Last Friday we decided to live on the edge. Our friends had a babysitter for their one-year-old son, and were meeting us for drinks after work in San Francisco. I think we were all desperate for some adult fun, so we decided to go bar hopping in the We had fun too, let me tell you. We met at One Market for drinks after work, only to be confronted with a bar full of half-drunk boring lawyers/businesspeople/stiffs wearing suits - on a FRIDAY? This is San Francisco people. It seemed like a perfectly fine restaurant, but too fancy and too loud for us. Instead we strolled across the street car tracks to Market Bar in the Ferry Building. Within five minutes we were seated with a bottle of cheap (and tasty!) Austrian wine and an overpriced cheese plate. After a long week of work, I need a table at a decent restaurant, friends, and a bottle of wine (noticing the wine pattern around these parts? Man I'm a lush).
The wine caught up with our almost-empty stomachs, so we let Market Bar and got more wine, duh. Little known secret - Taylor's Refresher only charges $1 corkage. $1 gets you 4 real wine glasses, a silver tray, and the cork sucked out of your wine bottle. Add this to a relatively cheap burger, fries, and onion rings, and you're in heaven. And that's before the heart attack.
The Ferry Building isn't exactly bustling at 8pm on a Friday, but the wine bar was definitely open and Slanted Door was busy. Mental note to try the wine bar out sometime...
After we were kicked out of Taylor's (because they were closing) we really felt the pressure. Late nights in the Financial District should not be attempted by amateurs. The street was pretty dark, and the sidewalks were pretty much deserted, but the shining beacon atop the Hiatt called out to us. You have to have a sense of humor before going to Equinox, San Francisco's only spinning restaurant. It's on the 20-something floor of a hotel surrounded by 30-something floor buildings. You do the math.
Another round of cocktails and we were ready for a pretty crappy dessert. Who cares? We were drunk by then anyway. I think we enjoyed the Cockburn Port the best. Cockburn Port, the city spinning around us, a whole evening with our friends...you just need to be a little creative to find the fun in the Financial District.
