Tower update: The CDs are now 60% off and the DVDs are 50% off. CD singles are 75% off, and a fair number of random CDs are just $1.50 or $2.00. I was there on Thursday when there was still a fair selection of artists and titles that you've actually heard of before, but I imagine that at this price point things will dry up quickly. One of the most interesting aspects of this is wondering how Tower ended up with such large quantities of certain titles. Some are obviously records that they thought would go big but which bombed (Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair" anyone?) but did they really think they needed a few dozen copies of Huey Lewis and the News' "Grestest Hits"?
The holiday season gets a big kick-off in the Castro tomorrow night, Wednesday, November 29, as the Merchants of Upper Market and Castro are sponsoring the lighting of the Castro Christmas tree along with a retail-oriented holiday block party of sorts. Details are here on the MUMC website, but the tree lighting occurs from 6:30-7:30, followed by a holiday benefit show at Harvey's and late-night shopping and sales throughout the Castro.
The tree is located at the MUNI entrance at Castro and Market, right next to Diesel, instead of in front of Bank of America where it is normally located. The color scheme this year is blue and copper, extending beyond the tree to a series of copper bows on the palm trees down the center of Market.
The festivities also include a business and home decoration contest that will be judged on December 8 and 9 so I'm hoping for some spectacular windows this year. I'll be sure to post photos of the best.
One last item of note is that there will apparently be a "strolling Santa" tomorrow night to liven up the shopping. All visitors to the Castro are advised to ask for positive ID of the official strolling Santa before agreeing to sit on the lap of any guy with a grey beard and a gut who invites you to.
Well, a drop in CD price, at least. I drove past Tower Records and Tower Movies tonight, and the signs now say that everything is 40% to 60% off. I haven't been inside yet, but my guess is that pretty much all of the CDs and DVDs are now 40%, and just some odd categories are at the greater discount level.
So time for some bargain Christmas shopping! This year, everyone gets direct-import Kylie Minogue CD singles!
Ask a Castro resident what we have too much of in the neighborhood, and there are a certain number of shops that usually get mentioned: porn, club-kid clothes, burritos, and Thai restaurants. And while it's true that we have a lot of Thai, it's also interesting to note that there has been a fair amount of change in the last few years of Thai restaurants opening and closing. Until recently we had a total of six Thai restaurants in the area, but if my current count is correct we are down to four. (Yes, only four. How will we survive? Maybe on burritos.)
Here's my run-down on the Thai options in the Castro.
My personal favorite is the one with the straightforward name: Thailand Restaurant at 438 Castro Street, upstairs from the bar 440 Castro (formerly Daddies) and across from The Castro Theater. Not that the food is anything spectacular, but I've consistently had good meals there, and I also like the seating in the windows with a nice view of the activity on Castro Street below.
The newest Thai restaurant (well, not actually -- I'll get to that later) is the Thai Chef on 18th Street next to Does Your Mother Know?. (Interestingly, the web site calls it "Thai Chef 2" but I don't see any indication of where "Thai Chef 1" might be located.) The sign is garish, but the inside is quite nice, and I've had some fine meals here.
When they first opened last year, part of their gimmick was that the entire staff did drag, and the front window featured photos of the staff both in drag and out. (Some of them were a little, um, rougher than others.) Additionally, they would hold special drag shows on certain nights.
I never witnessed one of these drag nights, but based on a friend's report they were pretty much a hot mess in high heels. My friend was waiting for a table and had been told that one would open up in 10 minutes. Then almost immediately all of the staff disappeared to get ready for the drag show which brought everything in the restaurant to a grinding halt. Needless to say, no patrons were leaving during the show, no bills were being distribued or collected, and so no one was going to be seated in any 10 minute interval in the near future. My friend left.
The drag shows are no more, so I'm guessing that they realized that they were a literal drag (sorry) on the bottom line.
Also new, but a little bit older is Thaihouse Express on Castro at the corner of Castro and 19th Street. I think that one has been around about 2 years now, and interestingly both it and Thai Chef replaced very old Chinese restaurants.
