{"id":402393,"date":"2026-07-17T16:47:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T16:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/402393\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T16:47:42","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T16:47:42","slug":"haight-ashbury-music-venue-and-bar-deluxe-is-reborn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/402393\/","title":{"rendered":"Haight-Ashbury Music Venue and Bar DeLuxe is Reborn"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve been hanging around for awhile, you may remember Club Deluxe, the intimate live music venue with a divey, old-school Haight-Ashbury vibe that closed in 2023. <\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve been hanging around even longer, it may be DeLuxe that\u2019s lodged in your memory, a gay bar with a pool table and what was rumored to be a choice cruising scene in the \u201880s. The place didn\u2019t have a permit for staging live music, but they did it anyway.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody smoked in bars in San Francisco back then, so the way that you\u2019d promote your speakeasy show was on the back of a matchbook,\u201d says Christian Beaulieu, co-owner of DeLuxe. <\/p>\n

\"\"\/ Mitch Polzak & the Royal Deuces brought down the house on The Deluxe’s reopening night in June.(Kit Castagne) <\/p>\n

Today, the live music is on the up-and-up, but that indie, word-of-mouth, neighborhood-centric core remains. Even getting the club back on its feet was a community effort. Beaulieu, a musician and former bartender at Club Deluxe, was the one to light the spark. <\/p>\n

\u201cI was walking down the street one day and saw that the property was available and that all the magic was still just sitting in that space,\u201d he remembers.<\/p>\n

So, Beaulieu began talking to other local musicians, many of whom felt the same affection for the little club. They, too, had been trying to generate interest in bringing the venue back to life, and knew just the guy who could help connect the dots.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember receiving four or five messages in a week saying that I should reach out to this guy Christian,\u201d remembers DeLuxe co-owner Jay Bordeleau, who is also the owner of Mr. Tipple\u2019s Jazz Club<\/a> in Hayes Valley. \u201cIt felt like such a shame for San Francisco to lose such a storied venue, such a well-loved venue<\/a>. The universe was saying this needs to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\/ Christian Beaulieu and Jay Bordeleau, co-owners of DeLuxe(Dennis Hearne) <\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s open a jazz club, it\u2019ll be fun,\u201d was the running joke between the two during the months of painstaking dealings with contractors, vendors, and paperwork required to get DeLuxe back into fighting shape. Open a little less than a month now, it actually is. <\/p>\n

The space isn\u2019t the same as it was when it closed three years back. It’s still got the that streamlined Moderne look with train-car-window cut outs in the divider between the bar and the stage, but new murals by Jon Weiss dress the upper walls with moments from the venue\u2019s history, and handcrafted liquor shelves add a bit of Art Deco-inspired drama. There\u2019s room for 80, most perched in wooden booths and at tables that wrap around the bandshell stage. An all-new sound system and custom speakers have upped the ante in the listening department.<\/p>\n

The bar is working from a menu of ten house cocktails, including the club\u2019s previous crowd-favorites: Greyhounds made with squeezed-to-order grapefruit, and Spa Collinses made with a blend of citrus, ginger, cucumber, and mint. They\u2019ve added others, including a fizzy Cosmo Spritz, a Mezcal Louisiane (mezcal, vermouths, absinthe, bitters), and an espresso martini, along with a fresh lineup of beer, wine, and craft mocktails.<\/p>\n

The one thing they knew could not be changed, however, was \u201cthat Haight-Ashbury independent community vibe,\u201d says Bordeleau. \u201cThe visceral feeling of being in a small room, up close and personal with live music, that emotion was what we were most keenly aware of. We talk about the music being at the forefront, but for me, it\u2019s the interaction of the music and the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\/ Opening night at The DeLuxe(Kit Castagne) <\/p>\n

While Club Deluxe had developed a reputation as a jazz club, the previous generation flexed with other musical genres, too. Beaulieu and Bordeleau are continuing that tradition and \u201cadding a little more strangeness.\u201d But even as music at the new DeLuxe will draw from all over<\/a>\u2014blues, indie pop, Spanish guitar music, rockabilly, even the Grateful Dead\u2014jazz will remain elemental to the venue.<\/p>\n

\u201cJazz and swing music really, really sound like they want to be in that room,\u201d says Beaulieu. \u201cYou can feel it when you\u2019re in there: This is really the ancestral home of this music in the Haight-Ashbury<\/a>. This is where it\u2019s supposed to be played.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something emotional, too, about this long-loved club returning at a time when so many of the indie music venues from the \u201890s and \u201800s have shut down. \u201cPeople almost can\u2019t believe what they\u2019re seeing,\u201d Beaulieu continues. \u201cIt\u2019s not at all what\u2019s supposed to be happening, a club coming back from the ashes.\u201d<\/p>\n

But whether you shot pool at the original DeLuxe in the \u201880s, caught a jazz quartet at Club Deluxe in the early 2000s, or just showed up in the city last week, Deluxe version 3.0 is a kind of universal proof that \u201cthe city\u2019s not dead and lame,\u201d says Bordeleau. If DeLuxe can be reborn, \u201cthere\u2019s still hope for other cool stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

\/\/ The DeLuxe is open seven days a week with one performance per night, Monday through Thursday, and two performances Friday through Sunday; 1511 Haight St. (Haight-Ashbury), check out the calendar at thedeluxesf.com<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"\/ Beaulieu behind the bar at The DeLuxe(Dennis Hearne) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019ve been hanging around for awhile, you may remember Club Deluxe, the intimate live music venue with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2977,151350,161473,161472,161475,161480,161477,161476,9400,27524,161478,161479,101,103,102,104,106,105,161474],"class_list":["post-402393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-sanfrancisco","tag-club-deluxe","tag-club-deluxe-sf","tag-deluxe","tag-deluxe-sf","tag-haight-ashbury-live-music","tag-haight-live-music","tag-jazz-club","tag-live-music","tag-music-venue","tag-music-club-haight","tag-music-venue-haight","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-the-deluxe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}