I discovered Sugar (yelp, dodgeball) last New Year’s Eve while walking around Hayes Valley with some friends and no particular plan. We quickly discovered its defining attribute: Sugar is v e r y   c h i l l. In fact, it was so chill that the DJ refused to do a countdown, instead leaving the four or five groups in the bar to do their own, independently. So perhaps it wasn’t the best place for a wild-and-crazy New Year’s celebration, but if you need to decompress from other wild-and-crazy things, or just to go to a cool bar where you can talk with friends, this is the place. Most of the specialty martinis and cocktails are very good, and the DJ stops the atmosphere from becoming too dead (but also doesn’t shout down everyone in the room with the music). After the jump, pictures from my trip there this Wednesday.

See? Very relaxed. The metal object in the middle of the bar (in front of the bartender) is the dish of Hershey’s Kisses, in keeping with the sweet theme. Frequently there are appetizers of some kind on the shelf just out of shot to the right, but there’s no kitchen. The DJ is behind the place where this picture was taken.

The bartenders at Sugar are so efficient that they move too quickly to be captured by mere photography. They mix mojitos at near-relativistic speeds. Ok, maybe not. But the mojitos are good. A little sweet, but many people like ‘em that way.

These are Sugar’s sugars. They have sugar behind the bar at Sugar. Several sugars, come to that. If you cannot say “Charley, Shirley sure sells sugar to Sugar,” you should go home.

We spent most of our night on the couches up front. Here, Jane is drinking the Tokyotini we passed around. Nobody much liked it, but that was the only drink anybody had complaints about. The drink menu is about eight pages long, and includes a broad range of wines and spirits, so you have a very wide variety of other options.

I couldn’t tell you what kind of guy brings a computer to a bar, but the guy who writes the bar up for the blog he contributes to is a good guess. And it fit in with the group; here, Davin demos his current project to Joe and Natalie.

Dinah noticed how the candle projected the martini glass with my Manhattan in it onto my laptop, so she took a picture of it. This photo pretty much sums up the spirit of the evening.