The Interval at Long Now

The Interval is the cafe, bar and salon of The Long Now Foundation at Fort Mason Center, and it is unlike any other bar in San Francisco because it was built as an argument. The Long Now Foundation exists to encourage thinking on a ten-thousand-year timescale, and the room is furnished accordingly: a floor-to-ceiling library intended to hold the books required to rebuild civilisation, an eight-foot mechanical orrery, prototype components of the Clock of the Long Now, and generative artwork by Brian Eno. It opens for coffee in the daytime and runs as a bar into the evening, which makes it usable across a whole day rather than only at night.

The drinks programme was created by Jennifer Colliau, founder of the syrup and cordial maker Small Hand Foods, and later shaped by Todd Myles Carnam. Both have since moved on from The Interval, and a section of the current menu titled "Time Capsule" keeps their most requested drinks in circulation — the menu notes that a few "became iconic, so inseparable" from the bar that removing them would be unthinkable. What Colliau established and the bar has kept is a treatment of no- and low-ABV drinks as core rather than supplementary, made from the same house-made ingredients as everything else. The house shrub changes with the equinoxes; in autumn and winter the bar makes a cranberry syrup infused with its own blend of clove, anise, allspice and cinnamon, served tall with seltzer. Current alcohol-free pours include Asimov's Crater ($16), built on Wilfred's aperitif with pineapple, almond and lime; the Bitter Orange Old Fashioned ($12), made with Chinotto, dashes of non-alcoholic bitters and a lemon peel over ice, which the menu describes as "a paragon of our ongoing commitment to providing alternatives for sober social drinking"; and The Maiden ($12), pomegranate, almond, ginger, lemon and seltzer, written up as the bar's answer to the question "Do you have a Shirley Temple?" Untitled Art non-alcoholic beer and Dupont sparkling apple cider round out the list. Punch profiled the venue as "A San Francisco Bar Meant to Last 10,000 Years."