ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE NEW MISSION THEATER
A dine-in movie house that serves food, beer and cocktails to one’s seat. The theater offers first-run Hollywood and independent films as well as special film events.
Where: 2550 Mission St., San Francisco (between 21st and 22nd streets)
Cost: Movie tickets run $5-$16.25 for 3-D films. Food menu items cost $17 or less, draft beers $10 or less. Cocktails are $12.
Transportation: Parking is extremely limited, but the theater sits a few blocks from the 24th Street and Mission BART station, and it’s also on the 14-Mission bus line.
Information: drafthouse.com/sf, 415-549-5959
SAN FRANCISCO — Chicken-liver mousse pairs well with Colonial American horror, it turns out.
The recently opened, five-screen Alamo Drafthouse New Mission Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District offers a food menu consisting mostly of easy-to-eat-in-the-dark items common to dine-in theaters, such as pizza and sandwiches. But we started our meal, consumed while watching the low-budget, 17th-century New England-set film “The Witch,” with the menu’s most gourmet offering.
Fanciness seemed in keeping with a 1916 theater that had just undergone a $10 million, four-year-long rehab to restore it to its former grandeur, after some inglorious years spent as a mattress storage facility. The New Mission marks the first foray into California by Alamo Drafthouse, the Texas theater chain that popularized the idea of in-theater drink and meal service.
The mousse went down smoothly, its sharpness cut by the huckleberry jam accompanying it. It remained palatable even during more disturbing moments of “The Witch,” in which bonnet-ruffling forces of evil beset a Puritan family.
Part of the ease with which our party of two consumed the mousse, along with a Brussels sprouts salad, Nashville “hot chicken” sandwich, plus a Coke and a Knee Deep Citra Extra Pale Ale (the theater chain that put “draft” in its name offers 28 beers on tap, including this offering from Auburn), can be attributed to vast experience with movie-theater eating.
We’ve shoveled in popcorn, candy, nachos and reheated pizza while watching horror films since the 1980s. Made-to-order food prepared in a real kitchen, led by a real chef (Ronnie New, formerly of San Francisco’s Comstock Saloon), and served to us at the table between our seats felt less like a foreign concept than a luxurious extension of past experiences (though neither the $16 sandwich nor $12 salad tasted near as good as the $11 mousse).
Noise from other patrons always has been harder to stomach. But there were no distractions when we saw “The Witch” at a packed weekend showing in February. Maybe it was because people knew they were being watched, by the cadre of servers who stand in the back of the theater’s large main auditorium, looking for patrons to place order forms in slots at the front of tables.
Or perhaps moviegoers were aware of Alamo’s reputation for kicking out rude people. Alamo once turned an angry voicemail left by a patron ejected for texting into a profanity-laced ad for the chain.
More impressive even than the hushed audience was the unobtrusive manner in which our server, through an expert series of ducks and bends, delivered our food. He was so stealthy that his appearance during a pivotal scene in “The Witch” did not diminish its impact.
This was our first experience with true dine-in movie magic.
At the other dine-in theaters we’d visited, including Rocklin’s Studio Movie Grill, the lighting is set to twilight, presumably to help guide servers, when movies need darkness. The service distracts as does a too-clear view of other moviegoers. The New Mission, by contrast, keeps things dark, relying on servers’ eagle eyes to spot order forms jutting from tables.
It took a few months after the New Mission opened in December with “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” to get the service model “dialed in” in the main auditorium where “The Witch” played, New Mission creative director Mike Keegan said.
Most of Alamo’s 24 theaters across the country were built new, and feature stadium seating with every other row missing, so servers do not invade viewers’ sight lines. Such is the case with the small auditoriums Alamo built in the New Mission’s former balcony spaces. But in the large, original auditorium, Alamo honored the theater’s city-landmark status by arranging the theater’s 324 seats on “the natural rake of the room,” Keegan said. “So it’s a lot of ducking” for servers.
Keegan discussed the renovation process while sitting, on an afternoon in early June, in one of the main auditorium’s new seats. These seats — comfortable without being rockers or recliners or otherwise too living-room-like — are among the many features that create a space that seems new and classic at once.
A 45-foot-wide screen shows super-bright SRX-R515DX digital projection in a room whose century-old, gold-leaf design flourishes register just as clearly. There’s also a 35-millimeter projector, for the New Mission’s many screenings of archival films.
The New Mission’s architectural details either are original or are, Keegan said, “meticulous re-creations of how this room opened in 1916.” The Alamo crew consulted old photos, newspaper ads and other historical resources during the long renovation process.
The New Mission’s original mirrors adorn the walls of the lobby, which holds a Deco-era plush sofa and vibrantly patterned carpeting.
One need not buy a ticket to get a look at the lobby of the New Mission, which sits on Mission Street between 21st and 22nd streets, to get a load of that lobby, or to enjoy a craftier-than-usual craft cocktail at Bear vs. Bull, a dark-as-midnight-at-noon bar that sits off to the side of it. Isaac Shumway, formerly of Tosca Cafe, heads up the bar crew.
At various times in its life, the New Mission showed A-level Hollywood films, C-level schlock, A-list films again — this time with Spanish subtitles to cater to the neighborhood’s large Latino population — and served as a mattress store that used the 1916 auditorium for storage. Pre-makeover photos hanging on the lobby’s wall show moldy mattresses beside crumbling moldings. By the time the picture was taken, the theater’s other longtime inhabitants — wild animals — had been shooed away.
The animals were “mostly aviary,” Keegan said with a laugh. “Lots of pigeons.”
Alamo founder and CEO Tim League has said that he chose San Francisco as his chain’s first California outpost (a downtown Los Angeles theater is in the works) for personal reasons, because his parents met in San Francisco and he was born in Berkeley.
Also, San Francisco has “a cosmopolitan audience,” Keegan said. “And it is kind of under-screened.”
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