Whitechapel
Martin Cate opened this room in 2015 with 370 gins on the shelf. In 2018 it was one of four finalists for the World's Best Spirits Selection at the Spirited Awards. Its own page now takes bookings for private parties and publishes no drinking hours. I have not found a bylined report dating the change.
Why go
Ignacio Gonzalez designed the room as an abandoned London Tube station of about 1890. Bootleggers squatted it and made it a gin clubhouse.3 The tiles came from the London Underground in a 1908 acanthus pattern. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry cast the last-call bell. It also made the bell for Big Ben.2
Behind a lock sat Beefeater from the fifties, sixties and seventies. There was a Booth's London Dry from the forties. The rest were filed by style, and the categories ran London Dry, Old Tom, aged, navy strength, flavored and genever. Alex Smith wrote 110 cocktails to run through the spirit's history. He also built a twenty-two-drink Martini Family Tree running from the 1840s. Cate and Smith blended a house gin with Distillery No. 209 across town and called it Whitechapel Victorian Dry.4
Cate had done this once before. Members of the Rumbustion Club at Smuggler's Cove taste two hundred rums across three levels. They get a red fez at the end.9 Keli Rivers ran the gin version. The club was called the Polk Street Irregulars, after the Baker Street Irregulars, Sherlock Holmes' street informants. David Murphy cooked Anglo-Dutch-Bengali alongside. A quail came out fried in gin botanicals and Bangladeshi spice.
Counts moved. Taylor Abrams, reviewing for The Infatuation, put the shelf at over 600 gins in 2018, three years after it opened.6
What locals & experts say
- Esther Mobley, San Francisco Chronicle, January 2016:
Whitechapel, Martin Cate's new bar in the Tenderloin, exists in the same sphere as his other bar, Smuggler's Cove. Both are studies in a single spirit: Smuggler's Cove is a shrine to rum; Whitechapel, to gin.
3 - Martin Cate, to Anna Roth of the Chronicle in July 2015, a month before he expected to open:
We're trying to make gin fun again.
4 - Camper English, in 7x7's fifty most iconic San Francisco cocktails, August 2018: the Hungry Monk of East Sussex,
Spirit Works private barrel gin, bourbon, Giffard Banane du Brésil, oloroso sherry, salted brulée, cinnamon bitters.
8 - Esther Mobley, in her 2019 guide to the city's classic bars, counts this room among the single-spirit bars that followed Julio Bermejo's tequila work at Tommy's.5
Good to know
- The party: forty to a hundred and twenty-five people. There is a full bar, and the food comes as a cocktail-reception buffet.1
- Where: 600 Polk Street, in the Tenderloin.
Verdict
could-visit — Skip it unless you are the one hiring the room.