True Laurel

Nicolas Torres roasts sunchokes from the farmers' market, infuses them into French apple brandy and builds a boulevardier on them. He runs the drinks for David Barzelay of Lazy Bear, who opened this bar in 2017. It took the Ketel One Sustainable Bar Award at North America's 50 Best Bars in 2024. The Chronicle's critics rank it No. 15 in the Bay Area for 2026.

Why go

The name is the California bay laurel. Torres came to bartending out of environmental education and habitat restoration.1 The bar buys ugly fruit. Farmers in the Bay Area and the Central Valley cannot sell it. Shipping citrus costs money and carbon. So the acid in a drink can be yellow wood sorrel. It is a weed and it grows everywhere here.

Barzelay's ceviche uses juice squeezed from imported pineapple. Torres keeps the skins and ferments them with soft California guavas. The tepache goes into the Paddy Issues. The rice-paddy herbs in it are Ken Phan's, grown in the Sacramento Delta.

Torres forages redwood tips for In the Pines and Under the Palms. He lacto-ferments kumquats for a seasonal drink.5 The room is small and it runs full table service. Michael Bauer's line on the drinks is that Torres treats a cocktail like an appetizer. There were ten house builds on the pink menu when he reviewed it in 2018.4

Order this / avoid

Order: the Mai O Mai. Light and dark rum, lime, Curacao and a pistachio-and-orange-flower orgeat. The light rum is clarified as a milk punch, so the drink comes out clear. The coffee-infused dark rum floats on top.3
Order: Sunny Side of the Street, the sunchoke boulevardier, with the wood sorrel doing the work of lemon.1
Order: the patty melt, and take the food menu seriously: candied nuts and asparagus gribiche at one end, chicken katsu at the other.7
Avoid: treating it as a stop between other places.

What locals & experts say

MacKenzie Chung Fegan and Cesar Hernandez, San Francisco Chronicle, ranking it No. 15 in the Bay Area in March 2026: Everyone knows True Laurel is a world-class bar. What everyone may not know is that True Laurel is also a superlative restaurant, worth visiting even if you only stick to water (but don't do that).2
Nicolas Torres, to Esther Tseng for World's 50 Best, on what the award was for: Because part of sustainability is us. It's our wellbeing and how to get by and how we please our guests and how we pay our staff.1
Camper English, 7x7, February 2024: the Mai O Mai is one of the fifty most iconic cocktails in San Francisco.8

Good to know

Booking: reservations run through Tock.6
Where: 753 Alabama Street in the Mission, around the corner from Flour + Water.

Verdict

must-visit — Brunch is the way in when the evening is gone, and it runs without the weekend wait the rest of the Mission makes you serve.