I've spent the past 20 years successfully avoiding miniature golf. There was no traumatic experience with a windmill, no irrational fear of neon golf balls — I just remember all too well the mortification of being stuck at Hole 2 at a mini-golf birthday party, cheered on only by a sympathetic parent as my pint-sized peers raced on to Hole 5. Adulthood requires many compromises, but one of its compensations is having the agency and wisdom to steer clear of situations that have humiliated in the past. And who wants to spend a night playing a game with a bunch of kids when there are bars and restaurants and plays and concerts and literally everywhere else to go instead?
Getting older, though, also means gaining enough perspective to understand that one game of miniature golf would probably not ruin my life, or even my night. And so I gathered some friends for an evening at the Mission's Urban Putt, a newish mini-golf course designed for adults. Adults of a sort, anyway; the average age in the place was in the low 20s. Groups of newly minted grown-ups were standing in clusters on the nine-hole indoor course, which contains painstaking re-creations of S.F. landmarks like the Painted Ladies, the streetcars, and the Transamerica Building. The holes have blacklights, sound effects, and elaborate mechanical elements, giving the whole thing a steampunk, Rube Goldbergian feel.
It was the coolest mini-golf course I'd ever seen, but as I watched youngsters run around the brightly lit room, I wondered if it was too late to back out and head to the dim, dingy refuge of Doc's Clock around the corner, like I would on a normal night. A soundtrack of long-forgotten songs from my teen years — Blur, the Dandy Warhols, Nirvana, Oasis — added to an uneasy feeling that I was regressing.
Luckily, Urban Putt has a full bar and restaurant instead of the crappy snack bars of my youth. Both the food and drink came with their own complications. The place doesn't yet have the proper permits for people to bring drinks onto the golf course, so you have to drink before your game or between holes (or not drink at all, I guess, but I was not especially interested in doing this sober). And though the course has a few haphazard tables, it doesn't lend itself to snacking in between swings, so you need to eat before or after.
You can have dinner in the upstairs restaurant, which has proper grown-up dishes like dayboat scallops on seared quinoa pancakes and slow-roasted pork shoulder with Brussels sprouts. But since it looked more or less like any other gastropub in San Francisco — dark wooden tables with benches, metal stools at the bar, hardwood floors — I opted to sit downstairs at the golf course-adjacent bar and keep tabs on the numerous first dates in all their awkward glory.
Ideally, a place like this serves the whole neighborhood. Though I have never bowled at Mission Bowling, I've been there a handful of times to drink cocktails and eat its excellent burger and fried chicken with fried-chicken-skin breading. I was hoping for the same experience here; a reason to come back when I'd hung my putter up for good. The bar bites menu traffics in the kind of kid food made over for adult palates that is all the rage these days, and though it served its environment, it wasn't a compelling reason to return.
Mini-corn dogs were the best thing I tried, with a crisp crust that tasted of cornmeal, though I would have preferred the simple, innocuous taste of a hot dog inside instead of the aggressive flavor of all-beef sausages or hot links. Deep-dish pizza was a huge disappointment, like something you could order at any mini-golf course in America, with a too-sweet, undercooked crust, flavorless cheese, and plasticky pepperoni. Chicken-and-waffle skewers were a nice idea but a bit singed around the edges; the waffles were dry, though the chicken thigh was moist and well-seasoned. Deep-fried olives stuffed with goat cheese were a too-salty, too-savory bite that would have benefitted from a dipping sauce (I lusted after a tzatziki or lemony aioli).
Cocktails weren't much better. The frozen margarita managed to be both too sweet and too tart. A concoction made of Stiegl Radler beer, Aperol, Milagro silver tequila, rhubarb syrup, and lime juice tasted mostly like the grapefruity beer. By-the-glass bubbles were low quality. Thankfully there is a lengthy tap list with a dozen-odd local microbrews. Though the Anderson Valley Gose was a little one-note sour, the easy drinking Calicraft Kolsch was the perfect beer to get you in the right state of mind to swing a golf club a few dozen times. After a few rounds, it was time to hit the course.
Urban Putt was built with painstaking detail and its 14 holes are full of surprises, nooks and crannies and moving parts (there were also a few mechanical errors: The Dia de los Muertos-themed hole 9 was out of commission and the virtual reality hole 4 didn't work as well as it should have). Everyone around us seemed to be having a good time, and I found myself having one too, even if I was bored after 20 minutes. I imagine that the parental chaperones of those long-ago birthday parties I attended felt the same way: Kids games aren't that interesting. Though I suppose it's good to check in every once in a while with the simple pleasures of youth, those things you did before you were allowed to spend evenings enjoying your friends' company over beers — as we did with the remainder of ours after we finished our game and went to Doc's Clock for a nightcap.
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