The Many Faces of Vic Vegas

You know I love me some Bar Rescue, the maybe-somewhat-staged show on Spike TV in which noted bar expert/bar-related Intermittent Explosive Disorder sufferer Jon Taffer and crew make over a failing bar, which usually involves cleaning up a shithole, installing new taps, hanging a bunch of flat screens on the wall, and calling it a day.

Last night's season finale was a cut above the usual episode, however, in its outsized cartoonishness and over-the-top conflict.  It was great.

Now, Jon Taffer, although he is clearly an amazing person, can't do it alone.  In every episode, he is accompanied by a Master Mixologist (in recent episodes, more often than not, it has been Russell Davis, who worked in some capacity at Rickhouse and appears to be a legit cocktail guy) and a chef (this season, usually former Top Chef contestant Tiffany Derry, who, again, appears to be legitimately good at what she does).

Russell and Tiffany were absent last night, and OH THANK GOD because in Tiffany's place we got VIC VEGAS, who looks like a UFC fighter and, we will learn, is the UFC of chefs.  A little Googling reveals that Vic Vegas was a former contestant on "Next Food Network Star" and his goal appears to be making Guy Fieri look restrained and classical.

Vic Vegas, a former contestant on "Next Food Network Star," is opening a restaurant this weekend in the hills of Anthem.

Simply called Vic's, the 180-seat restaurant opens Saturday, promising unobstructed views of Las Vegas with a menu the chef is calling country club meets rock 'n' roll.

"To me, the experience at Vic's will be like being seated in the rear of a Bentley while cranking up "Welcome to the Jungle" with someone like The Rock as your chauffeur," he said.

What a coincidence!  That's exactly what Thomas Keller said he wanted French Laundry to be like.  ANYWAY, w're not here to talk about Vic Vegas' culinary vision.  We're here to talk about Vic Vegas' amazing reaction shots.

What happens on the show is, before Jon Taffer + crew come in to save your bar, they sit in an SUV outside and watch covert secret surveillance footage of all the jackassery that you, the bar owner, either commit or permit to be committed.  Last night's episode, as it happens, featured two roided-out owners who occasionally did some male stripping and then also got in fights, as if they couldn't think of any other ways to express their affection for one another.  Vic Vegas watched the proceedings from the SUV and his reactions ranged from horror to a profound sadness.

This is the "Oh my God why you gotta do that to an innocent mozzarella stick?"

Vic Vegas is pained.  "I am pained."

This is the "Now what now?"

Surprise, with an extra cup of surprise on the side.  In fact, I love this whole tableau.  JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WHAT JUST HAPPENED.

And finally, a deep and penetrating sadness that not even a Bentley driven by the Rock could erase.

One final note about Bar Rescue: apparently they tried to recruit Shotwell's, a perfectly fine bar that, to my eyes anyway, in no way needs the services Bar Rescue provides.

Dude, Bar Rescue has called the bar three times this week asking that we be on the show.. I'm kind of offended
— Shotwells Bar - Beer (@Shotwellsbar) May 4, 2014

One can only image what they'd do to Shotwell's. They took the bar last night, a sports bar called The End Zone, and gave it the massively uninspiring name Houston Sports Hub, which sounds like an athletic complex with raquetball courts and a pool.  What a fucking terrible name.  My dream is that they'd rename Shotwell's something like T.J. McBeery or the Blendery.  IN FACT, Shotwell's should go all pomo and go on the show IRONICALLY.  I mean, we'd all know it, but Jon Taffer and Vic Vegas wouldn't.  Hilarious!

Red lanes of the world, unite!

Muni Forward! RT @MrCleanSF: More red lanes coming to make traffic safer & quicker. pic.twitter.com/cS1pouRDay
— Ed Reiskin (@EdReiskin) May 7, 2014

Ed, you lovable doofus. "Muni forward!"  That sounds like either the lamest office party chant or a leftover Cold War-era Soviet Young Pioneers slogan.

ANYWAY, here's the idea.  These red lanes are supposed to be for buses (and taxis I think) only, thereby making buses go faster because they have their own special lane and don't have to sit behind cars while cars sit still at stop signs because the drivers are reading text messages or looking at Twitter on their cell phones.  I don't do that and I would never do that.

