The Lusty Lady
Ken Friedman, left, and April Bloomfield upon reopening Tosca Cafe last fall. Photo: The Chronicle/Carlos Avila Gonzalez
North Beach’s “venerable, if dingy” strip club and peep show, the Lusty Lady, closed at the end of August 2013, following 30 years of business on Kearny Street. The news made national headlines, due in large part to its status as a worker-owned strip club, and the first American strip club to create a dancers’ union.
Now, the vacant Lusty Lady space will be resurrected by Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield, who took over Tosca Cafe last year, earning a 3-star review from Michael Bauer and a place on his Top 10 Restaurants of 2013. The pair just finalized a lease.
There, Friedman and Bloomfield will open a new cocktail bar with bar snacks from Bloomfield and Tosca chef Josh Even. Tosca bar manager Isaac Shumway will be in charge of drinks, and the Tosca wine pair of Ceri Smith and Randall Grahm will do the vino. They’ll also get the space to build a new wine cellar.
“We’re going to do a cool little bar that hopefully will pay homage to what the Lusty Lady was — the peep show parlor, the wonderful seediness, and the dying breed of seediness,” says Friedman. “We’re going to try to riff on that.”
For Friedman and Bloomfield, it was a logical fit. The Lusty Lady and Tosca Cafe share back walls, which will allow for synergy between the two historical venues (for example, a place to grab a drink while waiting for a table at Tosca). As Friedman puts it, “it’s right next door, it’s available, it’s the same landlord — it’s easy.”
Architect Seth Boor (Sightglass, The Mill, Southern Pacific Brewing Co.) will design the new bar, which won’t be called the Lusty Lady, since that trademarked name went to the grave with the strip club, along with the cool neon signage. Similarly, most of the interior has been gutted, but the new regime wants to recreate many of the ideas and themes from the Lusty Lady.
“The Lusty Lady had all these weird nooks and crannies. It keeps going on and on, private rooms that go on,” Friedman says. “We’re going to try to recreate some of those nooks and crannies.”
It’s still early on in the design process — they’re currently aiming for the second half of 2013 2014 — but initial plans call for a dark dive bar vibe downstairs; upstairs will be booths (2-person, 4-person, 6-person) that will be available by reservation. At those booths, they hope to create a peep show dynamic, perhaps wherein a customer inserts a dollar and then a window opens to reveal a bartender — instead of a stripper.
At this point, there’s no name yet; Friedman says they have a few ideas (or maybe it has no name at all), but they will do research about defunct North Beach bars and venues. They hope to procure a full liquor license; if not, they have a back-up plan.
