It’s a few minutes before midnight, and every seat at Lillie Coit’s (opens in new tab) massive, horseshoe-shaped bar is occupied. Mortadella sandwiches, bavette steaks with crinkle-cut fries, and French omelets shuttle out of the kitchen. So do plate after plate of oysters on the half shell, the results of the North Beach brasserie’s wildly popular buy six, get six free “Oyster Jubilee,” which runs every night from 10 p.m. until last-shuck at 1 a.m. On one wall, the Oyster Leader Board shows that the current winner is “Lia’s Ba-Team,” who managed to put away 396 bivalves in one sitting.
“No one’s on their phones,” owner Nick Floulis says as he scans the crowd. It’s both a compliment (his patrons are cool) and a boast (his restaurant is jumping). A gregarious restaurateur who usually stays until closing, Flouis embodies an old-school, shoulder-grabbing style of hospitality — a throwback in an age of ordering kiosks and QR codes. And in North Beach, home to San Francisco’s most resilient and re-energized nightlife scene, it’s working. “The 1 a.m. kitchen can be done,” Floulis says, passing out “cheekies,” or small pours, of Amaro Montenegro to a reporter and a well-known Bay Area barbecue chef who had happened to walk in at the same time. The cheekies keep coming.
A patron and his dog outside Gino and Carlo in North Beach. Friday, November 21, 2025.
The line at Golden Boy. Friday, November 21, 2025.
For decades, North Beach has been beckoning San Franciscans and visitors to get drunk and see where the night takes them. But having emerged from the pandemic with its bohemian vibes fully intact, the neighborhood seems to have cemented its dominance over the city’s nightlife — and into the early morning. Indeed, it may never have been as cool as it is now.
The past two years have seen a cluster of openings along the Columbus Avenue corridor. Besides Lillie Coit’s, the dive-y taqueria Next Door Bar and cocktail dens Long Weekend, April Jean, and The Lucky Spot have all found a niche.
The scene outside Vesuvio. | Source: Poppy Lynch for The Standard
The neighborhood’s magic stems from a number of factors. It’s compact, close to downtown, and well-known far beyond the city. The building stock is dense, with many Instagrammable alleys but few backyard patios — meaning that during Covid, any bars and restaurants seeking outdoor space expanded out front, augmenting an already lively, European-style street scene with San Francisco-style parklets. While bar-heavy neighborhoods like Polk Gulch, the Mission’s Valencia corridor, and the Castro labor to regain their pre-pandemic vitality, this corner of the city never seemed to flag.
North Beach is growing up
Joe Poz opened cocktail bar April Jean in the spring of 2024, taking over the former Grant & Green Saloon, a raucous venue with a diverse clientele, in a building that has housed a bar for more than a century. He and partners Nate Valentine and Jamal Blake-Williams are aware of the location’s history — and the responsibility that comes with it.
Realizing that many April Jean patrons frequented Grant & Green Saloon, Poz trained his staff to handle any grumbling with tact: “I said, ‘We’re going to get a lot of “I remember when this used to be Grant & Green,”’ and it’s important to honor that and allow people to express their feelings toward the loss of something very personal.” Vinyl nights with DJs spinning funk and disco, plus a cocktail list in the $14 range, are meant to entice the widest possible audience, in line with April Jean’s predecessor.
Still, Poz, who is of Guatemalan descent, is putting his own fingerprint on the neighborhood in small ways. In October, he installed an ofrenda, or altar, in the bar to commemorate Día de Los Muertos — a rarity for the historically Italian American neighborhood. The consensus among bar owners, he says, is that North Beach is undergoing a vibe shift — not an uncomfortable demographic change borne of gentrification but a maturation, with a sense that a rising tide is lifting all boats. “I couldn’t be happier with my decision to open this bar,” he says.
Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Bar co-owner Mario Crismani makes pizza at his family’s restaurant in North Beach. 
The pamplemousse French 75 at Petite Lil’s.
