A happy hour near me search in the Mission gives you a hundred bars and one that reinvents itself twice a year on purpose. Trick Dog, in a former warehouse on 20th Street, throws out its entire cocktail list every six months or so and rebuilds it around a new theme, printed as a new physical object each time.
Which menu is currently running changes what is behind the bar entirely, and early evening is a different room from late. Ask Karpo what Trick Dog's current menu is and how busy the Mission is tonight.
The menu is the concept
Past editions have taken the form of a Chinese takeaway menu, a Pantone colour chart, a zodiac wheel, a vinyl record sleeve, a mural of the Mission itself. Each one is a designed object and each one forces the bar team to build ten to fifteen new drinks against an arbitrary constraint.
Arbitrary constraints are the point. Asking a bar team to invent a drink that corresponds to a specific Pantone colour, or to a horoscope sign, prevents the usual drift toward whatever variation on a sour everyone is making that year. It produces genuinely odd drinks, some of which do not work, which is the honest cost of the method.
The Bon Vivants, the bartending group behind the bar, treat each menu as a complete project with a design collaborator, and old editions circulate among collectors. If you like one, take it with you; they are printed to be taken.
How to order from it
Do not try to order a classic. You can, and they will make it well, but that is the equivalent of going to a tasting menu restaurant and asking for a steak. The list exists to be ordered from, and the staff can steer you within it if you tell them what you normally drink.
Say what you want in terms of spirit, sweetness and strength rather than naming a cocktail. A room that reinvents its list this often has a bar team who are used to translating, and the recommendation will be better than your guess.
Some drinks on every menu are jokes that also happen to work. Order at least one of those; they are usually the most interesting thing on the list and they are the reason the bar has the reputation it does.
Happy hour and timing
The bar opens in the afternoon and the early hours are a completely different proposition from the late ones. Before about 7pm you can walk in, get a seat, talk to the bartender and actually taste what you are drinking. After 9pm on a weekend it is a full, loud room where a drink takes a while to arrive.
If the point of your evening is the cocktails, go early. If the point is the room, go late. Both are legitimate, but conflating them leads to disappointment.
There is no reservation system for most of the bar, so the strategy is arrival time rather than planning. Weeknights are substantially easier than weekends across the whole evening.
The food is not an afterthought
The kitchen runs a short menu of bar food executed considerably better than it needs to be, and the burger has had a following since the bar opened. This is not a bar where you should eat first somewhere else; it is a bar where eating here is a reasonable plan.
There is also an upstairs space that has operated in different configurations over the years, generally quieter and more suited to sitting down with food than the ground floor. Ask when you arrive whether it is open.
Why six months is the right interval
A bar that changes its list every month cannot develop anything; the drinks stay at the level of first drafts. A bar that never changes ossifies. Six months is long enough for a team to refine a list through hundreds of services and short enough that nobody gets bored making the same fifteen drinks.
It also creates a reason to come back on a schedule, which is a commercial idea as much as a creative one. Regulars here track the menu changes the way people track a gallery's exhibitions, and there is a small secondary market in the printed editions.
The building and the block
The bar occupies a converted industrial building on 20th Street, and the structure shows: high ceilings, exposed frame, a long bar down one side, and enough volume that a crowded room does not feel like a crush. The dog motif runs through the decoration in ways that are funnier than they sound.
The stretch of the Mission around 20th and Florida sits between the residential Mission and the old industrial corridor toward Potrero, and it has a dense run of bars and restaurants within a few minutes' walk, so a full house here is not the end of the evening.
Practical notes
Address: 3010 20th Street, San Francisco, at Florida in the Mission. Afternoon through late; check current hours. No reservations for most of the room. Card is standard and the bar is busy enough that a tab is the sensible move.
Go before 7pm if you want to taste the drinks properly, tell the bartender what you like rather than naming a classic, order at least one of the strange ones, and take the menu with you. The 16th Street and 24th Street BART stations are both about twelve minutes' walk, which is the better arrival than parking.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #MissionDistrict #HappyHourNearMe #TrickDog #CocktailBar #SFBars #TwentiethStreet #BonVivants #SFNightlife #ThemedMenu #BayAreaBars #SFDrinks #CraftCocktails #MissionNights
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know what Trick Dog's current menu theme is, how busy the bar is right now, and where else in the Mission is worth a drink tonight? Ask Karpo for tonight's crowd, the current list, and a five-minute-walk backup.
