Just because your bar doesn't have a sign does not make it a "speakeasy."

Other features that, sorry, still don't make it a speakeasy: a hidden door. A reservation-only policy. An intimidating gatekeeper.

And here's something that definitely precludes your bar from being a speakeasy: You send out press releases and post endless photos on Instagram, no matter how many old-timey mustaches or antique medicine bottles may appear in said photos.

For a while I've been biting my tongue, willing to let this term go the way of "handmade" or "artisanal," wearing itself out to the point of meaninglessness. But it's gone too far now.

The latest offender is the Grid, the new "Tron"-themed "speakeasy" inside the arcade-cum-bar Coin-Op. (Though there's some confusion even among its operators about what to call it: All press releases call it a "speakeasy." But one partner prefers "VIP lounge" to "speakeasy," which, don't even get me started on "VIP lounge.")

Forget the cacophony of "Tron" and "speakeasy" appearing in the same sentence – the key point is that the bar is blasting publicity alerts and holding preview events in a way that suggests it definitely wants people to know about the Grid (as any commercial business should). So what if it has a separate entrance from the main space? So do a lot of bars, like, say, the wonderful Linden Room, which likewise lacks a sign.

Real speakeasies, during Prohibition, were dangerous. Finding them was a whole lot riskier than running a Yelp search. Once there, the goods were not FDA-approved. The Feds often conducted raids. And they could be problematic for women of a certain social class, who even before Prohibition would not have wanted to be seen cavorting in a bar.

In 2017, the world beyond San Francisco retains a complicated relationship to alcohol consumption. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, those found drinking without personal liquor permits may be arrested. Drinking in public is out of the question; being in public with alcohol in your system is a punishable offense.

In the face of such prohibition, the networks of bootlegging, underground booze sales and safe-consumption havens are vast, and participating in them can be dangerous. That's why attendees are encouraged to "speak easy," to keep their voices down.

As a modern buzzword in San Francisco, "speakeasy" is voyeurism, channeling the thrill of that danger without having to encounter it.

Even some of San Francisco's most deliberately furtive bars don't deserve the "speakeasy" title. What about Wilson & Wilson, you ask, inside Bourbon & Branch? Or Marianne's, inside the Cavalier? To which I say: There is nothing more difficult about obtaining entry to these than to any mildly popular restaurant in San Francisco. You just have to make a reservation.

(The speakeasy posers, by the way, should not be confused with the bars-within-a-bar popping up everywhere these days – a fascinating, and not necessarily offensive, phenomenon of meta-differentiation. Lots of San Francisco watering holes have non-secret sub-bars, often in smaller spaces and with different concepts: Azucar Lounge has El Palenque, ABV has Over Proof, Hawker Fare has Holy Mountain, Oddjob has Standing Room Only, the list goes on.)


Bartender Alex Conde, a Chronicle Bar Star, makes a drink at Benjamin Cooper.

Benjamin Cooper, one of my favorite bars in the city, doesn't have a sign, and doesn't make a big deal out of the fact that it doesn't have a sign. The door is always open. You just walk in. The drinks are great.

In fact, the Benjamin Cooper way may more closely resemble what Prohibition-era drinking was like in this city than the Grid or Marianne's does.

That's because, even under the Volstead Act, the Bay Area was one of the easiest places to find a drink in all of the United States. Which brings a special irony to the proliferation of the word "speakeasy" here.

San Francisco's most famous watering hole in those temperate years, according to articles found in the Chronicle archives, was in Chinatown, where the Ping Yuen Center now is. Officially known as Isadore Gomez's Soft Drinks, unofficially as Izzy's Place, it specialized in homemade grappa – an artisanal handmade product if there ever was one. The Tent, in Emeryville, was another popular, and rather ritzier, destination.

To obtain entry to Joe's, a speakeasy on Russian Hill, one had to recite a nursery rhyme so self-explanatory that it would seem to defeat the purpose of having a passcode: "There is a place in Frisco town/where the hills go up and the hills go down/where it is nobody knows/it only goes by a place named Joe's."

Local law enforcement, by the looks of the newspaper reports, sound a little under-committed to their work. For example, despite a highly organized strike – 1,300 patrolmen strong – to curb the debauchery surrounding the 1931 Cal vs. Stanford game, five raids around the Bay Area resulted in just eight arrests.

The Federal Prohibition agents, the Chronicle reported on Nov. 23, 1931, "admitted that the score against them was considerably higher than the 6-to-0 victory the University of California rooters were celebrating in their annual football game with Stanford."

And the band played, and drank, on.
