In the hour she spent waiting for me to show up at Novela, a book-themed bar on Mission Street, Alaric decided that Novela really ought to be a book-themed strip club.
I'd have been better off stealing her wallet or sleeping with her boyfriend: Letting Alaric stew for an hour at the "book-themed" Novela was the kind of mistake that can kill a friendship. It's probably the worst thing I've ever admitted to doing in print.
It's natural, with every new bar needing a "theme" the way every Spider-Man sequel needs a third villain, that the beverage industry would look to books for inspiration. Books, after all, have terrific brand recognition, and the technology still works. Books are also well known for having content, which is vital to the kind of out-facing marketing platform that makes a bar unique and special to people who will go there to check their phones.
But there is no way to pull off a "book-themed" bar where it's too dark to read. That's just the first problem with Novela. The second thing wrong with it is that all the books on the walls are — I swear to God — "chromatically classified." That means their library of decorative books is organized according to the color of their covers ... just like the Library of Congress would be if the U.S. had been taken over by illiterate kindergarteners.
Tied for the second thing wrong with Novela is that the place is too noisy to have a meaningful conversation. So the only thing book lovers actually love to do with books besides read them — talk about them — is also impossible.
All this makes Novela a "book-themed bar" where people who like the idea of going to look at books on a wall because of their pretty colors can, if they get a reservation (!), sit, squint, and shout at one another in exactly the way that people who like books would never do because they'd be reading someplace else.
I walked in, took one look at the place, and said, "oh fuck no." And then spent the rest of the night trying to make it up to Alaric with sushi. But Alaric had plenty of notes about what it's like to sit in Novela, wishing you were in solitary confinement. Or on fire.
The gin gimlets, she told me, are tasty and reasonably priced if you are the sort of person who would wipe your child's ass with a $50 bill.
The clientele she met came straight to the bar from the airline with their carry-on luggage, then complained about their hors d'oeuvres. The food, Alaric reported, was in fact fine except that it was overpriced, which was the one part they weren't complaining about.
The deviled eggs are tasty. The avocado on them is a nice touch.
Novella serves six different seasonal punches. They're pretty good.
Novela's website has an "events" page. Most of the events on the page involve movies, and as of this writing, none involve books.
But most importantly: This bar aspires to be a strip club. It's spacious and dark with lots of seating and terrible music played too loudly. Turn the bar into a runway and send scantily clad women out while an MC talks about how much they love Longfellow or Wordsworth, and the vibe will lose absolutely nothing.
Actual "book-themed bars" are called cafes, and Novela is designed to appeal to people who would never go to one unless it were owned by a reality TV star.
Bad bars in San Francisco are nothing unusual, especially at the upscale end: People with money will apparently pay for anything that other people with money tell them to.
But there's something pathologically self-destructive about Novela. It's like this bar was built just so that after an earthquake flattens San Francisco, people can shrug and say, "They had it coming."
People of the world: We did not ask for this. This was built so that wealthy out-of-town tourists can be sent somewhere by their hotel concierges. The hotels are not locally owned. This is not on us.
Comments are closed.
