Once an elegant, buzzed-about restaurant with an industrial-chic aesthetic and headed by a celebrity chef, the space at 508 4th Street that was formerly Elizabeth Falkner's Orson will soon become Coin-Op Game Room, an off-shoot of the San Diego-based arcade bar concept. As Hoodline reports, there's also a Coin-Op Game Room in Sacramento, with the team having expanded there last May, and now via a liquor license app we learn that they're headed for SoMa.
In between Orson's 2011 closing and now, the space has been a chandelier-filled nightclub called Drake which closed earlier this year after becoming mostly a special-event venue. It features a large, custom-built, horseshoe-shaped bar in the center, a full kitchen, and a mezzanine level.
This of course follows the trend of nostalgic bar-cades, which started with Barcade in New York City, and which SF has gotten a taste of with Brewcade in the Castro, which opened in late 2014.
We'll also be getting another, much larger arcade bar on Divisadero soon from the Chicago team behind Emporium, as we learned last fall. Emporium SF will be opening in the historic Harding Theater at 616 Divisadero, complete with pinball, pool and foosball tables, air hockey, and many classic arcade games in an enormous, vaulted-ceiling theater space, but there's still no projected opening date for that project.
And let's not forget that while we already have a couple of boozy bowling alleys in town (Mission Bowling Club and Lucky Strike, in addition to the old-school Presidio Bowling Center), we are also getting an offshoot of popular Susan Sarandon-owned ping-pong parlor SPiN, which will be debuting at some point in the new, futuristic building at 690 Folsom Street, at Third. Please may our collective, perpetual adolescence never end.
As of yet, there's no ETA on Coin-Op Game Room either.
Related: Second Act Approaches For Harding Theater, Long Vacant On Divis