Hip Hops: San Francisco’s Toronado beer bar at the crossroads

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Hip Hops: San Francisco’s Toronado beer bar at the crossroads
Dave Keene opening the Toronado, August 1987.

Here’s the text from Toronado’s feed at Instagram.

Beer Week 2025 (Feb. 7 – 16) will be a special occasion for the Toronado family. After 38 years, our owner and founder Dave Keene is retiring and selling the business. This marks the end of an era for the generations of beer drinkers that have shared lives with us. In true Toronado fashion we plan to celebrate Dave’s innumerable contributions to the world craft beer scene with 10 days of great events, great beer and great people. Please join us as we regale 38 years of hazy memories and prepare for many more. As Dave says “Its the people that make the Toronado” and you are our people.

So, what is Toronado?

It’s an institution.

This description comes from a bottle of Cable Car by Lost Abbey Brewing, a beer brewed especially for the legendary San Francisco bar’s 20th anniversary celebration in 2007.

You’ve made it to 547 Haight Street. This destination is more San Francisco than Rice A Roni, Chinatown, and Lombard Street combined. Welcome to Broadway for brewers everywhere. Everyone who is anyone has poured their kegs here. For the last 20 years, this place has launched careers, confirmed legacies, and since 1987 the only name you need to know is David Keene.

Take a seat. Tip Strong. Nod appreciatively and don’t ask stupid questions. Welcome to Big Daddy’s House known to most simply as “The T-Room.” Here the bartenders are fluent in English, German, Flemish, French, Walloon and Czech. But they’re most known for their American Lip Service. Watch it. The lady with the jet black hair behind the bar eats idiots for lunch.

I’ve neither met Keene (born in 1955) nor visited Toronado. However, I’m honored to doff my chapeau in his general direction.

One chronological irony is worthy of note, as Keene launched Toronado during the same month, August of 1987, that I sat foot in Sportstime Pizza for the very first time. Five years later at Rich O’s (the precursor to New Albanian Brewing Company) we were looking to the T-Room and others like it, both in America and abroad, as the inspiration for like-minded efforts at home in New Albany — where the skeptics insisted it couldn’t be done.

By the way, an earnest thanks to those skeptics. It was delightful proving you wrong.

Still later in...Read more