A New Era for San Francisco’s Iconic Starlite

In early 2024, Starlite, the top-floor lounge in the Beacon Grand Hotel in San Francisco’s Union Square, reopened after a renovation. In its heyday, the venue was the hottest club in town, but recent iterations have underwhelmed. Now bar-hoppers and scenesters have adopted the spot again, thanks to a redesign and major drink menu relaunch by one of the City’s top cocktail creators.

A Long Line of Notable Bartenders

Starlite has a prime location on the 21st floor of a hotel located up one of San Francisco’s steep hills in the prime tourist shopping area of downtown. It offers tremendous views of the city, and people at lower elevations can look up to see the flashing lights in its windows from far away. Beyond its visibility, the space is iconic for its history of employing San Francisco’s top bartenders stretching back decades.

In the 1970s, a sub-category of the singles bar was the fern bar. The design of fern bars (including TGIFriday’s before it became a family restaurant chain), was a tavern-style look from the Gay Nineties (1890s, that is) with wood and polished brass, Tiffany lamps, and lots of ferns. One of the first of these bars in America was Henry Africa’s, first located in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco. The owner was a man who had changed his name to Henry Africa.

One person who worked for Henry Africa was Harry Denton. Denton went on to become a well-known bon vivant and host in the city, and at one point the bar now known as the Starlite was named Harry Denton’s Starlight Room.

Denton employed bartenders including Tony Abou-Ganim, who went on to create the Cable Car cocktail for the space. The drink is a Sidecar variation made with spiced rum. (Hey, it was the 1990s!) The drink became so iconic that pretty much every other iteration of the bar has included at least a nod to it on the menu.

Other now-famous bartenders who worked at the Starlight Room (born as the Starlite Roof in the 1940s) include Marcovaldo Dionysos (inventor of the Chartreuse Swizzle), Thomas Waugh, Jacques Bezuidenhout, and many more. Those bartenders, in turn, have trained many others over the years, so the San Francisco fern bar lineage continues to this day.

During the height of Harry Denton’s reign in the 1990s and early 2000s, the bar was regularly visited by sports stars and models and operated more like a nightclub. Customers ordered bottle service and champagne, and cocktails of their era. In 2005 Bezuidenhout launched a “million-dollar cocktails” program to cater to high rollers, featuring a French 75 variation with 1996 Dom Perignon and1979 Chateau de Ravignan Armagnac for $650. (That was a lot for a cocktail back then, but seems almost quaint today at the apex of peoples’ obsession with vintage bourbon and other spirits.)

Since that high point, the bar has changed direction several times (with cocktail reporters like me dutifully showing up to try each new menu) and the décor has often been redesigned along with it. The last version before reopening as Starlite (called Lizzie’s Starlight), which opened just before and closed during the pandemic, was particularly forgettable.

New Look, New Old Drinks

Scott Baird photo credit © Brian Molyneaux

Starlite reopened earlier this year with another new look (designed by Alice Crumeyrolle) in a range of low lounge seating and mixed patterned fabrics, with yet another great mixologist at the helm. The menu was written by Scott Baird, co-founder of Trick Dog, though he now operates independently. Baird is a San Francisco native well known for using unexpected ingredient combinations in his delicious, crowd-pleasing drinks.

Baird’s menu features many familiar cocktails, transformed to match the modern era. There is a Cable Car updated with Don Q rum, Mommenpop blood orange vermouth, and Chinese five spice powder, which comes garnished with a gold and cinnamon sugar rim plus a flavored “fog” atop the glass in tribute to the City’s famously un-sunny weather.

Other drinks renewed from the 1990s include a Dirty 90s Martini (with olive oil-washed Grey Goose vodka and a blue cheese olive), the top-selling Porn Star Martini (also with Grey Goose, passionfruit, vanilla, lime, cacao, champagne, and glitter dust in the glass), and an Espresso Breakfast Martini (a clever mash up of the two drinks with orange marmalade and espresso liqueur).

There are older drinks too. The Swedish Gimlet combines the house lime cordial with Ahus Akvavit, while the Brown Derby has St. Germain elderflower liqueur added to the typical bourbon-grapefruit-honey drink. The Strawberry Grasshopper is a lighter take on the minty dessert drink, adding rum, lemon, and red bitter to the crème de menthe and crème de cacao combo.

Camera-Ready Cocktails

Baird uses modern techniques such as agar clarification of lime juice to create the drinks. “I’m using the skills learned over the last 20 years of bartending and applying it to these older drinks,” he says. So the cocktail names and flavors may be familiar, but they’re constructed differently and for the modern social media environment.

While the drinks are new interpretations of older drinks; they’re not necessarily more challenging versions of older drinks. Baird says. “Palates are simpler now [after the pandemic]. People want the environment and not complex drinks. They’re more interested in how things look.”

Baked Oysters at Starlite bar — Baked Oysters photo credit Joseph Weaver

To meet those needs, Baird offers clear drinks that photograph better than ones with cloudy juice bits in them, and glitter-enhanced drinks that sparkle for the camera. Starlite offers these cocktails in expensive stemware, and the snacks, like caviar, baked oysters, and tuna crudo, are also equally photogenic.

Millennial Martinis

Starlite Bar Lounge photo credit Mark Mediana

The drinks at Starlite reflect a larger trend of cocktails from the turn of the millennium appearing on menus again, often modified or completely transformed. Around San Francisco you’ll find a variation of the Appletini on the menus of trendy Mexican restaurant Lolo and Tallboy in Oakland (that also has a Dirty Martini and Cosmopolitan on offer), a Lychee Martini at The Rabbit Hole, and a Porn Star Martini at Pacific Cocktail Haven (P.C.H.) among others. It seems we are returning to the familiar flavors of the top drinks of 2000, when Harry Denton reigned in the post-fern bar era.

Much like the Starlite itself, everything old is new again – or rather, new and improved.