Welcome to Swig City, where we point you toward don’t-miss cocktails at some of the best bars, restaurants, and clubs in the city. Cheers!

Sometimes a drink is all about the garnish. 

Golden Rule (opens in new tab) is the month-old cocktail bar on the ground floor of Chase Center’s Thrive City that developed out of David Nayfeld’s burgeoning Che Fico empire. One of its signature drinks, the MIP, is a perfumed, melon-y aperitif that, appropriate for a hangout beneath a sports arena, takes its name from the Most Improved Player award.

Made with gin, mezcal, vermouth, and house-made bitters, it’s either a fancified white Negroni or a stripped-down Paris Is Burning — and it’s as clear as distilled water. So bar director Danielle Peters-Clossey figured out a way to give this flavorful yet transparent creation some visual pop: the pink-and-green, 1990s bubblegum Hubba Bubba, a small and appealingly garish piece of which rests on an ice cube.

“We made a tincture out of it too, so there’s musk melon and spearmint and all these bright flavors,” she says. “But it’s a spirit-forward cocktail. So it’s ‘most improved.’” 

In lieu of a coaster, the MIP arrives atop a WNBA card featuring a guard for one of the basketball teams that plays upstairs. “It’s a nod to Veronica Burton, who’s my favorite Valkyries player,” Peters-Clossey adds. “And last year, she was the [league’s] most improved player.”

San Francisco has no shortage of elaborate, even outlandish cocktails, from the spaghetti Negroni at Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack to the tiki-in-the-redwoods Smokey Gets Sandy (opens in new tab) at Bar Orso to the Simpsons-inspired Flaming Moe at Moe’z Tavern. But from ingredients to presentation, Golden Rule’s approach is distinctly millennial-coded. Cocktail aficionados will find themselves nostalgia-baited into trying drinks such as the Halftime Snacks, made with vodka, guava eau de vie, pomegranate honey, and lime. It’s meant to evoke the innocent, summertime pleasure of a Capri Sun (but without the frustration of trying to jam a pointy straw into a Space Age pouch).

“We don’t want to be pretentious or too serious,” Peters-Clossey says. “Drinks are supposed to be fun.”

That’s not to say that Golden Rule is pure whimsy. Many, if not most, of the drinks are decidedly adult. For example, coconut rum and pandan impart a nuttiness and sophisticated mouthfeel to the whiskey-based Filipina. A spin on the requisite espresso martini, the Bi-Coastal grows up a bit with a hit of banana cold foam. And the Draymond combines cognac and the Greek herbal liqueur mastiha with the lesser-known Italian amaro Punch Fantasia, lending a Christmas-y warmth. “It has clove, cinnamon, and ginger, but also this crazy fruitiness as well,” Peters-Clossey says. “So we mixed it with Jamaican carrot punch, which is fresh carrots and condensed milk. It almost feels like a carrot chai.”

Beyond full cocktails, there’s a section of cheekies — “little treats,” in Golden Rule’s house parlance — that span the ice-cold Bananagrams (Fernet and banana liqueur) to the unfussy Mr. Bryan (Jameson Irish whiskey with Miller High Life). Che Fico’s kitchen is right upstairs, and Golden Rule patrons can have slices of cheese and pepperoni pizza couriered down in an elevator, along with inventive bar snacks such as peri-peri cocktail nuts or the barbecue-spiced corn kernels known as quicos — comforting throwbacks, all. 

For anyone who wants chef Nayfeld’s full dinner treatment, there’s both Che Fico and Via Aurelia a few blocks away, both of which have quickly become culinary anchor tenants in the burgeoning Mission Bay. (The original Che Fico (opens in new tab), on Divisadero Street, was severely damaged by fire last week and remains closed indefinitely.)

For now, the orange-blue-and-yellow-tiled Golden Rule is open only during brief windows: Thursdays through Saturdays from 5 to 9 p.m., plus any game days. The plan is to scale up to seven nights a week. 

Golden Rule is not a sports bar; the arena complex already has one in Splash, with 75 screens spread across 30,000 square feet. Instead, “I would call it a neighborhood cocktail bar that loves to show sports,” Peters-Clossey says. “We’re taking something and turning it on its head.”