If you’ve been hanging around for awhile, you may remember Club Deluxe, the intimate live music venue with a divey, old-school Haight-Ashbury vibe that closed in 2023.
If you’ve been hanging around even longer, it may be DeLuxe that’s lodged in your memory, a gay bar with a pool table and what was rumored to be a choice cruising scene in the ‘80s. The place didn’t have a permit for staging live music, but they did it anyway.
“Everybody smoked in bars in San Francisco back then, so the way that you’d promote your speakeasy show was on the back of a matchbook,” says Christian Beaulieu, co-owner of DeLuxe.
Mitch Polzak & the Royal Deuces brought down the house on The Deluxe's reopening night in June.(Kit Castagne)
Today, the live music is on the up-and-up, but that indie, word-of-mouth, neighborhood-centric core remains. Even getting the club back on its feet was a community effort. Beaulieu, a musician and former bartender at Club Deluxe, was the one to light the spark.
“I was walking down the street one day and saw that the property was available and that all the magic was still just sitting in that space,” he remembers.
So, Beaulieu began talking to other local musicians, many of whom felt the same affection for the little club. They, too, had been trying to generate interest in bringing the venue back to life, and knew just the guy who could help connect the dots.
“I remember receiving four or five messages in a week saying that I should reach out to this guy Christian,” remembers DeLuxe co-owner Jay Bordeleau, who is also the owner of Mr. Tipple’s Jazz Club in Hayes Valley. “It felt like such a shame for San Francisco to lose such a storied venue, such a well-loved venue. The universe was saying this needs to happen.”
Christian Beaulieu and Jay Bordeleau, co-owners of DeLuxe(Dennis Hearne)
“Let’s open a jazz club, it’ll be fun,” was the running joke between the two during the months of painstaking dealings with contractors, vendors, and paperwork required to get DeLuxe back into fighting shape. Open a little less than a month now, it actually is.
The space isn’t the same as it was when it closed three years back. It's still got the that streamlined Moderne look with train-car-window cut outs in the divider between the bar and the stage, but new murals by Jon Weiss dress the upper walls with moments from the venue’s history, and handcrafted liquor shelves add a bit of Art Deco-inspired drama. There’s room for 80, most perched in wooden booths and at tables that wrap around the bandshell stage. An all-new sound system and custom speakers have upped the ante in the listening department.
The bar is working from a menu of ten house cocktails, including the club’s previous crowd-favorites: Greyhounds made with squeezed-to-order grapefruit, and Spa Collinses made with a blend of citrus, ginger, cucumber, and mint. They’ve added others, including a fizzy Cosmo Spritz, a Mezcal Louisiane (mezcal, vermouths, absinthe, bitters), and an espresso martini, along with a fresh lineup of beer, wine, and craft mocktails.
The one thing they knew could not be changed, however, was “that Haight-Ashbury independent community vibe,” says Bordeleau. “The visceral feeling of being in a small room, up close and personal with live music, that emotion was what we were most keenly aware of. We talk about the music being at the forefront, but for me, it’s the interaction of the music and the audience.”
Opening night at The DeLuxe(Kit Castagne)
While Club Deluxe had developed a reputation as a jazz club, the previous generation flexed with other musical genres, too. Beaulieu and Bordeleau are continuing that tradition and “adding a little more strangeness.” But even as music at the new DeLuxe will draw from all over—blues, indie pop, Spanish guitar music, rockabilly, even the Grateful Dead—jazz will remain elemental to the venue.
“Jazz and swing music really, really sound like they want to be in that room,” says Beaulieu. “You can feel it when you’re in there: This is really the ancestral home of this music in the Haight-Ashbury. This is where it’s supposed to be played.”
There’s something emotional, too, about this long-loved club returning at a time when so many of the indie music venues from the ‘90s and ‘00s have shut down. “People almost can’t believe what they’re seeing,” Beaulieu continues. “It’s not at all what’s supposed to be happening, a club coming back from the ashes.”
But whether you shot pool at the original DeLuxe in the ‘80s, caught a jazz quartet at Club Deluxe in the early 2000s, or just showed up in the city last week, Deluxe version 3.0 is a kind of universal proof that “the city’s not dead and lame,” says Bordeleau. If DeLuxe can be reborn, “there’s still hope for other cool stuff.”
// The DeLuxe is open seven days a week with one performance per night, Monday through Thursday, and two performances Friday through Sunday; 1511 Haight St. (Haight-Ashbury), check out the calendar at thedeluxesf.com
Beaulieu behind the bar at The DeLuxe(Dennis Hearne)
