S.F.’s newest, hottest natural wine bar is for everyone

Bartenders are generous with wine samples; if you’re unsure of what to order, they might ask you to identify five you’re curious about, and they’ll walk you through a series of pours. The wine list is divided into evocatively titled sections: Thicc Boys (full-bodied reds), Here to Party (sparkling wine). The place feels playful and alive.

Maybe it’s the nature of this moment in San Francisco’s bar culture — a restless emergence from pandemic restrictions, coupled with a seemingly insatiable thirst for anything that calls itself “natural wine” — but Luevano is aware of the possibility that Key Klub’s momentum might not stay so high forever.

“So far, so good, but my only worry is if we can sustain it,” he said. “That’s just the nature of this business.”

The good news for Luevano is that he and his business partner, Paria Sedigh, have a track record for keeping momentum going. Their other wine bar, Bodega, has been attracting impassioned crowds of young people fomenting late-night dance parties in North Beach for seven years. (“I feel so old in there,” Luevano said of Bodega. “Everyone is so beautiful.”)

Back when Bodega opened, Luevano and Sedigh didn’t see many other bars in San Francisco like it. The list of mostly European, minimal-intervention wines that Luevano stocked had not yet found the receptive audience they enjoy today. There were far fewer California wineries then making anything that they would have willingly called natural, and Luevano fielded frequent complaints from customers that he didn’t stock enough local wines.

In the span of a few short years, his approach morphed from radical to standard. Hard-to-sell bottles suddenly became easy sells. “We couldn’t sell a case of orange wine before the pandemic,” Luevano said, not even bottles like amber-hued Ribolla Gialla from the northern Italian winery Gravner, now highly sought after. A far cry from two years ago, Luevano said, customers come into Bodega pointedly asking for “the cloudy, high-acid bottle that looks like orange juice.”

And so it’s notable that at Key Klub, just as people’s palates have become whetted for the wildest wines, Luevano has taken a step away from natural wine’s hardest core, offering a menu that feels a little less obviously natty, a little more mainstream. There’s no official dogma here for what qualifies as natural: You can order a glass of Bordeaux (a very good Merlot from Clos Petit Corbin; $18), or a sparkling wine from Napa’s Carboniste (a bright, fruity take on Pinot Grigio; $15), neither of which is typically associated with the natural-wine scene. There are neighborhood regulars, Luevano said, who come in “just for the Jolie-Laide” — the Sonoma County producer specializing in esoteric French grapes like Trousseau Gris and Melon de Bourgogne. Key Klub always has one or two of the winery’s bottles on its list.

The beer selection is more extensive than at Bodega, thanks to Sean Halpin, a new partner that Sedigh and Luevano brought on. Halpin, who formerly worked at San Francisco’s Cellarmaker Brewing Co., has emphasized milder beers like lagers and pale ales, with a few IPAs that clock in at lower alcohol levels. Top local breweries like Russian River, HenHouse, Pacifica and Sante Adairius are well represented.

Luevano’s gentler approach here is a testament to just how vague the term “natural wine bar” has become in today’s Bay Area. If it once felt very specific, it can now equally refer to a Parisian-inspired bistro (Oakland’s Snail Bar), a nightclub DJ rave (the Mission District’s Bar Part Time) or a snug alcove that feels like an old living room (Potrero Hill’s Ruby Wine).

By the time natural wine reaches the everything-and-nothing point, anyway, Key Klub may not be around anymore. The bar has a defined life span: When Luevano and Sedigh signed the lease, they knew that the building would be leveled in five years to make way for a condo development. They’d done some research and discovered that the space had been home to a nightclub called Key Klub in the 1950s, and so they wanted to revive that name for its final years, “to give Key Klub one last run,” Luevano said.

The deadline didn’t deter them. “Five years in this city — that’s successful as far as this business goes,” he said. Besides, in five years, who knows what a natural wine bar will be anymore?