Double Dutch Bar / Club

Mission, San Francisco –

For those who worship Wu-Tang and roll their eyes at Lil’ Wayne, who think Young MC’s Bust a Move should be sung in church, and who rank Brooklyn’s 80s break dancing scene as their own version of Shangri-La, then it doesn’t get much better than Double Dutch.

True, the venue is dark, cramped by design, and eye-blinkingly humid – and sometimes the DJs segue into Top 40 before the night is out – but there’s little doubt of this tiny club’s devotion to retro rap culture.

The bathrooms are covered with graffiti, stacks of a hundred-and-fifty glittering boom boxes backdrop the DJ booth, and photographs of swaggering b-boys toprockin’, freezin’, and generally pulling moves that would kill anybody over thirty line the walls.

There’s hardly ever a cover charge, even when the Mission bar-hopping crowd floods in Thursdays through Saturdays, filling the small bar and booths that run down either side of the narrow front half of the space, and grooving shoulder-to-shoulder on the small dance floor in back.

Most of the patrons probably think a ghetto blaster is a weapon from Star Wars, but that doesn't stop the youngsters from eating up the DJ-spun 80s and 90s classics with the kind of relish a typical club-goer demonstrates toward David Guetta’s latest Usher remix. If anything, Double Dutch proves that an old-school vibe is far from tired and good times can be rooted in decades far, far away.