For a few months in the spring of 2025, the fate of San Francisco's most stubbornly analog bar rested with a crypto investor who wanted to turn it into a coin. Dave Keene, who had run Toronado on Haight Street since 1987, announced his retirement that January and put the bar up for sale along with the building next door, the one that had housed a sausage shop for decades. A buyer surfaced almost immediately: Orion Parrott, who floated the idea of rebranding the 38-year-old dive into a "global brand" with its own token. The account he set up for it, @ToronadoCash, is still sitting on Twitter, or Xitter, or whatever it's called this year, a small monument to a future that never happened.
The deal collapsed by mid-2025. Keene reportedly tried to back out of it himself before it was formally declared dead. What replaced it, and what replaced Club Deluxe two blocks away around the same time, tells you something about how this stretch of Haight Street actually works that no listing description or neighborhood guide will spell out for you.
The Buyer Who Was Already a Regular
Toronado's new owners are Bill Lewis and his brother-in-law, Wall Pringle. Lewis spent two decades in finance and tech, including stints at Zynga and Facebook, before becoming CFO at Catch+Release. Pringle is a certified Cicerone, the beer world's equivalent of a sommelier certification, and has bartending experience. Neither of them is a stranger to the bar they bought. SFist described Lewis as a San Francisco resident of three decades and a regular of the beloved Haight Street bar. That distinction, regular versus outside capital, is the whole story.
Keene, in a statement about the sale, said the thing everyone who has ever waited in line for a barleywine at Toronado wanted to hear: "The history, the atmosphere, and the community have to remain intact." Lewis has echoed the sentiment with less formality. "Dave got it through the first 38 years," he told the SF Standard in May. "We've got it for the next 40." The bar stayed all-cash. The tap list stayed deep. Lewis has floated a food concept in the old Rosamunde and Berliner Berliner space next door, the same storefront where regulars have grabbed a sausage and carried it back in for thirty years, but nothing has closed that ritual off yet. Yelp's current listing, updated this month, still shows the same hours and simply flags a new menu, not a new identity.
Online reaction to the near-miss with Parrott was blunt. One commenter summed up the relief on Reddit, as reported by Washington Beer Blog: "That's far better than a crypto bro wanting to turn it into a lifestyle brand." It's a crude line, but it names the actual fear correctly. The worry was never that Toronado would close. It was that it would survive and stop being itself.
The Same Story, Two Doors Down
If Toronado were an isolated case, you could call it luck. It isn't isolated. Club Deluxe, the jazz venue that anchored the other end of this stretch for decades before closing in 2023, came back this summer under the name The DeLuxe. The people running it are Christian Beaulieu, a musician who used to bartend at the original Club Deluxe, and Jay Bordeleau, who owns Mr. Tipple's Jazz Club. Same pattern. Someone who already worked inside the room, partnered with someone who already runs a room like it.
The DeLuxe brought live music back seven nights a week, a bandshell-style stage, and a cocktail menu built around ten house drinks, including a greyhound and an absinthe-accented Mezcal Louisiane. Haight Street has picked up several new bars over the past two years, from the Irish pub O'Reilly's to the LGBTQ+ hangout Mary's to Magnolia Brewing's outpost, but the SF Standard called The DeLuxe "the grandaddy of them all." That's not an exaggeration about square footage. It's a statement about lineage.
Two of the neighborhood's most identity-defining rooms changed hands within months of each other in 2026, and in both cases the buyer had already spent years inside the culture they were purchasing. That's not a coincidence you can chalk up to sentiment. It's a function of how dense and specific this corridor's social fabric actually is. There are enough Cicerones, former bartenders, and decade-long regulars circulating through these two blocks that when a business comes up for sale, an insider buyer is a realistic outcome, not a happy accident.
Why the Corridor Can Afford This
None of this works without foot traffic dense enough to make small, specific businesses survive on regulars rather than volume. Two doors from Toronado, a 42-seat sourdough pizza spot called Jules has reservations that drop at midnight, thirty days out, and sell out the same day. That's not the behavior of a neighborhood padding its restaurant count for a listicle. It's the behavior of a corridor where enough people already live close enough, and eat out often enough, that a tiny room with limited seating can run at capacity indefinitely.
Duboce Park, sitting between the two neighborhoods that give this area its name, does the same work outside of business hours. Dogfest, held in April, brought roughly 12,000 people to the park this year, according to Axios San Francisco, and doubled as a fundraiser for McKinley Elementary, funding visual arts, literary, and science programs for 275 students. Duboce ParkJam, a free concert series run by the nonprofit Friends of Duboce Park, brought five local musical groups to the park's lawn on August 22 this year, a tradition the group has kept going since 1997 when it was started by neighbors from both Duboce Triangle and the Lower Haight. You can check the group's calendar for the next one. On quieter days, the Harvey Milk Recreational Arts Center, recently renovated, and the Scott Street labyrinth built by the same Friends group give the park a rhythm that doesn't depend on a crowd at all.
None of these things are real estate amenities in the conventional sense. They're the reason a bar sale doesn't automatically mean a bar's disappearance here. When enough people are rooted in a place long enough to become its Cicerones, its bartenders, its ParkJam volunteers, and its Dogfest sponsors, the businesses that define the block have a better-than-average shot at staying owned by people who already understood what made them worth saving.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If you've watched a "For Sale" sign go up on a business you've frequented for years, the instinct is to brace for a chain, a rebrand, or worse. The past year on this stretch of Haight Street suggests a different possibility is genuinely live here: that the next owner might already be someone you've stood next to at the bar. That's not guaranteed anywhere in the city. It's specific to a corridor with this much overlap between the people who patronize a place and the people qualified to run it.
That overlap doesn't happen by accident, and it isn't something a listing sheet or a walk score can capture. It comes from density, longevity, and a habit of showing up, at Dogfest, at ParkJam, at the bar itself, often enough that when ownership does change, it changes hands within the community rather than away from it.
If you're thinking about what it actually means to put down roots in a pocket of San Francisco like this one, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches these patterns closely. The Denis Lancerin Group has spent years reading exactly this kind of neighborhood signal across the city's most specific corners. Let's work together.
