How the SF Giants saved the dive bar Tempest

That was back in 2010. The fact that the owner had just sold the place was disconcerting news. Too often, we’ve seen legendary local dives get bought and turned into something bougie or worse — something bougie that tries to channel the grittiness of the thing it replaced, like a doomed peep show-themed cocktail bar in the former Lusty Lady space.

But as anyone who’s ever been to the Tempest knows, that sure as hell didn’t happen. In fact, it may even be divier than it was back then. And I mean that as the highest form of compliment. Old bicycles dangle from the ceiling while local art and SF Giants memorabilia fight for wall space with hundreds of stickers. Pool players of every imaginable variety hover around the billiards table to the staccato rhythm of shot glasses landing back on the bartop. Neon beer signs illuminate the room with almost as much color as the graffiti in the bathroom. Yes it’s divey alright, and that all thanks to a group of fellas who go by Pour Guys.

Inside the Tempest: Bartender Alessandra Goldsborough, upper right, serves up a fresh Tempest Mezcal Margarita; Old friends Abby Tornquist of Seattle and Cassie Simpson of Chaska, Minnesota, lower left, catch up at Tempest while visiting San Francisco. (Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)
Inside the Tempest: Bartender Alessandra Goldsborough, upper right, serves up a fresh Tempest Mezcal Margarita; Old friends Abby Tornquist of Seattle, left, and Cassie Simpson of Chaska, Minnesota, lower left, catch up at Tempest while visiting San Francisco. (Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)

“Yeah, we didn’t come in and rip everything apart and change it aesthetically,” Joey Christensen tells me as I sit in the office-slash-storage area in the basement of the Tempest. Instead of just bulldozing in with what they thought the Tempest should be, they asked themselves, “Does this fit the Tempest?”

“We wanted it to be gradual as well,” Tony Cooney, one of Christensen’s business partners, chimes in. “So, it wasn’t shocking, like, ‘Hey my home bar just changed. It’s going to suck and ruin everything.’” One weekend they might paint a wall. Another they might hang up some cool artwork they found.

Cooney, Christensen and their partner Justin Trujillo took over control of the Tempest on the night of Game 4 between the San Francisco Giants and the Phillies in the October 2010 National League Championship Series. If you were around San Francisco in October 2010, then you know how incredibly fortuitous it was to own a bar at that particular moment.

“It was really lucky,” Christensen smiles. “It kind of slingshotted us in. I think when we took over, we had just literally a couple hundred bucks left in the bank. Not even enough money to restock the shelves.”

That wouldn’t be a problem again. The Giants beat the Phillies in the playoffs, and then went on to defeat the Texas Rangers and win their first World Series since 1954. San Franciscans danced and partied in the streets, but nobody was as jubilant as the city’s bar owners. Multiple publicans I know paid off all their debt that year thanks to Los Gigantes, and while I doubt that was the case for Cooney, Christensen and Trujillo, it certainly put them in a far better place than most people when they first take over a bar. And then of course the Giants won a few more World Series rings, making things even better.

Within a few years, they teamed up with Stephen Crawford and Eric Mejia and officially became Pour Guys, ultimately purchasing three more bars together, Connecticut Yankee, Louie’s Bar, and the Showdown. And with each new bar the philosophy was the same: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just make it smell a little better. (The Showdown is the only bar where they started from scratch — the spot was formerly a Thai restaurant, so it came with a much less divey set of smells.)

The Tempest is born

When I sit down to do these interviews with bar owners, I never really know what I’m gonna get. Other than the rumors, fables and urban legends that drunks pass around the barroom, usually the only information I have is my own personal stories with a place. So, it was an absolute stroke of luck that, while I was sitting there asking Cooney and Christensen about the history of the bar, media industry veteran Margo Brenes walked into the basement.  

“I was drinking at Hanno’s when I was 17 — when I started at the paper — and then celebrated my 21st birthday there,” Brenes laughs while regaling us with the history of the Tempest and its previous incarnations. And she knows quite a bit.

She worked at the San Francisco Newspaper Agency from 1974 to 1992 (the agency was the group that owned the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner until 2000 when they were run under a joint operating agreement). Then she came to work for the San Francisco-Oakland Newspaper Guild (now called the Pacific Media Workers Guild). The guild owns the Tempest building and is thus the bar’s landlord. Between talking to Brenes and doing some of their own research, Cooney and Christensen pieced together the history of the building and the bars who’ve inhabited it.

-The edifice at 431 Natoma St. was built in 1914. 

-It’s not clear what went on for the next 54 years it existed

-In 1968, it was bought by the San Francisco-Oakland Newspaper Guild. 

-The first lease Team Tempest found with a bar or restaurant was in 1969, owned by a man named Roger Aguilar. It was called Page One, an obvious reference to the building that SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle share just a short stumble away (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms). 

-A fair amount of drama and changing hands over the next decades, but then a man named Hank Cheeke really put Page One on the map. It was apparently a big gay bar at the time, just rather quietly.

