Golden Rule, a new bar from the owners of Che Fico at Thrive City, will serve playful drinks like the MIP, a gin-based drink served with a trading card of the Golden State Valkyries’ Veronica Burton, named the WNBA’s most improved player last year.
Courtesy Krescent Carasso
When she creates drinks for the group of restaurants that includes Che Fico in San Francisco, bar director Danielle Peters-Clossey is accustomed to using Italianesque ingredients like tomato vermouth. But for Golden Rule, a new bar that the group is opening Saturday in Thrive City at Chase Center, she took things in a more Americana direction, making, for instance, a mist out of watermelon Hubba Bubba gum to spray on a drink that combines gin, mezcal and musk melon.
“When you bring it to your face, it’s instantly nostalgic,” Peters-Clossey said of the drink, which is served over a large ice cube and garnished with a slice of the gum. “Being in Thrive City, it has to be festive.”
Golden Rule, which was first reported by the San Francisco Standard, is the first bar from Back Home Hospitality Group, which runs some of the Bay Area’s most popular restaurants, including Che Fico in San Francisco and Menlo Park; Che Fico Pizzeria at Thrive City; and the upscale Tuscan destination, Via Aurelia (no. 66 on the Chronicle’s Top 100 Restaurants list) nearby.
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Golden Rule adds to the list of prominent openings at Thrive City, such as a location of Alameda barbecue sensation Fikscue (no. 21 on the Top 100 list), and broader momentum in the fast-growing Mission Bay neighborhood, which is attracting AI companies and major developments — and the restaurants to serve them, including Trick Dog spinoff Quik Dog and the perpetually mobbed Arsicault Bakery.
“This is our third business we’re opening in that mile stretch; we’re bullish on that stretch,” said David Nayfeld, who runs Back Home Hospitality with Matt Brewer.
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The bar, in a newly built space just below Che Fico Pizzeria, will pour whimsical drinks that take inspiration from the Golden State Warriors and Golden State Valkyries who play in the Chase Center next door. There’s a cocktail named after Draymond Green of the Warriors, while the Hubba Bubba drink, called the MIP, is a nod to the Valkyries’ Veronica Burton, named the WNBA’s most improved player last year.
The Halftime Snacks cocktail is meant to evoke nostalgic flavors of Capri Sun and orange slices.
Courtesy Krescent Carasso
In addition to cocktails ($18 to $21), Golden Rule will offer several nonalcoholic drinks ($14 to $18) and seven “Little Treats” ($10 to $15), such as small versions of a martini and a snaquiri with pineapple rum and chili picante inca corn. The mix of nonalcoholic and lower alcohol options are a response to the “huge downtick” in drinking, Peters-Clossey said. “We are looking at what we can offer to that group and have them feel welcome in the space.”
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A fan of tropical ingredients, Peters-Clossey snuck banana — a flavor that she said can be divisive but that she’d like to reframe — into two drinks. One is a mini cocktail called the Bananagrams, which stars freezer-cold fernet branca and banana liqueur. The Bi-Coastal — a play on the espresso martini with cold brew, espresso liqueur, rum and banana cold foam — will be served in the iconic blue-and-white cups used by New York coffee vendors.
Peters-Clossey, who joined the restaurant group in 2024, also pulls inspiration from her own experience playing softball, soccer and basketball, a sport she continued to pursue during nursing school before becoming a bartender. Her vodka-based Halftime Snacks is meant to evoke the Capri Sun and orange slices handed out to kids at games, with guava eau de vie, pomegranate honey and lime creating a fruit punch profile that’s tempered by a bitter aperitivo.
Golden Rule is named both for the biblical principle — which Nayfeld summed up as “don’t be an asshole” — and also the Warriors (not to be confused with Steph Curry’s bar, the Eighth Rule). It will be open Thursdays to Saturdays, along with game days, to start. But Nayfeld said he is confident that foot traffic in Mission Bay will increase, even when there aren’t games, as more offices open from UCSF and AI companies, and more people move into new apartment buildings in the area.
Golden Rule will have seating for 15 inside and 30 on an outdoor patio.
Courtesy Douglas Friedman
Growing up in the Bay Area, Nayfeld has been a lifelong Warriors fan, another reason he’s excited to open a bar there. And he said the restaurant group wanted to showcase the talents of Peters-Clossey, who he called “one of the most talented barmen in all of the country.”
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For that reason, Nayfeld said, the food menu is limited to a short list of snacks, such as chile-lime potato chips, nuts spiced with peri peri, and pizza rolls similar to stromboli, with Che Fico sourdough crust rolled around a range of fillings.
The Golden Rule will seat 15 at a long bar decorated with contrasting orange, red, yellow and blue tiles against charcoal gray walls, and has room for an additional 30 on a patio.
As he prepares to open his first bar, Nayfeld has been reading a book about Harry’s Bar, the almost 100-year-old Venice institution whose purported motto is “to serve othersas you yourself would like to be served.”
“Bars are such special places,” Nayfeld said. “You should understand what kind of day someone’s having by their body language when they walk in. I find ideas like that to be so endearing.”
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Golden Rule. 720 Terry Francois Blvd., San Francisco. goldenrulebar.com