That’s a Spicy Meatball – Festa Coloniale Italiana and the 7th Annual North Beach Bar Run This Saturday

Suck it up.

North Beach can be a conflict of interests.  You got all this cool history, the center of the city’s Italian culture, aaaand…douche bags.  Even after you live in the city for years, you still make the occasional excursion over to this venerable hood hoping for the best, and usually getting burned.

If you feel like taking a chance on love in this dysfunctional relationship one more time, you have two options on Saturday.

The Italian American Athletic Club is closing down Stockton for the Festa Coloniale Italiana, replete with booths overflowing with birra, peppers, sausages, meatballs and ravioli presses.  They’re even recreating an 'œauthentic piazza”, with real cypresses and a trickling fountain, inside the club’s ballroom.  How Pirates of the Caribbean!

If copious liquor is more your speed, however, than why not pop over a few blocks to the 7th Annual North Beach Bar Run?  Billed as the largest pub crawl in the city, it does indeed boast an impressive list of participating gin bins. Belligerent asshole and projectile vomiting factors are higher for this one, but in these bleak days of the city kowtowing to whiny haters, it might be fun to hold your nose and join the fray.

Festa Coloniale Italiana
Stockton Street (btw Union and Filbert)
[North Beach]
SF
September 19, 2009 11:30 a.m.-7:00p.m.
FREE

7th Annual North Beach Bar Run
Northstar Café
1560 Powell Street (@ Green)
[North Beach]
SF
September 19, 2009 4 p.m.
$6 advance/ $10 at event