This restaurant is our stand-by for Sunday lunch if we can't decide on anything else. The food is fine, and the presentation is a bit more stylish than the other restaurants. The biggest problem with the place is that it painted white inside and out, and generally feels like a hospital waiting room. I think that the designers were going for a sleek spa-like feel with the lack of ornamentation and stick-branch decorations, but this is more sanitarium than spa. Check out the photo to the right here: No, this is not a construction site. This is the final facade for the place.
The fourth Thai restaurant is Thai Corner Express (more express Thai!) at the narrow corner of Market, Sanchez, and 15th Street. This is actually technically the newest Thai in the Castro because it recently changed hands and is sporting a "Grand Opening" banner now. I believe that the previous Thai restaurant in this space had been there for quite a while, but we never, ever ate here. Not that we were boycotting it, but I always found this building to feel dark and unwelcoming. Also, you can walk right past it without really realizing that there is a restaurant there.
I hope the new owners can figure out how to fix the bad juju that this building has, and make the place more obvious and welcoming.
Now, the two that got away...
I mentioned that until recently there were six Thai restaurants, and the two that closed were sister restaurants named Khun Phoa and Khun Phoa 2. Khun Phoa was located on Market, next to Subway and under The Cafe. Not long after it closed it was renovated and reopened as Crave, a stylish restaurant specializing in cocktails and featuring three high-tables placed directly in the front window, for maximal see-and-be-seen effect. I haven't been inside yet, but it seems popular already.
This place caught our attention during the renovations because one of the first things they installed was the light fixture pictured to the left. It is attached in the doorway, and is visually striking, delicate and sleek ... and is completely exposed to the street, 24 hours a day. We saw that and cringed, wondering how long it was going to be before some homeless person was strutting down Castro wearing that fixture like a tiara.
Sure enough, three of the lights were snapped off pretty quickly, but miraculously since then nothing else has happened and the fixture is still there today. Those three lights have never been replaced, which is sad, but I'm glad that spindly little light is surviving. It's really a metaphor for any business in the Castro, in a way. Effete, over-designed, and surviving against all odds.
Or maybe not. We'll see if Crave survives the year, but it does seem to have a lot of traffic, which is good.
Khun Phoa 2 was located on 18th Street, and it has not seen anything replace it yet. That building was in much worse shape -- dank, dark, oddly chopped up with doors and walls -- so maybe that was to be expected. The building has been boarded up for literally months now, and although the boards themselves have changed periodically, there doesn' t seem to be much evidence of anything going on in there.
However there is an application for a liquor license posted, and the business name given is Brandy Ho's Hunan Food. Now this name sounds so much like a drag queen fundraiser at NTouch that it's hard to take it seriously, but I'm also fearful that they are going to steal the drag show idea from Thai Chef and try to debut the Castro's first Hunan drag show. At the very least, the Chinese resturants are going to reclaim one from the Thai after losing the two locations above.
There's a new restaurant in town, and it opened quite quietly about 3 weeks ago. The new Eureka occupies the space which formerly housed Red Grill downstairs and Whiskey Lounge upstairs. The building got a spiffy new paint job too, trading the darker red and black color scheme for something you might describe as "nouveau Restoration Hardware."
They don't have a web page yet, but I did find this restaurant description on menupages.com which includes a link to their current menu. (I called to confirm that the info is accurate.) The restaurant describes itself as "California cuisine with French influences," which, yeah, there's a lot of that in San Francisco, but the menu does look like it favors the heavier fare that the old Red Grill specialized in.
As for the former Whiskey Lounge upstairs, it is now half restaurant seating, and half cocktail area. I'll miss the old place which was one of the few bars where you could actually have a conversation, but maybe this restaurant bar will be a new "hidden treasure" like the Catch bar.
I know I seem obsessed with the shop that sprouted toadstool-like in the spot where Browser's Nook was, but I can't help cringing at the missed possibilities there. Well, it seems that the former signage that went up was mostly correct, and the store is named Lotsa Stuff.
The name was on the first computer-printed signs, and it was confirmed on the hand-written sign posted to the right of the door in the photo above, except minus the extraneous apostrophe that had been between the "lot" and "sa." The big signs still trumpet "Collectibles" and "Antiques" but the hand-written sign concedes that the store also serves as a "flea market" of sorts.
