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Peter Lawrence Kane
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If you're drinking to forget, please pay in advance. Especially you in the dunce cap.
When a venue finds a concept and runs with it, it tends to go one of two ways over time: settling in nicely or aging very poorly. (The Madonna Inn and Rainforest Café would be a good examples, respectively.)
House Rules, a gastropub in Russian Hill that perfectly exemplifies the Marina-creep along Polk Street, could go either way. It’s basically a Trapper Keeper of a bar, art-directed to exalt alcohol’s potential for sex and danger via visual reminders of detention. It may not be highbrow, but it is high-bro, although the gimmick probably tugs harder at guys whose high school days are more than seven years behind them, not less. Time will tell, but tentatively, it works.
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Peter Lawrence Kane
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Lots of etiquette printed on the walls.
Although the ceiling has a model of a classroom (with a distorted perspective) complete with a dunce cap on a stool and a Bart-Simpson-in-the-opening-credits chalkboard litany of “I WILL OBEY THE HOUSE RULES,” there are also things that people will appreciate on a second or third visit, namely four TVs and a big modern fireplace for the June shivers. The after-school metaphors continue on the dinnertime cocktail list consists of things like Recess, Time Out, and Teacher’s Pet. I went with the Frenemy, a well-balanced and pleasantly prickly mix of Espolón Reposado, Lichi Li liqueur, Dolin Blan and habanero grapefruit bitters. It’s the time of year when there’s not one but two separate sports championships on the screen but it wasn’t a den of shouting dudes: the gender composition was pretty even. House Rules is neither a sports bar nor is it overtly a place to bring a date, but it could probably be either, depending on the day.
The kitchen’s output appears more than respectable, too: dirty martini deviled eggs, a lobster salad sliders, and a grilled fish sandwich made with cabbage and kale slaw. (No demerits there.) A separate brunch menu stays fairly simple, with huevos rancheros and a farmer’s omelette, but ventures to turkey hash and bourbon French toast territory, too.
There are lots of quotations written on the walls, the kinds of things you might find in a venerable Irish bar that wants to highlight the fact that Dylan Thomas once got blackout drunk at a booth. But House Rules, working double-time to differentiate itself from the burger-and-pint places all around it, could do a whole lot worse than Ballast Point Sculpin, Delirium Tremens, and Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA. We’ll just see what happens with their permanent record.
House Rules,
2227 Polk, 415-722-9109.
