The Pied Piper has such an "Old World Luxury" feel that it ought to be a cigar bar. Wooden walls, carpeted floors, chandeliered ceilings, giant oil painting, racks of display bottles ... I feel like I've walked into Bertie Wooster's club. Any moment I expect a pair of young aristocrats named Barmy and Tuppy to walk in complaining that the Aston Martin broke down near Tottingham-on-Welfax.
This is the vibe, seemingly effortlessly achieved, that so many other local bars are straining for. But those bars are going for "hip" or "exclusive luxury," while The Pied Piper is just going for "luxury." There's nothing hip about the crowd. It's well-heeled, sure, but more than a little fuddy. Older people not trying to look young. Young people dressed in loud shirts and sweaters. Families holding Macy's bags and likely staying at the surrounding Palace hotel.
There isn't even a moment's consideration that all this luxury might be too good for somebody. I think that's why it works. The attentive casualness of the staff, too, keeps it from titling over into stuffy. Sit down and dine in your club, whoever you are.
Yet for all its casual welcoming, the door accessing The Pied Piper directly from Market Street is usually locked. To reach the bar and its eponymous (slightly-)famous painting you have to walk over to the entrance to the Palace hotel, step inside, and go down and around.
It's not difficult, but it's counterintuitive, and it serves to completely cut The Pied Piper off from the city it's in. There are no windows; no natural light. Aside from that one locked and distant door, the Pied Piper is in a world of its own. A San Francisco institution completely cut off from San Francisco.
And really, who wants to ruin all this with a view of Market Street? It's cold out there, and dark. As I walked towards The Pied Piper that night, a man was standing among the shivering tourists singing out "Please help me, I'm dying, and it don't feel nice!" in a rhythmic pattern over and over again.
Everybody on the street looked away. Now, a dive bar can absorb that kind of thing into its character. But The Pied Piper can't compete with such reality. Its illusion grows brittle at the touch of outside air. It has to be hermetically sealed if it is to survive.
Enjoy the fantasy. You're paying for it. This is the land of $14 cocktails and $20 hamburgers.
Is it worth it? Well the Market Gimlet — a cucumber twist on a classic — is simply superb. Sadly my second cocktail, "The Last Cocktail" (Bombay Sapphire, lemon juice, pear juice, rosemary syrup, prosecco), which the server told me is one of the bar's most popular, was a complete misfire. It was fizzy and uncoordinated. I sent it back, which I almost never do. To its credit, the staff accepted it gracefully. Just like Bertie Wooster would have done.
The food is likewise hit or miss. Never bad, but much that I feel could be better. Many of the bars that have such trouble getting this atmosphere have much stronger kitchens.
Yet for all its weaknesses, The Pied Piper gets a gold star for its one truly essential task: preserving the aesthetic. The beauty of an environment like this, luxurious and isolated, is that it allows everyone — except the servers — to forget that we're all singing for our supper somehow.
It's a wonderful experience. Yet I can't get the singing beggar out of my head tonight. Someone said "I'm dying" and I ignored him to go get a drink. I long to walk up to other customers and ask, "If you were out on the street and needed to get attention so you could survive, what would your schtick be? How would you ask? What would you do or say to keep people like you and me from averting our eyes?"
But I don't say anything. I decide not to break the illusion. I'm not sure why. It's unlike me. Perhaps it's that this isn't a crowd like you find in so many other bars, where a question this out of left field would be seen as part of the night's entertainment, rather than an existential challenge. Barmy and Tuppy don't consider such things. Or maybe I'm just tired. I feel like I've let the singing guy down though, although that's absurd. He wasn't asking for an inquiry into the human condition. He was asking for help. Just what do I owe him?
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