Boding well for the life of the store, this ghastly four-foot statue in the window was already proudly proclaiming its status as "SOLD." I knew that statues prominently displaying boy-parts sell well in this neighborhood, but the speed of this sale surprised even me. Thank goodness it sold before another neighbor with small children demanded a tasteful kilt to be fitted over the statue's privates.
Note that the rental sign is also still up, giving hope that this is just a way for the landlord to clear out his basement while looking for a less musty tenant.
Update: The hand-written sign has changed, and the wayward apostrophe is back. So I guess the name is back to "Lot'sa Stuff".
The Tower Records clearance discount is down to 30-60%. What this means of course is the vast majority of CDs and DVDs are 30% off, and only a smattering of things (magazines, CD singles) are at the higher discount levels.
But at 30% off this is getting to be cheaper than Amazon with free shipping, so I imagine that the stock will start going faster now. The stores are still remarkably full of merchandise.
Well, another Halloween down. They tried ignoring Halloween, and the crowds grew bigger and rowdier. They tried "cancelling" Halloween, and the crowds grew bigger and more out of control. And they've tried providing entertainment, and still the crowds grow big and wild.
In case you haven't heard the news, the night was relatively calm until about 10:40 when apparently two gangs traded gunfire, injuring 9. Here is the Chronicle coverage.
I wasn't there (residents tend to stay indoors on Halloween) so I can't report firsthand, but I'm quite curious how this will effect the coming supervisor election. Already Alix Rosenthal is capitalizing on this for her campaign. Stay tuned...
I wrote recently about two new pet supply places that have opened up recently (Pet Food Express and Best in Show) but a much older pet supply shop closed many months ago at the corner of 18th Street and Douglass.
My Best Friend was an old-fashioned neighborhood store in that the owners were pretty much always there, often standing in the doorway, greeting neighbors as they walked by. We don't have pets, so I never was a patron of the store, but there was a nice vibe about the place.
Earlier this year, that vibe went bizarre. The store announced the shut-down and cleared out its merchandise. However, instead of clearing out and covering the windows with butcher paper (the normal routine in these situations) the store suddenly filled up with the furnishings of an ersatz living space -- bookshelves filled with books and CDs, armchairs in front of a tv, posters on the walls and in the windows. We thought maybe this was going to become yet another "antique" store selling garage-sale cast-offs year-round, but then the windows were covered with bedsheets and it became obvious that someone was living in the store space! (I know!)
That situation continued for a while, and then eventually an eviction notice was posted on the glass doors. The storefront emptied out soon afterwards and the door was chained shut. Soon after the realty signs went up. The entire building (including two empty apartments upstairs) is/was for sale.
A neighbor eventually filled us in on the backstory for this building. The owners of My Best Friend lived upstairs, and when the owners decided to sell the building things apparently got pretty ugly. When the MBF guys were evicted from the apartment where they were living they moved down into the retail space until they were forced out of that space as well.
The apartments upstairs are fairly large, but badly in need of remodeling. The retail space is also pretty deep, as you can see in the photo above. The building features parking in back as well.
A couple of weeks ago we noticed that the realty sign was down, and there was activity in the store space:
Could it be a new tenant was moving in? Refrigerators and a stove? Is it a restaurant? A health food store? We were psyched to see this space finally getting a new business.
Unfortunately upon closer inspection those aren't commercial-grade appliances, and the most likely explanation is that the space is being used as a staging area for the badly needed remodels of the upstairs units. But the good news is that this probably means that the building was sold and the new owner is investing money in keeping up the property.
OK, two more awning updates:
Deki Jewels has finally finished tearing down the old Husbands awning and replaced the "H" sign with its own name. It's a pretty blue, and I like the font. (I have a thing about fonts.)
At the other end of the taste spectrum, we finally have a name for the renovated Pendulum space: 18th Street Bar. (And the people said, "Huh?") The sign went up just a couple of days ago, and the owner bravely eschewed the constraints of traditional rules like "no stripes with stripes" or traditional easthetics like "pleasing to the eye" to produce this sign.
Honestly, not to be too bitchy about it, but would it have been so hard to find a graphic artist in this town to design a better sign and logo for this bar? The letters look like rub-on transfers that you can buy at a hardware store. They even look a little crooked.
