How Balboa Street (seriously?) become SF's unlikely arbiter of cool

The crowd, which skews on the older end of Gen Z, gives natural-wine natty: mustaches and dad caps, ironic T-shirts (Barefoot Contessa), band totes (The National), dogs in striped sweaters, a flutter of butterfly hand tattoos. It could be Bushwick, but it’s Balboa Street, and Rampant owners Charlie O’Leary and Jack Pain, who live in the neighborhood, fit right in themselves.

On top of a carefully curated selection of bottles, the duo offer 16 natural wines (i.e., “clean and not flawed”) by the glass — specifically those they hope will convert the haters. “People say natural wine is funky, cloudy, and tastes like kombucha,” says O’Leary, who admits that “there is an ocean of horrible natural wine out there.”

But this is not the case with the Albariño — nor, they hope, a new orange wine that O’Leary describes as “approachable, delicious, complex” from Kelley Fox, a female producer based in Oregon. Soon they’ll have in SF-based Isabella Morano to do a tasting of her Isa Wines in person. The little food menu has wine-bar go-tos like bresaola and tinned fish, but also hummus made by the woman who owns Al-Masri, the longtime Egyptian and belly dancing restaurant down the street.

Just a couple of blocks up, there’s more natural wine to be had at Slake, a year-old shop that specializes in clean drinking — “frankly, an exhausting conversation, but it’s also an important one,” says owner Daniel Lovett. Lovett did his time working everywhere from Nopa to Saison before starting a family and wanting to ditch the restaurant grind. Natural wine, he says, isn’t just a millennial affectation. “It’s about drinking the way we’ve learned to eat here in the Bay. Keep it clean and small and local.”