A Classic Dive Bar Holds Out Against the Tide

It’s got a lot of what’s great about a bar. It’s cozy and inviting (its name, Vieni Vieni, means “come come”), small and narrow, 15 or 20 barstools, no tables, so it’s easy to talk to the people who apparently know each other and seem happy to welcome you in. Drinks are reasonably cheap — $6 to $7 for a beer, $7 to $10 for a shot or mixed drink — though not quite as cheap as they used to be. More about that later.

It does not have a lot of what’s bad about a bar. No live entertainment to make conversation difficult. (There’s a jukebox instead.) No “drink menu” list of complicated concoctions with stupid names. Only two TVs. It’s the kind of place your dad took you when you were a kid if you were lucky.

Dominique Buoni was luckier than most. Her father not only took her to Vieni Vieni, in what used to be the Italian section of San Francisco. He owned the place, having bought it in 1965 from another Italian guy who had run it as a beatnik bar, selling wine out of big bottles. When dad retired in 1992, Dominique took over.

“I got it because I was the oldest of us eight kids,” says Dominique, now 54. “I was going to run it with my oldest brother, but he died in a motorcycle accident, that same year.” For a long time Dominique earned a living for herself and her two kids. But then two things happened.

One was Covid, from which the business and the North Beach neighborhood — linked for so long — still have not recovered. “Look,” says Dominique, pointing out the window to the corner of Stockton and Columbus. “The foot traffic hasn’t come back.” But the second thing was worse.

San Francisco was taken over by a new generation, people who actually want drink menus, and live entertainment and lots of huge TVs. They also took over the apartments, driving out many neighborhood bar denizens.

Some of those bars started taking on the trappings new customers wanted and replacing the old bartenders. But Dominique found “the more things you change and the more things you add, the more complicated it gets. And the place doesn’t necessarily become a better place.”

So except for finally adding a buck to the drink prices a few weeks ago, only to end up offsetting it a little with a $12 beer and call shot special, and deciding to accept credit cards even though they can cause more problems than they solve, she has been trying to hold steady, true to her dad’s ideals.

She’s paying the price.

Driving in from more than 40 miles away, where she finally had to move to find an affordable place for the family to live, she has had good days, when “it’s wall to wall” and she’s able to pay the rent and her suppliers and to make the payroll for her five bartenders who work a few hours each.

“Thank God the landlord has been fair and reasonable,” she says, noting that others have refused to renew leases, only too happy to see their properties redecorated and transformed.

But there have been days when, after last call, there’s been $45 in the register, and the bottom line, Dominique says, is that “I’m going through my inheritance and my savings.”

On a recent Thursday afternoon at 5, she had three customers. Around the corner, a place with young bartenders and “craft cocktails” was packed. Meanwhile, a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle was announcing — as though it was good news — that a nearby “100-year-old dive bar space is reopening with a snazzy new cocktail bar” (offering a $13 number made with rhum agricole, sour lime, condensed milk and “a bit of pie crust”).

“They call this place a dive bar now,” she says. “And for a long time that hurt my feelings. But, you know, I’m proud of that now because a dive bar, to a lot of people, has come to mean a place where they can be themselves and feel wanted and know they’ll be taken care of. Now when they call this a dive bar, I embrace it.”

She recalled a longtime regular, a retired museum staff member, who recently died, alone, in his 80s. “He’d hit a few rough patches where he was between checks, out of money for a while, and he knew he could always come in here. I’m not sure that would have been the same at a lot of these newer places. But we’d keep track of what he owed and he always kept his promises.”

In any case, Dominique still has no plans to turn Vieni Vieni into something it’s not. And she’s still optimistic that she won’t have to.

“There was a big neighborhood festival that wasn’t the money maker I was hoping for. And the city has a ‘legacy business program’ to help out old places like this, but it takes three months for them to even look at your application. Still, Columbus Day is coming. I’ve got high hopes hanging on that.”

She’s also enjoying good word-of-mouth from bartenders and waiters in the area who, no longer all that comfortable at their own places of employment, have been coming in and recommending Vieni Vieni to their friends. She’s hoping all that will continue to grow.

Meanwhile, she looks out the window again, waiting for the customers to come.