Bar Iris

Bar Iris opened in early 2022 at 2310 Polk Street as the bar sibling to Nisei, chef David Yoshimura's Michelin-starred tasting-menu restaurant next door in Russian Hill / Polk Gulch. Where Nisei is formal and reservation-bound, Bar Iris takes walk-ins, and it inherited the restaurant's Japanese framing: a spirits list heavy on Japanese whisky and shochu, ice and glassware treated as part of the drink, and service explicitly modelled on omotenashi. Under bar manager Timofei Osipenko the cocktail list has run to ten-ingredient builds using yuzu kosho, hojicha, calamansi and Okinawan purple yam, and the bar earned Pearl Recommended Bar recognition in 2025. It is closed Monday and Tuesday and opens at 3pm on Friday and Saturday, later in the week.

The alcohol-free programme is not a footnote but a separately published menu, and the printed list is a starting point rather than a boundary — the bartenders will build to a guest's description. The current N/A list runs nine cocktails named for Japanese places, priced $20 to $21, essentially at parity with the $21–$23 full-proof list: among them the Aichi (Seward N/A gin, red shiso, N/A riesling, Muri Yamile, honey, Q soda), the Kyoto — an N/A martini of Amass and Dhōs N/A vodka with Aplos Arise, narazuke brine and tsukemono — the Tokyo (Amass N/A gin, N/A vermouth, Pathfinder N/A amaro, N/A sake, Aplos N/A bitters), and the Yakushima (Okinawa purple yam, Wilderton Earthen, kalamansi, li hin mui). Several cocktails on the main list carry an "also available as n/a" note, and a non-alcoholic bottle list backs it all: Suntory Free beer, Origami "zero" dealcoholized sake, Odd Bird blanc de blancs, Non 3 verjus bubbles, Dr. Lo dealcoholized Mosel riesling and a Saint Viviana sauvignon blanc, currently sold by the bottle only. Earlier lists carried the Heiwa, Osaka Bay, Ninjin Sour, the Okinawa and a Tsukemono Martini; those have rotated off, which is the point, because the alcohol-free list turns over on the same cycle as the alcoholic one instead of sitting static for years. Surveying the city's best non-alcoholic drinking in December 2023, The San Francisco Standard noted that "more than half the cocktails on this Polk Street Japanese-style bar's list can be made without alcohol."