The way they work is that sensors inside the red paint can detect when a normal passenger car is driving in the restricted lane and the sensors activate a series of embedded electrical generators, which send a powerful shock up through the street, leaving the driver of the car in intense, excruciating pain.

j/k, that doesn't happen.  The way they work is they rely on the Inherent Goodness of Humanity to keep people from driving their cars in the red lanes.

THERE'S ONLY ONE CATCH: There is no Inherent Goodness in Humanity.  People drive in the red lanes all the time!  WHEEEEEEEE LOOK AT ME IDGAF!!!!

And that just happened to be randomly captured by the Google Street View car. If you ever go to the Safeway on Church & Market, you know what I'm talking about.

What's the solution?  Wait for the Sun to swell and engulf the Earth as it dies in 2.8 billion years.  Pending that, a little enforcement!  Not SFPD's strongest suit, but it's so crazy it just might work.

Muni forward, comrades!

Attack of the Smoke Detector Bird

Baby Beyonce is 13 months now (and fucking adorable, I assure you) and at this point her sleep pattern is such that she goes to bed around 7 pm and gets up maybe once or twice a night, usually around 1:30-2:30 and then sometimes again in the 4:00-5:00 range.  The Wife typically attends to her during these fairly routine and brief episodes.  Other than that, getting enough sleep has not been too bad.

Until recently.

We have a large tree in our backyard, and it appears that it has now become the morning hang of some kind of bird.  I'm not sure what kind of bird exactly except it sounds like the LOUDEST MOST DEFECTIVE SMOKE DETECTOR IN HISTORY and its preferred time to GO FUCKING NUTS is about 5:30 a.m.

Here's the tree. NOT PICTURED: Smoke Detector Bird

I know you're thinking I'm overdramatizing this but we sleep with a white noise machine on in our room and the call of the Smoke Detector Bird cuts through that like a Caramel Unwrapper through the quiet part of the symphony.  It might be OK if it had any kind of pleasing, mellifluous tone, but it's more like an abrasive BEEP every half second.  I tried to identify it online and the closest I could come is the Downy Woodpecker but that's probably not it.  The sound is close but not nearly as annoying.

One morning last week I finally lost it and decided to take some action, so at 5:45 a.m. I got up and found half a lemon in the fridge.  I opened the back door (we're on the second floor so we're level with the tree) and fucking CHUCKED THAT THING at the tree.  Voila, the sound of BEEPing receding into the distance.

It's back again.  This morning, right on schedule at 5:30.  Fucking bird.  I don't have an infinite supply of lemons so I don't know what the fuck.  I think we might have to move.

ONE OTHER THING.  Another year of SF Weekly's Best of San Francisco awards, another year I didn't win Best Blog.  Um, congratulations, Bold Italic.

The Bars That Time Forgot, an occasional series, vol III: Great Water Bar & Cafe

(In The Bars That Time Forgot, we will, on occasion, pause to remember a drinking place that has shuffled off this mortal coil.)

This installment is a twofer and has a surprise twist ending!

Great Water Bar & Cafe was, incongruously, a bar with a Thai restaurant inside.  

I couldn't find any actual pictures of Great Water.  This is what 373 Broadway looks like now, anyway.

In fact, now that I think about it, almost everything about Great Water was incongruous.  It was at 373 Broadway - where today sits uber-utzy Coi, a fancy-pants restaurant where dinner costs $195 and features things like "fermented carrot" - which is in the heart of the Strip Club and Douchebag Dance Club District (next door to Centerfolds, in fact), but had nothing in common with establishments of that type.  No doorman, no oonce oonce music, no fancy cocktails.  Just drinks and pool and Thai food served through a window in the back.  I used to live up the hill in North Beach and went there pretty regularly because it was one of the least annoying bars in North Beach and that's really saying something.

