By Peter Fish, Sunset editor-at-large

Dick Dale’s tragic surf guitar is playing from the speakers. The guy on the barstool next to me studies the menu and asks, Where are the light beers? He appears not to be joking. Dude, I want to say, this is not the place for light beer. This is the place for serious drinks, drinks to make you forget every woman who ever dumped you and every precious dream that ever died. And maybe make you remember the one dream that might yet live. 

The place is Alembic, on San Francisco’s Haight Street. A year old, it’s the best bar I’ve been into in a decade. The name has its pretensions—“alembic,” as you may know but I sure didn’t, refers to an antique method of distilling liquor.  And certainly the ambiance (as people who know the definition of alembic like to say) is a lot classier than the scruffy block of Haight it calls home.

But when it comes to drinks, Alembic is the real deal. Consider this: a menu of three dozen bourbons,  a dozen American ryes, a roster of single malts that runs from highlands to lowlands and back again. Cocktails? Alembic does the classics—the Sazerac, the Martini—expertly. And its New School cocktails are, mostly, things a grown-up might actually want to drink, like the rye-and-bitters Vow of Silence. I go for The Blood and Sand—“alluring as Rita Hayworth, but this femme fatale kicks like a bull”—and follow it with a Manhattan.

By now the guy next to me has gotten into the Alembic spirit. He’s working on a gin Bee’s Knees, and telling his two buddies, “What I really want to do is start a Heli-snowboarding company. Like Heli-skiing. But with snowboards.” Now the speakers are playing a mournful version of the Hawaii 5-0 theme, as if Steve McGarrett and Wo Fat had both sat down at the bar to share sorrows. Book ‘em, Danno, let’s hear more about the snowboards, and order me another Blood and Sand.