Rikki's co-owners Danielle Thoe and Sara Yergovich pose for a portrait with consulting chef JD Voss. The bar — the Bay Area's first women's sports bar — opens on Wednesday, June 11. (Molly DeCoudreaux, courtesy of Rikki's )
The sports bar is a passion project for co-founders Danielle Thoe and Sara Yergovich, who met as teammates on the San Francisco Spikes LGBTQ+ club soccer team. As consulting general manager Vinny Eng tells KQED, the bar’s origin story is that for years, Thoe and Yergovich had trouble finding any bar or restaurant in the Bay Area that would play women’s sporting events on their TVs (to say nothing of actually playing them with the volume on).
So, the two decided to create the kind of place that they themselves had been dreaming of. In all, Rikki’s has 14 television screens that will be tuned into any professional or collegiate women’s sports game being broadcast on cable or a streaming platform — including, whenever possible, every Valkyries and Bay FC game.
“The thing that was really important was to create a welcoming, inclusive space for everyone who celebrates women’s sports,” Eng says.
The bar features 14 TV screens that will show a variety of professional and collegiate women’s sports. (Molly DeCoudreaux, courtesy of Rikki's)
It also aims to be a place where sports fans can snag some delicious food and drink while they watch the game.
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Initial reports on Rikki’s have mostly, for good reason, focused on the women’s sports aspect and the community aspect — but this being the Bay Area, it should come as no surprise that the food and drinks won’t just be an afterthought. Eng’s involvement was an early clue: Before his current day job as a community organizer, he’d made a name for himself as a wine director and GM in the Tartine family of restaurants, and was even named one of Food & Wine’s sommeliers of the year in 2019.
So, the food, too, will be ambitious in its own way. The menu was created by consulting chef JD Voss, who’s now based in Chicago but came to prominence locally as the owner of the well-loved SoMa wine pub Jamber, which closed at the start of the pandemic. Longtime patrons of that restaurant will find versions of its signature dishes at Rikki’s: a smash burger, a beet burger, a bacon-wrapped buffalo meatloaf. Most everything will be “scratch-made,” down to the hand-cut fries and house-made sauces and aiolis, Eng says.
The food menu includes several sandwiches, like the fried chicken sandwich pictured here. (Molly DeCoudreaux, courtesy of Rikki's)
Meanwhile, Christian “Suzu” Suzuki’s cocktail menu pays homage to some of the most iconic moments and figures in women’s sports history, with specialty drinks like “The Queen Is King” (a fizzy cocktail inspired by Billie Jean King), the “Forget the Rest” (a green-chili-spiked drink that nods to a famous Kristi Yamaguchi quote) and the Miss Gaviota (a mezcal cocktail inspired by Mexico’s first trans lucha libre wrestler).
The idea is for everything to be delicious and discerning, Eng says, but not fussy. It is still bar food at the end of the day, and the bar is meant to be a place where you can also get a cold Bud Light if that’s what you want to drink while you’re rooting on the home team.
An array of appetizers courtesy of consulting chef JD Voss. (Molly DeCoudreaux, courtesy of Rikki's)
In addition to offering a fairly comprehensive slate of live televised women’s sports, the bar will also sometimes air certain iconic games from women’s sports history — say, old Billie Jean King matches or U.S. women’s Olympic or World Cup matches from the Brandi Chastain era.
More than anything, though, the bar’s focus will be on providing a safe and joyous gathering place for all fans of women’s sports — and especially for the LGBTQ+ community. Eng notes that the bar is named after Rikki Streicher, who ran a pair of legendary queer and lesbian bars in San Francisco until she passed away in the early ’90s. “They were places where women felt seen, celebrated, uplifted, and also could turn to when they were feeling unsafe,” Eng says.
Co-owners Yergovich and Thoe. (Molly DeCoudreaux, courtesy of Rikki's)
And at a moment now, he says, when so many members of the community are being told that they aren’t welcome, Rikki’s hopes to provide that kind of safe space once again in the Castro. “Finding affinity is so important right now,” Eng says. “Showing up for each other is how people are getting through.”
Rikki’s will be open Tuesday through Sunday 3:30–10 p.m., except Fridays and Saturdays when it will stay open until midnight. The bar is located at 2223 Market St. in San Francisco’s Castro District.
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