Inside it seemed like they were going for sort of a British colonial Caribbean theme, with ferns and lots of wood and high ceilings.  There were a couple of pool tables and an excellent bartender named Tim who was affable and remembered what you like.  A couple of years after Great Water closed, I ran into Tim smoking outside Elixir on 16th (and coincidentally, Elixir will feature in an upcoming episode of Bars That Time Forgot) and he said he'd gotten a job on a cruise ship.  Hopefully things worked out for Maritime Tim.

As I mentioned, there was a window in the back wall from whence one could order and receive Thai food.  I never ate there so I don't know what the deal with that was.  

I'm not sure when Great Water closed. Maybe around 2005?  I guess there was nothing that special about it - it certainly wasn't a destination bar - but it was the kind of place you'd automatically feel comfortable in and it was a nice respite in a part of town with lots and lots of bars but very few you'd actually want to spend any time in.  

WHOA WAIT A SECOND.  I was just doing some followup Googling and discovered to my surprise that this same location was also home to something called "Bierhaus on Broadway"!  In fact, this guy recommends it, says they have "over 100 microbrews," and, amazingly enough, says, "The bartender Tim, was very helpful between free sample shots and other brewpubs and breweries to visit."  I assume Bierhaus on Broadway was before Great Water (that review is from 1995), so I guess Tim came with the bar!  

Giants of advertising

Matt Cain knows that even $127 million doesn't guarantee financial security, so he cannily agreed to pick up some extra cake on the side shilling for Patxi's Pizza (which, BTW, is delicious).




Not bad!  I AM CONVINCED, MATT CAIN.  BRING ME A PATXI'S PIZZA.  At first I was confused about the "Tricky spelling, though - P - A - T - X - I - S," as if we couldn't read it right there on the screen, but then I realized this was a radio spot.  Oh OK.

Next to Bruce Bochy, Matt Cain has Sean Penn-level acting chops.  Bochy also pimps pizza, but for Patxi's bitter rival Amici's.  Bruce delivers his line readings with all the verve of a Soviet prisoner recording a confession extracted under torture.




You know who wastes Cain and Bochy both, though? No surprise here: Sergio Romo.  He's got no lines in this Mercedes ad, but he's got mad style.




I vote Serg Most Likely to Have a Viable Pitchman Career After Baseball.

Then there was this unpleasantness:



Perfect, Brian Wilson for Taco Bell. One is an embarrassing nauseant with an outpost in the Marina and the other is Taco Bell.  I am happy to say that I was way out in front in the Hating Brian Wilson game and started hating him long before he left the Giants.  His whole schtick is so fucking tired at this point.  His current 0-2, 14.40 ERA gives some small comfort.

14.40 ERA!  Hahahahaha.  Brian Wilson.

Three guys walk into a radio station

I was on BFF.FM yesterday with Burrito Justice and Olu.  It was fun.  Here's a link to a recording of the show!  This is what we talked about, more or less.

(I came late and wasn't there for the beginning.)

5:55 - The minutiae of Twitter
8:52 - Sandwich talk
14:20 - ENTER A TK
18:40 - Markov chains explained (not really)
23:28 - Does the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project still exist? And if so, do they have regular meetings?
26:26 - Let's talk about Yelp.  We create _LP.
28:40 - Is HBO's "Silicon Valley" good, or is it just "Girls" with computers?  The conversation takes a sad turn.
37:40 - Orphan Black is Canadian in its Canadianness.  The Mad Men D.B. Cooper hypothesis is mentioned.
42:17 - Sandwich Talk II.  There is a cultural misunderstanding.

**** SONG BREAK ***   *** SONG BREAK ***

1. Guided by Voices - As We Go Up We Go Down
2. Guided by Voices - Tractor Rape Chain
3. Woods - Moving to the Left

54:30 - "Nerd talk"
56:30 - An amazing coincidence
59:30 - San Francisco bars, a rumination
1:04:00 - Parenting detour
1:04:39 - Powdered alcohol, bagged alcohol, and tiny bottles of alcohol
1:07:45 - Is Ottawa racist?
1:15:30 - Live music venues in SF
1:22:35 - TK produces the Outside Lands lineup, printed, amazingly, on a piece of paper
1:23:00 - Holy shit, did you know it's Tegan and Sara who did "Everything Is Awesome"?
1:26:36 - Recycling poachers, FINALLY

Oh no, Debra J. Saunders is looking at gentrification now

Oh God.  You know what that means.  A quasi-libertarian word salad and some unfocused jabs at "the left."

