A bar you'll <3

When you set foot in a place with a long-storied past, you can't help but feel the history emanating from the floorboards to the rafters -- just look at AT&T Park, where rumor has it, you can still hear the spooky whispers of "Pacific Belllll" and "SBCeeee". For a wine bar/gallery haunted by the ghosts of prosties and grease monkeys, hit Heart

From a financial commentary writer turned wine buff (here we go again...) comes Heart, a reclaimed wood-heavy, Edison-lit vino bar-slash-art gallery with casual, communal seating and a rustic small plate menu by the Kitchenette dude, that occupies a long, skinny former mechanic's garage and before that a brothel, so either way, you were getting your pipes cleaned. On any given day they'll have up to a hundred "obscure or overlooked" varietals available by the glass/bottle or retail; notables include an exceedingly dry, Spanish, unfiltered cider called Isastegi; the nutty/earthy Silver Vionet from Santa Barbara; and the light n' floral Mannucci Droandi Chianti, which (Spoiler Alert!) drinks more like... a Pinot! The all-American menu emphasizes processes like smoking, brining, curing, etc., and'll feature classic staples that range from chicken pot pie, to US-made charcuterie, to a cider-braised goat shank dish, to chopped liver -- order it, and the goat shank'll be all "what am I chopped liver?" And you'll be like, "no, you're goat shank, goat shank"

The idea's that Heart's wine'll pair with whatever art they're showing, which today includes a series of photos of suggestively-posed pregnant chicks, so have fun with that. If the concept's somehow lost on you, sip while entertaining yourself with Heart's free Wi-Fi, which used to be powered by PacBell in the halcyon days of 2004, when men were men, and pregnant women were not being paired with wine.