Dave on the left, John Ottman in the center, Ali on the right. Both are longtime regulars of the bar. Probably since 2013!
Tucked into Bernal Heights on Cortland Avenue, Holy Water has spent over a decade becoming exactly the kind of place neighborhood bars aspire to be, and rarely achieve. Its walls are covered in vintage religious iconography and collected treasures, its taps pour some of the city’s most sought-after craft beer, and its staff remembers your name. But twelve years ago, when owner John Ottman first walked into what was then the dog-friendly Stray Bar on a slow winter day in 2012, none of this seemed guaranteed.
What transformed a struggling former dog bar into one of San Francisco’s beloved gathering spots? The answer involves patience (six slow years’ worth). This 100-year-old nun loved the possibly blasphemous name, anniversary parties with lines around the block, and Ottman’s conviction that great bartending matters more than rare bottles. On a quiet afternoon before the evening rush, he settles in to talk about blasphemy, bar life, and why you can’t bring babies into his bar.
Pictures by Sam Durbin
Holy Water: A Conversation with John Ottman
On a quiet afternoon at Holy Water in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, owner John Ottman settles in to talk about his bar’s journey from the former dog bar to one of the hill’s most beloved gathering spots.
You’ve been here since 2013. What was this place before Holy Water?
“It was called Stray Bar,” John recalls. “It was known as a dog bar – there was a dog logo out front and dogs were definitely in here. We still allow dogs, actually. The space was much smaller back then. It used to end pretty much where that concrete changes. That was the main space of Stray Bar – then there were bathrooms right there, and they had a pool room with a fireplace at the ned of a narrow hallway.”
He laughs when describing the dog situation. “We could have anywhere from zero dogs to maybe 10 or 12, which is kind of too many to be honest. As long as all the dogs are cool, it’s fine, but if there’s a barky or slightly aggressive dog, it disrupts the whole ecosystem. It only takes one, but 99% of the time there are no issues.”
How did you end up taking over this space?
“I got linked up with a couple of guys who owned Churchill and Bloodhound – they owned Double Dutch in the past, too,” John explains. “I was working with some other guys downtown, and I left there to work with them because there was a pattern. Whenever they found a new spot to buy, renovate, and operate, they would bring on a third partner to run it. I thought maybe it could happen a third time with me. Long story short, it did.”
“I came to look at the space in winter of 2012, and I remember thinking, ‘Ooo, it’s slow up here, is this a good idea?’ It turned out to be a great idea, though we were pretty slow for like six years.”
Were you in the bar business before this?
“Yeah, I worked at Elixir, Rickhouse when it opened, Heaven’s Dog, Churchill – kind of bounced around, a little bit bit stayed everywhere for a couple years while working at more than one spot at a time,” John says. “But before all that, I did construction work. I grew up in Sacramento and worked in telecom for a bit – inside cell phone towers, hooking up all the machinery, RF bays, all that. Worked in a cabinet shop, laid tile, did concrete, siding, windows.”
“Then there was a restaurant that opened up in Sacramento near where I lived. I was like 23, working full-time and going to school. Sacramento gets hot – 110, 115 degrees – and I was like, maybe there’s a better job. I somehow had this idea, maybe it’d be fun to be a drafter. I took a drafting class in high school, so I went through this architectural structure and design course at City College.”
He shakes his head with a wry smile. “This was 2008, 2009, and the housing market was falling apart. There were no drafters to be hired. Then I found out they also wanted you to have an architecture degree. I was like, ‘I don’t want to be an architect, I was just hoping to be paid to use Revit or AutoCAD.’ So I just stayed working in bars.”
How did you come up with the name Holy Water?
“We had a bunch of names in the hat, all kinds of ideas, and whittled down to Holy Water,” John says. “No real grandiose story other than we liked this name, we liked that name, and we mulled over Holy Water a bit. We thought, ‘Yeah, that could work. Might make some people upset, might piss some people off.'”
“There was a split second where I thought, ‘Oh, maybe this is a bad idea because I’ve got a lot of Catholic family, maybe they’ll be upset.’ None of them has been upset. I have a Great Aunt who just passed away at 100, a nun her entire life. She came in, and she loved it. I mean, she doesn’t speak for every Catholic in the world, but all my aunts and uncles have loved it. The pope just threw a rave in the Vatican, so I imagine he wouldn’t care too much. I’m sure we’re the least of his problems.”
