jason l.
Yelp
Blooms is about two blocks from my house, where I've lived for almost four years, and I've only been inside it three times.
This is a sore spot for me. I like to drink and I'm inherently lazy, so my neighborhood bars tend to snag a lot of my money, even if they kind of suck. But Bloom's sucks a whole lot, to the extent that on the rare occasions I want to get totally, horribly hammered, I go somewhere else, despite the obvious advantages of having a less than 2 minute walk home. And I don't ask a lot of bars when I want to do some serious drinking.
This place is sort of sad. Not to be all emotion-y, but it reminds me of some of my least favorite memories of the 'rents. It's full of people about the age that my father will always be, rocking out on their own to The Eagles and drunkenly discussing the comparative merits of bands whose times came and went before I snuck out the side of a condom and found me an egg. They "dance" to 70's rock, and by dance I mean grimace and air-guitar. Singularly depressing, a pocket of the crap atmospheres I left behind in Texas popped up in the middle of my granola-liberal SF dream.
My S.O. and I got yelled at for ordering an Irish Carbomb here. Are. You. Kidding. If there was a drink that efficient and tasty called the Jewish Occupation, I'd be actively encouraging my goyim friends to drink it. Sadly, all my people have is Passover wine, which tastes like a hangover. Better we should have carbombs, nu? But I digress.
The important thing to note here is that Bloom's sucks, which is sadder than saying that Random Sports Bar sucks because it continues to have this potential (right near me, not a sports bar, pool table, usually not too packed, poor lighting, contains alcohol) that it absolutely refuses to live up to.
(Interesting anecdote: my S.O. recently discovered Craig's List Personals, specifically the erotic services section. She was looking up the Potrero Hill options, and kept calling me over- "Hey! That chick's always standing outside Bloom's! And so's that one!" And it was true.)
You know what? I hate how negative this review is. I bet Bloom's has some totally positive aspects, like it's really well retrofitted or it used to have a detective agency on the top floor or something. Maybe it kicks ass on, like, Wednesdays around 11 am. A wise friend of mine once told me that you become what you hate, and he's right. I'm heading over to Bloom's right goddamned now for a beer, and I'm going to try as hard as I can to completely enjoy every minute of it. In fact, because I know I'm going to have such an amazingly positive bar experience, I'm going to go ahead and preemptively tack on a second star.