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Venue Search

23:18 Mon 02 Apr 2007
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As I mentioned in February, the Canvas Café is closing. It’s open until the end of this month. Apart from all the other sad things about this, it means that the Wednesday night sfmagic draft group will have to find a new home.

Finding that new home hasn’t been at all easy so far. We don’t have one. Seth and I checked out a place that he found tonight, Naan ‘n’ Curry on O’Farrell at Mason, and while it looked good and is open 24 hours, the management there were uninterested, because they say they have really high turnover there and want to keep it that way.

It’s not easy to find something matching our criteria:

* Can accommodate 20-30 people. We don’t go above 20 that often at the moment, and finding somewhere that can accommodate more than 30 might be wishful thinking, so I think aiming for 20-30 would be good.
* Open until midnight. We could possibly get away with 23:30, but before that seems completely unrealistic.
* Open to minors.
* Plenty of tables and chairs.
* Isn’t a card store (just thought I’d get that out there…) (unless they’re willing not to charge, and to let us sell cards at cost, plus trade, etc.—seems unlikely)
* Accessible by public transport.
* Decent lighting (typical Canvas lighting being more or less the minimum acceptable level).
* No entry fee.

We’d like to have these things too:

* Serves food.
* Serves alcohol
* Isn’t too loud
* Is by a BART station

But frankly, finding something matching the first set is pretty tough. The biggest problem is the late opening, really. Yet again, I lament this, one of the few things I don’t like about this city. Everything closes too damn early! This makes even less sense to me given that people tend to eat dinner fairly late here. I would have thought that a post-dinner café culture would have evolved, especially given the popularity of coffee houses during the day, but no. It’s hard to tell if that’s a reason for or a symptom of things like no decent late-night public transport.

I was clearly spoiled by Berlin, which is just such a fantastic place from that point of view—plenty of cafés, and they mostly stay open until 04:00, and there’s public transport all night. Truly a 24-hour city. (Berlin is also fantastic for plenty of other reasons, but it’s this particular thing that looks most attractive right now.)

Anyway, after that, our desire to accommodate younger players and so not be in a bar makes things difficult, as only bars tend to be open that late.

We’ll just have to keep looking. If by some odd chance any reader knows of a good place to try for this, please post in the comments! I’ll also try a Craigslist post this week to see if we can get anything that way.

I’m worried that we might have to settle for a bar, which would make things a lot less pleasant and cut significant numbers of our group out—but I’ll take that if it’s a choice between that and nothing.

2 Responses to “Venue Search”

  1. Juliana Says:

    You might check out Pizza Orgasmica on Clement. Huge venue and they supposedly have a big back room with pillow for parties, etc. They might let you get a standing arrangement there for Weds.

  2. Tadhg Says:

    Thanks. I’ll check that out.

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