The piece is called, for no particular reason other than, I guess, to recycle a 15-year-old movie catchphrase, "I see rich people."  It starts off like so:

In the Star Trek movies, San Francisco serves as headquarters of Starfleet Command. This cracks me up no end, as I cannot imagine the Board of Supervisors approving construction of Starfleet Academy or the oddly shaped high-rises you see in the background. And if City Hall somehow did approve the project, you know there'd be some ballot measure to kill the deal. The grounds could be endless: No photon torpedoes. Too many techies already. What about affordable housing?

Debra, look away, because Salesforce Tower is already underway:

Deb moves on through some well-trod ground, including 8 Washington and then the fact that she can't afford to live in SF, then mentions Kim-Mai Cutler's incredible article in Techcrunch, "How Burrowing Owls Lead to Vomiting Anarchists (Or S.F.'s Housing Crisis Explained)."  Then we get these curious paragraphs:

Cutler also supports proposals to make it more expensive and difficult for owners to evict paying tenants. There's a price for that approach. In a city with more renters than homeowners, do you want to be the chump who buys a duplex when City Hall can tell you want you can and cannot do with your own property? (Keep in mind that this City Hall won't let retailers give away paper bags.)

Groups like the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project stage protests to send this loser message: "The Yuppie dot-com lifestyle must be fought and eliminated, because if it is left unchecked, it will eventually ruin our neighborhoods, our cities, and our planet." They ignore the fact that the Mission is happening now in part because of the influx of tech money.

Most working people want to live in a neighborhood where residents spruce up buildings and keep the streets clean. Who is most likely to do that? Homeowners.

Para 1: Judging by the current real estate market, there appears to be no shortage of people who want to be the chump who buys a duplex.  If Deb's logic was on, duplexes would be dirt cheap.  I haven't checked lately, but I don't think that's true.  BONUS POINTS for any mention of the plastic bag ban.

Para 2: I don't think the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project has existed since the first dot com boom, sweetheart.  And have you walked down Valencia lately?  It's over, and the yuppies won.  (Sadly, they never managed to eliminate "Neighborhood enemy number one," Beauty Bar.  We can still dream!)

Para 3: I was wondering why the streets are so dirty!  Now I know why: RENTERS.  Why can't you clean up after yourselves, you dirt-loving planet destroyers?

More confusion ensues:

But I don't think it would hurt for San Franciscans to reorient their thinking to make this town more livable for the middle class. Last week, I walked from City Hall down Market Street at dusk with a friend from out of town. It stank, the police had a couple of people in handcuffs, and the mood was downright eerie. Yet the left in this town thinks Twitter is bad for San Francisco.

People pay top dollar to live near what only can be called squalor. Those Yuppies whom anarchists hate pay $700,000 for a condo in a neighborhood where they have to step around street people on their way to work. And the Yuppies rarely complain until a neighbor wants to rent to out-of-towners through Airbnb. Then suddenly they are outraged, and their quality of life is threatened.

Let's unpack that first paragraph, because it's the Italian opera of SFGate columns: it sounds pretty, but I can't understand a fucking word.  OK, first, yes, it wouldn't hurt to make the town more livable for the middle class!  Yes!  Great!  How do we do that?  Wait, now we're walking down Market Street and something something the left hates Twitter.  Wait, what?  I learned in 6th grade English, Debra, that the PARAGRAPH is supposed to flow from the TOPIC SENTENCE.  You don't write "Argentina is a land of many features" and then follow it up with how you flew over Mexico once.

The second paragraph has no coherent thought at all.  People pay a lot of money to live in a bad neighborhood.  Then they complain when someone uses Airbnb.  WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING POINT.

It's fine to have problems with current SF housing policy, but for fuck's sake, if you're going to go public with them, write some coherent arguments down instead of a bunch of disconnected phrases that floated through your head.