A taxidermied deer head now watches over happy hour at 239 Kearny Street, where San Francisco's Financial District crowd gathers around a wooden ski mounted with four shot glasses, waiting for a stranger to say when. Shotski's Alpine Lodge opened in May 2026 in the former Nightingale space, trading that bar's plant-heavy speakeasy aesthetic for faux-wood paneling, vintage ski posters, and a prize wheel meant to get people talking to each other rather than staring at their phones.
The bar is the latest project from Future Bars, the hospitality group behind Bourbon & Branch, Pagan Idol, The Dawn Club, and Long Weekend, and it marks a deliberate pivot from the meticulous craft-cocktail speakeasies the company built its reputation on in the late 2000s and 2010s. As The San Francisco Standard reported, the space's namesake drinking game requires four different people to each down a shot fixed to a single plank of wood, a gimmick engineered to force strangers into a shared, slightly ridiculous moment. Future Bars co-founder Brian Sheehy told the Standard the bar only works if patrons put their phones away, and that the group set out specifically to create experiences that force interaction.
The concept traces back to Future Bars special events manager Alexandra Garrett, who according to 7x7 Bay Area, built Shotski's around an observation that post-pandemic Financial District happy hour crowds needed deliberate incentives to mingle rather than cluster in their own work cliques. Garrett previously managed nearby Rickhouse, across the street, giving her a close-up view of how downtown drinking habits shifted after 2020. The bar's official slogan, all altitude, no attitude, sums up the unpretentious turn away from the hushed, reservation-only speakeasy model Future Bars once specialized in.
What's Actually In the Glass
Beverage director Jayson Wilde, who has also shaped drink programs at Bourbon & Branch and The Dawn Club, designed Shotski's menu to balance the bar's playful drinking-game bones with real mixology, 7x7 reports. Standard cocktails run $13 and include the Dance With the Devil, a highball made with root beer, absinthe, and lime; the Death Cookie, built from bourbon, amaro, Stroh, and a European-style biscuit; and the Hip Hop Mogul, a mix of vodka, grapefruit, lime, cinnamon, and allspice. There's also an espresso martini topped with soft-serve vanilla ice cream and Rumple Minze peppermint schnapps, plus draft Red Bull cocktails and chambongs for those who want their alcohol delivered with more spectacle than sipping.
The $10 shotski itself is the headline attraction, but the interactive menu doesn't stop there. A 16-space prize wheel offers rewards including a chambong, ten claw-machine plays, and a Fernet flask, while the claw machine itself dispenses mini basketballs, stuffed monkeys, Cheez-Its, knockoff Crayola markers, and Maruchan instant ramen, according to the Standard's reporting. Sheehy told the outlet that some of Shotski's specific ingredients and gimmicks won't be exported to Future Bars' other locations, suggesting the concept is meant to stay a one-off rather than a template for the rest of the group's portfolio.
From Fern Bar to Ski Lodge
The address has cycled through several identities over the past decade. Before Future Bars took over the lease, 239 Kearny hosted Gitane, an upscale Southern European restaurant and cocktail lounge under restaurateur Franck LeClerc known for a heated patio in the adjacent alleyway, as SFist reported at the time. Future Bars then opened Nightingale there in December 2019, a 1970s-inspired fern bar with living-plant wall sconces and custom Tiffany-style lamps, a callback to the plant-heavy lounges originally designed to draw single female patrons decades earlier. Hoodline covered that opening in 2019, and per the Standard's account, Nightingale ran for seven years before closing in March 2026.
Shotski's now spills beyond its own four walls onto Claude Lane, the historic pedestrian alley behind the building, where the bar has hosted outdoor block parties, live music, and DJ sets, according to SF Funcheap. The alley has a long history of hosting European-style street celebrations downtown, giving Future Bars a built-in outdoor extension for its indoor lodge theme. The Standard notes the bar appeals to a mix of people in business attire and Valkyries fans, a crowd Future Bars is clearly betting will keep growing.
A Bigger Bet on Downtown's Rebound
Shotski's arrives as San Francisco's commercial real estate market shows real signs of life, with artificial intelligence companies driving roughly 30% of office leasing activity since 2023 and helping push downtown office vacancy down to 30.1% in the second quarter of 2026, according to Hughes Marino. That AI-driven leasing has concentrated heavily in and around the Financial District, the same blocks Future Bars has spent years trying to keep afloat through uneven foot traffic. Future Bars surveyed its own patrons and found that people crave immersive experiences, a finding that helped shape the group's pivot toward concepts like Shotski's.
Sheehy has been an outspoken voice in the debate over how the city should manage that recovery. He testified against proposals to expand downtown liquor licenses in late 2025 and again in mid-2026, arguing that Financial District customer traffic remained too volatile to support an oversupply of new venues without hurting existing ones, a claim Hoodline examined in its reporting on the liquor license fight. Future Bars has also felt that volatility directly: the group put its nearby LGBTQ+ bar Ginger's on indefinite hiatus last November amid the same downtown foot-traffic swings.
Shotski's fits into a broader strategy shift for Future Bars, which opened Long Weekend in North Beach in October 2025, a permanent pop-up bar that changes its destination theme every nine months, starting with Havana inside a converted 1920s bank building on Columbus Avenue. Future Bars was founded in 2004 by Sheehy and Doug Dalton, who moved their liquor license from their burned-down bar, Anu, to launch Swig near Union Square before growing the group to more than ten venues across the Bay Area. Shotski's Alpine Lodge is open now at 239 Kearny Street, with menu and event details posted at shotskislodge.com.