-At the time, there was a bar even closer to the Chronicle building called Hanno’s, at Minna and Mary streets, but Hearst bought the building and tore it down. 

-In 1983, Joseph Bourne and Harry Horton signed the lease at 431 Natoma St. and changed the name from Page One to Hanno’s in the Alley. 

-In 1995, Darla Kubala and Eric Berman took over and started Tempest Bar & Grill.

-Then one day in 2010, I sat at the bar while Eric told me “I don’t really give a f—k anyways. I sold this place and I’m moving back to Kansas.” The Pour Guys have had it ever since.

The story goes that in the heyday of Page One and Hanno’s years, newspaper writers would drink at M&M, a bar that was where the Chieftain currently is on 5th and Howard streets. Journalists were such a fixture that the San Francisco Chronicle reportedly put a direct phone line into M&M so that reporters could file their stories from there (I’ve heard many a tale of Warren Hinckle doing this from a plethora of bars). It was the blue-collar guys who would hang out at Hanno’s after loading up the newspaper delivery trucks in the very early morning.  

The cheapest PBR in town

By the time I started hanging out there, it was popular with a different group of blue-collar workers: bike messengers. While the Tempest would fill up with baseball fans to watch the Giants have an incredible run, it was really bike messengers, service industry people and Moscone Center workers who were the bar’s bread and butter. And of course, a smattering of writers, too.

Longtime Examiner and Chronicle columnist Al Saracevic was a regular right up until his untimely passing in 2022. He’d reportedly drink a double Dewars on the rocks, and the Pour Guys would honor the price that Eric and Darla used to charge him: $5. In fact, there are a handful of loyal customers that are grandfathered in to their pre-2010 prices. Cheap drinks are one of the things the Tempest is known for.

“We always want to be priced on the lower end of the market. To be your everyman’s bar,” Cooney explains. 2010 is when fancy cocktail bars started to really make a splash in San Francisco, and the Pour Guys wanted to buck that trend.

“We did $2 Pabst forever,” Cooney continues. “We were top 10 in the country with Pabst sales.”

Shots of Fernet-Branca were also always cheap. For many years, they were only $4, which meant you could get a shot of Fernet and a PBR for $6. I know people who pretty much lived off that combination for years.

Clockwise from top left: The popular Box Burger at Tempest; Cole G. brings another ready order to The Box window outside Tempest bar; The Potato Cheese Taquitos; Gilberto Cinta fires up an order in the kitchen of Tempest. (Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)
Clockwise from top left: The popular Box Burger at Tempest; Cole G. brings another ready order to The Box window outside Tempest bar; The Potato Cheese Taquitos; Gilberto Cinta fires up an order in the kitchen of Tempest. (Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)

Unlike the vast majority of dive bars though, what really sets the Tempest apart is the food served by their kitchen, Box Kitchen.

Right about the time their original chef was moving on, Stephen Crawford — a regular at the bar who cooked at Michael Mina — made a proposition: “I could take the food I’m doing at Michael Mina, make it approachable bar food, and launch this to another level.” And that’s exactly what he did.

Suddenly a dive bar that sold $2 PBRs was getting written up by national publications for their eats, and foodies were flocking to sit elbow to elbow with the bike messengers, writers and off work service industry people. The elevated bar cuisine like mac and cheese egg rolls, asparagus fries, and potato skins with pork belly and quail eggs was an immediate success. Crawford went on to be the executive chef for all the subsequent businesses, too. It also helped that in a city with diminishing late-night food options, the Tempest served until midnight — which it still does.

A dive bar empire faces uncertainty

For 10 years, things were really humming at the Tempest. So much so, that Pour Guys were able to open a few other places, including the Showdown in 2019, and then … well you know what happened.

“2019 was a perfect year to start a new restaurant,” Cooney laughs. Considering the immediate and astounding success of the Tempest, it becomes a bit of a yin and yang story with The Showdown. Opening a new place just before a global pandemic shuts the world down is never good for business. But the Tempest and all the Pour Guys spots survived.

“We did whatever we could,” Cooney explains. “It was ‘come inside, don’t come inside,’ ‘sit down, you’re not allowed to sit down.’ It was like every day they changed the rules and we would just do it.”

Luckily, having a great relationship with the landlord helped the Tempest stay afloat. “They had our back,” Christensen says of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. “We are on the same team for sure. They love that we’re a blue-collar bar, a workingman’s bar. I mean, they’re a union.”

And that’s not just good for the Pour Guys, it’s good for San Francisco.

“We’re not leaving here anytime soon,” Cooney tells me. “The lease is up in a couple years. And we’ve already been discussing with the landlord. They want us to stay and we want to stay.”

While prices have had to go up to reflect economic realities — I think a PBR is now $4 and a Fernet is $7 or $8 — it’s heartening to know that there will still be a working-class bar in the heart of downtown San Francisco where writers, bike messengers, service industry folks, and general weirdos can hang out and hope the Giants might just do it all again this year.