The little room at the bottom of Potrero Hill launched half the bands on your festival posters. Bottom of the Hill opened in September 1991 at 1233 17th Street in San Francisco, in a two-storey 1911 Edwardian that had served the neighbourhood as restaurant, soda fountain, speakeasy and workingmen's lunch club almost without interruption - the Seventeenth Street Restaurant had already renamed itself Bottom of the Hill back in 1964, feeding warehouse workers and Merchant Marines Italian food. Dave Benetti bought the building and its entertainment license around 1990, hung art on the walls, booked local punk and rock, and watched the music swallow the restaurant whole. The roll call since is barely believable for a 246-capacity room: Green Day, Oasis, the White Stripes, the Strokes, Arcade Fire, Elliott Smith, Neutral Milk Hotel, Death Cab for Cutie, Cat Power, Queens of the Stone Age, Alanis Morissette, Marilyn Manson and the Beastie Boys - the last playing a 1996 secret show as Quasar that drew 1,200 hopefuls when a DJ leaked it. Over 13,000 different bands and some 30,000 performances have crossed the small corner stage in three decades, most of them just before the artists got too big for the room. The operation stayed defiantly personal: co-owners Ramona Downey - the booker whose ear built the legend across the first 26 years - Kathleen Owen, Tim Benetti and later Lynn Schwarz, who took over booking, ran the club as a family concern with all-ages shows, a kitchen grilling through soundcheck, and a patio out back. NOFX immortalised the place in song; David Yow of the Jesus Lizard once crowd-surfed through the kitchen window. The club has announced plans to wind down by the end of 2026, which would close one of American indie rock's true incubators - the room where San Francisco went to hear next year's headliners first, at club prices, under the hand-painted ceiling.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 1233 17th Street, San Francisco, CA, United States, 94107

Website: https://www.bottomofthehill.com

Capacity: 246

Opening Date: 06/09/1991

Serves Food