Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

San Francisco's most glamorous nightclub began as a Prohibition speakeasy with showgirls and backroom gaming tables. Agostino "Bimbo" Giuntoli - nicknamed by a partner who could not pronounce Agostino - opened the 365 Club in 1931 on the third floor of 365 Market Street, promising "open 365 days" and the World's Best Dinner from 3 dollars 65. In 1951 he moved the operation into the Art Deco building at 1025 Columbus Avenue in North Beach, designed by master architect Timothy Pflueger for the rival Bal Tabarin club, and the neon Bimbo's 365 marquee has been an informal landmark of the neighbourhood ever since. The interior remains one of America's great surviving supper-club rooms: red-draped tables, terraced dining platforms, a curved stage, the original Pflueger bar - and behind it "Dolphina, the girl in the fishbowl," the club's signature illusion since the 1930s. Three generations of the Giuntoli family have kept the operation intact, riding out the nightlife slump of the 1960s, a 1970s stretch as a private event house, and every reinvention of San Francisco around it. The city recognised the club on its Legacy Business Registry, and San Francisco Heritage counts it among its hundred Legacy Bars and Restaurants. Since the 1980s Bimbo's has doubled as one of the city's best-loved concert rooms - 685 capacity theatre-style, 475 for dinner seating - with a booking history running from Chris Isaak, Macy Gray and the Brian Setzer Orchestra to Robbie Williams, and corporate clients from the Recording Academy to Oracle renting the room whole. The formula has not changed in ninety years: velvet, neon, a proper stage, and a family name over the door. The details reward regulars: the house's black-tie-era dress code softened decades ago but the staff tailoring never did, the original terrazzo and mirrors survive throughout, and the corner of Columbus and Chestnut sits at the foot of Russian Hill between North Beach and Fisherman's Wharf - a walkable evening in the city's most Italian quarter. When touring bands want to feel like Sinatra for a night in San Francisco, this is the phone number their agents call.