Nowhere is the tidal pull stronger than on Green Street between Grant and Columbus, where, under crisscrossing strings of red, white, and green lights, there are no fewer than five restaurant parklets in a row — a configuration that may be unique in the city.
Will DeVault, one of a trio of bartenders who took over the 89-year-old Columbus Cafe (opens in new tab) months before the pandemic struck, says maintaining these parklets is a group effort between the bar and its neighbors, including Bar Next Door, Sotto Mare, and Caffe Sport. The owners band together as much as they can, power-washing the sidewalks and generally augmenting the city’s beautification efforts. “It’s definitely cleaner,” he says. “We do a lot of that on our own, take that into our own hands, fix up the neighborhood, and remove graffiti.”
A cleaner neighborhood means room for some out-of-left-field projects. Bunny Cafe (opens in new tab), San Francisco’s first space dedicated to rabbits, will open this month on Columbus Avenue. Owner Kathreen Kato was the human companion to one of the city’s most beloved pets: the 28-pound Flemish Giant Alex the Great (opens in new tab), a member of SFO’s passenger-greeting Wag Brigade (opens in new tab), who died in July.
She’s opening the cafe in his honor, as a place where people can sip wine and beer while eating vegetarian-friendly Korean food — and maybe decide to foster a new long-eared friend. Kato chose North Beach because of the proximity to Fisherman’s Wharf and because she believes the rabbits will be secure overnight. “I’m putting everything into this,” Kato says. “Alex was my baby.”
‘You’ve gotta love where you live’
Of course, not everyone is wholly supportive of the way the neighborhood is changing. Artist Jeremy Fish might be one of North Beach’s biggest boosters (opens in new tab), known for designing prints that pay tribute to the community he has called home for 31 years. “It’s the last neighborhood where you can go out any night of the week and see live music.”
Petite Lil’s in North Beach is decked out for the holidays. 
People wait outside Tony’s Pizza Napoletana.
The scene at Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Bar.
On First Friday (opens in new tab) in December, Fish releases 100 copies of a fresh screenprint that go for free to anyone who can show that they spent at least $100 at one of 60 local businesses. Over the last four years, he has effectively injected $40,000 into the neighborhood. “I lose money on it every year, but I love doing it,” he says. “You’ve gotta love where you live, or you’ve gotta leave.”
Still, he’s wary about the neighborhood’s trajectory. Though he laments the reduced international tourism to the city and loathes long-boarded-up storefronts — like the row on Union Street that remains a ruined facade (opens in new tab) after a 2018 fire — he’s fiercely protective of the old North Beach. To Fish, nightlife is a zero-sum game in which new arrivals risk cannibalizing business from established operators. Classic places that survived lockdown, like Spec’s, are where people should go for their first drink, he says. Were he a prospective bar owner hunting for a space, he’d venture elsewhere. “If you’re so in love with North Beach,” he says, maybe reconsider “stealing business from any bars that inspired you.”
Not everyone finds success. When Yuka Ioroi and husband Kris Toliao moved Cassava (opens in new tab) from the Inner Richmond to North Beach in 2022, they were hoping that a Japanese prix-fixe restaurant would benefit from standing out among all the pizza and pasta. “We thought we’d do double what we were doing on Balboa Street, pre-Covid,” Ioroi recalls, citing bakery Butter & Crumble (opens in new tab) and quirky diner Hilda and Jesse (opens in new tab) (the only North Beach restaurant with a Michelin star) as breakout stars. “But we just weren’t a good fit.”
Insufficient tourist traffic and the difficulty of finding parking spurred Ioroi and Toliao to relocate again, this time to tony Jackson Square, where Cassava now operates as a kiosk. “We’re happy,” she says, “but we miss that restaurant. It was gorgeous.”
At the same time, Lillie Coit’s is flourishing. Echoing Poz and DeVault, Floulis credits this to a camaraderie among restaurateurs and owners who stuck around after the pandemic receded. “Nobody went back to their corners,” he says. “We’re not competition. People go, ‘You do you, and I’ll do me, and we’re just going to keep on doing right by the neighborhood.’”
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