The best fried chicken is at a San Francisco strip club
March 2, 2023
If you were to walk past Gold Club on a lonely Friday evening in downtown San Francisco, chances are, you wouldn’t look back.
Save for the royal blue lighting and cursive gold sign, the nondescript gentleman’s club could easily get lost in SOMA’s dark, unlit landscape. After all, management says, it’s the type of place where people go to become invisible. But against these odds, that’s exactly where my boyfriend and I end up on a cold February night.
Read what SF Gate says about our best-fried chicken in San Francisco strip clubs!
SFGate: If you were to walk past Gold Club on a lonely Friday evening in downtown San Francisco, chances are, you wouldn’t look back.
Save for the royal blue lighting and cursive gold sign, the nondescript gentleman’s club could easily get lost in SOMA’s dark, unlit landscape. After all, management says, it’s the type of place where people go to become invisible. But against these odds, that’s exactly where my boyfriend and I end up on a cold February night.
Make no mistake though, this place isn’t for chumps: The chicken may be $20, but whatever you spend on entertainment is between you and God. I tried to buy my boyfriend a dance later that evening, but, to my horror, I only had about $30 left, so we ended up splitting it 50/50. There had to be some sort of German word for that feeling, I thought, along with the complex range of emotions that follow when your card declines at the club twice.
The manager, who probably pitied me, kindly offered a lap dance and drinks on the house. A few minutes later, we were approached by a tiny, upbeat blond from San Jose. I like her: She’s bubbly, listens to rap and has a small tattoo shaped like a crown on her chest. She says some girls commute all the way from Sacramento to perform at Gold Club, and it’s her favorite place to work.
As she’s giving me a dance in the corner, I ask her what her biggest pet peeve is. “Whenever guys try to grab my pussy!” she says without missing a beat. “Wow, that sucks!” I yell. She looks back at me while furiously shaking her ass and gestures as if to say, “I know right?”
I gave her my last remaining wad of cash, walked back to our table, and silently prayed I had enough money on my Clipper card to get home. She told us to come back sometime, and in my heart of hearts, I felt it was sincere — but whether that’s true or not doesn’t really matter. As we thanked the staff and left, the doors shut behind us, and we were once again back out on the silent city streets.
Maybe what’s gold does stay, after all.
Story credit to SFgate.com.
Read the entire story here: The best fried chicken is at a San Francisco strip club
We’re not just here for the live entertainment though — we’re here for the club’s legendary fried chicken. For years, its storied $5 lunch buffet fed San Francisco’s working-class crowds and white-collar elites, quickly becoming a word-of-mouth phenomenon. I wasn’t expecting to break nearly 10 years of vegetarianism at a strip club with three and a half stars on Yelp this winter, but I suppose God just works in mysterious ways.
When we arrive around 8:30 p.m, a young security guard with a plastic earpiece escorts us inside, much like a host at Sunday brunch. After we pay the $25 cover, he seats us at a candle-lit table facing the stage, where a tall, lithe woman in 6-inch Pleasers pole-dances to R&B.
In many ways, I feel like I’m at a casino or maybe even a cruise ship, except there are naked women everywhere. Some prowl across the stage like panthers; others spread their limbs like petals to the sun. To our left, a performer glides down the pole with ethereal grace while another gets showered in cash.
After we place an order for a bucket of fried chicken, a medium-rare burger and two mixed drinks, I sit by the stage and slide a few bills to a woman in a scarlet red bikini. “What’s your name?” she asks, revealing a mouth full of green braces. I tell her, letting her know that I am actually a reporter and would love to interview her for a story — but only if she is interested, of course. She gives me a bewildered look and quickly gathers the dollar bills.
She is not.
A few minutes later, the server reappears with the long-awaited bucket of chicken and a vodka soda. Aromatic steam wafts from the paper wrapping; it smells incredible. I delicately peel it apart, pull out a wing and take a bite.
A lot was going through my mind at that moment — but all I could really say was, “Holy s—t.”
Somehow, it’s even better than I imagined: The meat is so juicy and tender that it gracefully falls off the bone; meanwhile, its golden outer layer is thick, crunchy and savory. This is, undoubtedly, the dankest fried chicken I have ever had.
My Southern boyfriend’s medium-rare burger isn’t playing around either. It’s rich and simmering in fat — the chef went light on the sauce, but he believes this was a deliberate power move, since the meat speaks for itself. The dish “sang,” as he likes to say.
In many ways, I feel like I’m at a casino or maybe even a cruise ship, except there are naked women everywhere. Some prowl across the stage like panthers; others spread their limbs like petals to the sun. To our left, a performer glides down the pole with ethereal grace while another gets showered in cash.
It’s still unclear how, exactly, Gold Club’s executive chef, Chris Hui, learned to make chicken that dangerous.
He says he landed the job by accident in 2015, and though he’s worked in restaurants since high school and attended the California Culinary Academy, he didn’t anticipate working at a strip club — nor did he expect to manage a wildly successful fried chicken buffet that sometimes brought in 300 patrons.
“It was like a madhouse here,” he tells me over the phone. “It was exciting and crazy, but it was definitely crazy.”
“I know everybody always talks about the fried chicken,” he says, politely adding that it’s not his “favorite” menu item. “I’ve been looking at that thing for years.” What’s really underrated — and has never changed, he says — is the $15.95 prime rib special.
Though Hui doesn’t work the floor, he’s also seen plenty of high-profile athletes come in over the past decade, including controversial boxing champion Floyd Mayweather and “professional sports players that are very local.” He won’t disclose who, but says they visit regularly.
“I’m talking like, you know, maybe once to a couple times a month on a rotating basis, almost,” he says.
And honestly, if I could make it rain like Rick Ross, I probably would, too — there’s something really pleasant and disorienting about dining in a strip club.
More than once, our romantic dinner was interrupted by the resounding “Clack! Clack! Clack!” of a stripper smacking her stilettos against the stage while doing the spread eagle. I watched a woman to my right build a house of dollar bills before knocking it over on a girl’s ass, decorating the stage with money. And when an EDM remix of Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” crescendoed shortly after, an impassioned audience member actually got up out of her seat and screamed the chorus, pumping her fist. I felt like I was overdosing on Benadryl.
By 10 p.m., the place was packed with stone-faced couples, fintech bros, and voyeuristic loners. In between routines, I watched stoic security guards literally mop up mountains of stray dollar bills, further convincing me their jobs are way cooler than mine. The atmosphere is loose, erotic, and fun.
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