window — 1pm here — none of this applies and the bar is simply open when you arrive. That later window is the easy one and it is also, for most people, the less fun one. The early game is where a road-team bar is at its best, because being in a full room at ten in the morning in a city where nobody else is watching your team is the entire point of the exercise.
The food is doing real work
Regional sports bars live or die on whether the kitchen commits, and this one commits. Clam chowder is on the menu, which in a Boston bar three time zones from Boston is less a dish than a statement of position. The taps carry the New England breweries you would expect — Sam Adams, Allagash — alongside the rest of the list. Ordering along those lines is not compulsory and nobody will look at you strangely if you do not, but on a 10am kickoff a bowl of chowder is a considerably better idea than a plate of wings, and the room has the good sense to make that available.
The wider menu runs New American and is substantial enough that the bar functions as a restaurant on non-game days, which is not true of most places that describe themselves as sports bars. If you are bringing someone who does not care about the game, this is the detail that makes the morning survivable for them.
Getting there, and the hill
The address is at the base of Potrero Hill rather than on top of it, which matters if you are walking. Approaching from the Mission or from 16th Street is flat and easy; approaching from the crest of the hill means a descent that is pleasant on the way down and a genuine climb on the way back. Street parking in this part of Potrero is better than almost anywhere else in central San Francisco on a Sunday morning, which is one more argument for the early game — at 9am the neighbourhood is quiet in a way it will not be by one in the afternoon.
- Arrive 45 to 60 minutes before kickoff for the early window if you want a seat with a sightline
- Confirm the game-day opening time for 10am kickoffs — it is not the posted 11am
- The patio is the fallback when the main room fills, and it is dog-friendly
- Wednesday is trivia night, which is the non-football reason to know the address
If this is not your team
The useful generalisation here is that San Francisco has quietly accumulated a full set of these rooms — bars that belong to Seattle, to Pittsburgh, to Green Bay, to New England — and they coexist inside 49ers territory without much friction. Knowing which one is yours is worth more than any list of the best sports bars in the city, because the best sports bar in the city is irrelevant if it is showing a different game with the sound off. The question to ask is never where the good screens are. It is which room will be full of people wearing what you are wearing at ten in the morning.
Practical notes
Connecticut Yankee, 100 Connecticut Street, at the base of Potrero Hill, San Francisco. Open 11am to 11pm Sunday to Wednesday and 11am to 1am Thursday to Saturday, with game-day openings for early NFL kickoffs handled separately — confirm before a 10am start. New England taps including Sam Adams and Allagash, clam chowder and a full New American menu, an outdoor patio that takes dogs, and trivia on Wednesdays. Expect roughly a hundred to a hundred and fifty people on a Patriots Sunday. Playoff weekends run hotter than the regular season and are the one time a reservation enquiry is worth making rather than turning up.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #PotreroHill #NFLSF #PatriotsNation #SFSportsBars #WatchParty #ConnecticutYankee #BostonInSF #SundayFootball #BayArea #SFBars #RoadTeamBar #NewEngland #ThingsToDoSF
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know whether your team has a room in San Francisco, what time that room actually opens on a 10am kickoff, and whether you need to be there an hour early to sit down? Ask Karpo which bar in the city belongs to your team, what the Sunday routine there looks like, and what is within walking distance afterwards when the game ends before lunch.