The walls here are covered with religious imagery and vintage items. When did that come together?
“The walls were pretty bare for the first five or six years,” John admits. “Then a friend of mine opened a bar, and he had all this stuff on the wall like day one, and I thought, ‘Man, this looks so great, so lived in. What have I been doing?’ So I got on Etsy and eBay, was going to garage sales, finding postcards, old items, and weird things.”
“I had a friend, Hector, who had a little shop on Mission – he had a framing shop, he was a gardener, did all kinds of stuff. I was like, ‘Hector, I got all these pictures, postcards, paintings, can you frame them for me?’ He had all these frames and did it all. We threw them up in the winter of 2018, and I’ve just been adding ever since.”
“People add to the collection a little bit. We’ve had some people bring rosaries – ‘Oh, this was blessed by this pope or this and that.’ I’m a little particular about what I put up because some things are very obviously new, and I try to keep it in line with the theme of the old. But there have been some cool things. Someone did a painting for us. I get people reaching out, and sometimes I say yes, sometimes I’ll pass. It’s hard because someone’s into it, they think of you, and you want to say yes, but I’ve got to keep the vision or theme consistent.”
What’s your clientele like? Is it primarily neighborhood folks?
“It’s a mix,” John says. “In the beginning, it was very much a neighborhood, but it’s grown. There are a lot of regulars who have their own days and times – regulars in the afternoon, regulars in the evening. I think we get a good number of neighborhood people and people coming from all over. Five, six years ago, someone taking a cab across town to visit us in Bernal seemed crazy, but now people are like, ‘Oh yeah, I came up from the East Bay.'”
He laughs. “Some people won’t walk up the hill. But we’ll get people coming from out of town who are like, ‘I was coming from the SFO, and I wanted to stop in.’ That happens quite a bit. It’s always wild to hear, “Oh, I was in LA, and I had to come see you guys.”
How do they hear about you?
“I don’t know, honestly,” John admits. “Being around for 12 years, maybe word of mouth. We’ve had a lot of people come and go working here who’ve done a lot of things, and after a while, maybe through word of mouth and friends scattered all over the country. Instagram helps.”
Tell me about your drink program. What are your signature cocktails?
John pauses thoughtfully. “We just upgraded the menu from 12 drinks, which I would say were our signature drinks. But ‘signature drinks’ as an idea – for me it always seems like a corporate chain restaurant thing, like ‘these are our signature drinks, nobody else has these.’ Many bars don’t really do that anymore. So kind of the entire menu, I guess – these are the drinks that we’ve thought about, we’ve worked on — perfected, we’ve made house ingredients for, or we’ve done some infusions or blends.”
“Previously, it was legal-size paper, size seven font on the back,” he continues. “I had this idea for a while to do something nicer. I worked with this killer designer and illustrator, Shawn Scott, a longtime buddy of mine, to make everything more visible, add a little story to each piece, and break it up into different chapters. Low ABV, a Main cocktail section, a larger and more readable Spirits list. We just launched the Christmas section yesterday – four drinks, Christmas-inspired.”
What about your beer program?
“We’ve done a really good job with both beer and spirits,” John says. “We’ve worked really hard on craft beer since we’ve been open – drive to pick up beer, try to get new accounts, have stuff shipped. A lot of people will come for the beer because they can’t get it, maybe except at Toronado, Crafty Fox, City Beer when it was open, maybe a couple other spots, but there are fewer and fewer options these days.”
“Beer Week is a big one for us,” he continues. “There’s also our anniversary party, which we just did in October – our 12th. It was our busiest one yet, which is wild. Last year’s anniversary party was a bit slower than I expected, but this one was so much busier. It was great to see so many old faces.”
I remember one year, there was a line around the block.
“That was 2022,” John recalls. “There was literally a line around the corner, around the block, a two-hour wait. I was like, ‘This is crazy, what is happening?’ It was coming out of COVID, and boom, people were happy to be out. It was one of those things, like, this is too busy, because I was worried our neighbors might be like, what the hell is going on. People were drinking in line, and I’m like, ‘Hey, you can’t be drinking out here.” This is my beverage, they would say. ‘Yeah, but you’re in line for our business.’ Our neighbors are going to blame us.'”
“Beer Week used to align with Pliny The Younger,” he adds. “It got separated, and I was a little like, ‘Oh man, that might really mess things up because people come from all over the world for Beer Week because they also want to hit Pliny The Younger.’ But it actually worked out really great. We were able to get the local Pliny The Younger crowd, and Beer Week is more manageable because you’re not having all these events on top of Younger.”
