Kennedy’s: Beer-Swilling Hippies & Curried McFarts
Apr 08 '02
The Bottom Line Kennedy's Irish Pub and Curry House is not a San Francisco institution, but I'm out to make it one.
When you think Irish pub, naturally you think Indian food, right?
And when you think Indian food, you’re pretty much always thinking Jalapeño poppers.
And when you think Jalapeño poppers, Indian food and Irish pubs, I know you’re thinking about The Grateful Dead.
Well you should be, because if you are, it means you’ve been to Kennedy’s Irish Pub in San Francisco’s North Beach. And if you’ve been to Kennedy’s, you’re cool. So sayeth the shepherd.
Well, at least so sayeth El Nino and T-Bone and Hairy-O, my religiously beer-drinking, jalapeño popping friends, and I can’t say I disagree with them. Kennedy’s is right across from Bimbo’s nightclub on Columbus Street, where you could go to see cool bands like the White Stripes or Superdiamond, and it’s a short walk from Broadway, where you could go to see cool things like naked people and teenage Italian boys driving Z-28s. But what’s most cool about Kennedy’s is that they serve really good food, a wide selection of very good beers at a bargain price, and it’s a neighborhood bar where the regular neighborhood folk consist of about 300 people from all over the Bay Area.
Beer
Me, I’m not a wildly enthusiastic beer drinker. I makes me kind of bloated and never gets me drunk enough, and I’ve noticed of late that it gives me an especially rancid smelling windiness. And since they’ve got the Indian food at Kennedy’s, this particular side effect can be, well, embarrassing. Curried beer farts do not make for a happy table.
Nevertheless, I drink the beer, because it’s all they have, and what they have is a pretty fine and reasonably priced selection. There are probably twenty or thirty beers on tap, from the standard San Francisco fare (Anchor, Full Sail) to Guinness, Bass, Pilsner Urquell, Pyramid and our personal favorite, Racer 5, with a few ciders thrown in.
But the real treat is their massive refrigerator of bottled brews. There must be a couple hundred products, ranging from low-brow treats like Smirnoff Ice to watery Mexican and American pilsners like Corona, Bud, Miller, Heinekin and Pacifico, to nice strong Belgians, creamy English and Irish monsters, and rich German, Czech and west coast micro-brewed beers.
The beers aren’t a huge bargain, but they are reasonable, and every night there is some very good beer being sold for two dollars a pint and eight dollars per pitcher.
And if you really need a shot, there’s a real bar right next door.
Food
Kennedy’s really does serve among the best Indian food I’ve had anywhere in the Bay Area. I wouldn’t put it at the same level as respected standards like Gaylords or Indian Oven, but it’s a far sight better than most of the places that serve Indian buffet brunches downtown or any of the mostly empty neighborhood places that dot the town.
Among my favorite dishes is the old Indian favorite Cable Car Delight, which is big hunks of tandoori cooked white meat chicken bathed in a pinkity, creamity curried type sauce – so much sauce in fact that you can dish heaping spoonfuls of the stuff over the fragrant jasmine rice that accompanies every meal.
I also like their Lamb Vindaloo, which manages to capture all the rich gaminess of the lamb, and remains tender without the usual gloss of rendered fat in the wonderful spicy sauce.
The Tandoori Chicken looks like a big subcontinental fajita plate, filled with scrumptious morsels of red-tinged breast meat and legs, topping a sizzling plate piled high with onions and peppers. And it comes with plenty of lemon for squeezing on top.
Also, they serve these little individually fried spinach leaves with a really good dipping curry. And some kind of mini-blocks o’ soft cheese in curry thing, and nan, and garlic nan, and big, bland potato and pea filled somozas. And everything comes with a little condiment tree thing that has a really good spicy green sauce and a sweet plum-y brown sauce. It’s all good. And I don’t think anything on the menu is more than $9.95.
Snacks
And it’s all well and good to be gettin’ to Kennedy’s at 5:30 and sitting down to a nice filling Indian feast. But what about six, seven hours later when you’re still cramped around a couple of tables, and the group’s on it’s twenty-second pitcher of Racer 5? You need to layer beer and food in your stomach, like sedimentary deposits along the walls of the Grand Canyon, to build up the proper internal structural strength needed to hail a cab.
That’s why Kennedy’s serves up all the fried sports-bar goodness you could ask for: jalapeno poppers, fried clam strips, buffalo wing type food, fried cheese sticks, thick-cut french fries. And everything comes with a proper dipping sauce. Nothing goes down easier at 12:30 on a Wednesday night.
Hippies
Kennedy’s is also unique among North Beach area haunts in that nobody there ever seems to care that the huge back patio is constantly filled with pot-smoking youth. Almost any time it’s dark outside, there are young dread locked, tie-dye or sun-dress wearing Phish fans crowded around the dirty plastic tables with glass pipes growing out of their mouths. And, like most Deadheads, they’re a friendly enough lot to liberally offer up a free toke to anyone who wanders into their midst.
Games
Probably because Kennedy’s is patronized by so many stoners, and because there’s just not enough room to hackey-sack, one of the bar’s back rooms is filled with good-time stoner games. There’s a glow in the dark air-hockey table, placed at just the right angle to assure at least once a night, someone walking in from the back patio will get pegged in the head with the little frisbie shaped puck. There are a couple of pin-ball machines – the good kind. And there’s video golf, for which there is always a line. When golf became a hippie sport, I don’t know, but I find it more than a little disturbing.
The “Special” Room
One of the really cool things about Kennedy’s is that, for all the many big open spaces, divided from one another, and allowing for a relative sense of privacy even though there are 300 other people in the place, there’s an even more spacious, privater, more divided space in the place. A back room, separated by french doors and decorated with murals so colorful and awful they would make Man Ray think he was having an acid flashback, which murals are punctuated by beer posters with hot Indian chicks on ‘em, and, if I remember correctly, high school prom bunting.
The room has about ten tables and easily enough room for 100 people. And they rent it out for private parties, which they will cater, and provide big overflowing buckets of cold beer to. I don’t know how much that costs, but the only friend who has rented it out insists that it’s “not too bad.” So I’m think maybe like two hundred bucks. But I don’t know.
Okay, so Kennedy’s. It’s good.
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Mr.Eyore
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About Me:
I come for the pervasive sense of elitist self-importance and semi-witty expressions of faux camaraderie
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