What’s different about having a bar in Bernal versus other neighborhoods?
John thinks for a moment. “It seems more tight-knit. It seems like a little mini village. I imagine many other neighborhoods feel like that, but Haight Street wouldn’t necessarily come to mind; I could be completely wrong. You’d have regulars, but it wouldn’t feel so neighborly, like Bernal, at least “Downtown Bernal” as the old Bernal regulars used to refer to it.
What do you think brings people here specifically?
“We’ve done a really good job with both craft beer, spirits, and cocktails,” John emphasizes. “But honestly, I tell the staff all the time: look, I can have the neatest, greatest, rarest stuff up here on the back bar at the most wonderful price, but if nobody wants to deal with you, no one’s going to come back. You guys are the main attraction here. If you take too long, if you’re rude, if you’re sloppy – all these potentially negative things – people won’t come back — you guys are number one.”
“I think we have probably the best staff we’ve ever had in 12 years. Everybody’s either managed a bar or has even owned a restaurant, and everyone has tons of experience. When we reopened after COVID, we were able to attract a really great staff.”
You’re very focused on the experience.
“It’s everything,” John agrees. “You can go to a place that’s maybe giving you mediocre product – whether it’s food, a drink, a donut, whatever, maybe coffee – but if the atmosphere is great, you know the people, they’re your buddies, you keep going back. It’s the connection, the relationship. You can have all the great stuff, but if someone’s not welcoming, doesn’t remember your name, doesn’t remember your order – like, I’ve been here 10 times, and you can’t remember anything about me, doesn’t even want to talk to me, ignores me – I don’t even care what you have. It’s not going to be a lasting success story.”
Have you noticed the neighborhood changing?
“Since COVID, absolutely, the last couple of years,” John says. “I’ve seen more young couples moving into the neighborhood, buying houses. Older folks sold some homes, probably retired somewhere else, and younger people are coming in. Some fresh blood. It’s helped business, and hopefully it’s helped everybody’s business in that regard.”
Has that changed who comes into the bar?
“It’s definitely younger,” John observes. “You think of the Noe Valley crowd with all the strollers – that wasn’t here really a couple years ago, or there was less. Now it’s more, more, more. People always try to come in with their babies.”
He laughs. “I got a Google number that goes straight to voicemail, and it says, ‘Don’t leave a message, just text us.’ I’ll get a lot of like, ‘Do you allow kids?’ A lot of: “My kids are only 6 years old,” or “7 months old.” ‘I always replied that nobody under 21 years of age is allowed under state Law, sorry! I wonder if maybe it’s foreigners. I would hope that people in San Francisco know that a bar can’t let their kids in, but maybe not.”
What’s the best thing about running Holy Water?
“The flexibility,” John says immediately. “I no longer have to bartend. I have banker’s hours now. I get in here at 7:30, 8, or 8:30. If I have things to do during the day, I can do them. But I try to wrap up my time at the bar by 2 or 3. I try to see most of the staffbrieflyt while they’re setting up. If I need to do other work, I can go home and do it. Some things that need to get done, but not right now – I can do them tomorrow, push them off. Just having the flexibility and the creativity.”
“When I was running three bars at one time, it was just putting out fires all the time,” he reflects. “There was no time to do anything except fix things. No creativity”
What are you most excited about right now?
“Honestly, diving into agave spirits,” John says enthusiastically. “Just trying a couple of brands and different things, I’m like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy.’ There are many incredible producers in the market right now.
Anything else you want people to know about Holy Water?
John considers the question. “I think just… we care. We care about the staff, the experience, and what we’re serving. The walls were bare for six years, but now they tell a story. The menu was tiny font on legal paper, but now it’s something people can actually read and engage with. We’re always trying to get better.”
He gestures around the bar, now filled with religious iconography, vintage postcards, and years of collected memories. “This place was slow for six years, but we stuck with it. We built something. And now, 12 years later, we’ve got regulars who come in at their set times, and we’ve got people traveling from across the city and out of town. We’ve got the best staff we’ve ever had. That’s what matters.”
“Oh, and we still allow dogs,” he adds with a smile. “As long as they’re cool.”
Holy Water is located on Cortland Avenue in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood. The bar is open daily and welcomes both neighborhood regulars and visitors from across the city – leave your kids and aggressive dogs at home.
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