Leave it to San Francisco to take the classic, no-frills hand job and turn it into a specialty phenomenon. What started as a quirky offering at one Excelsior café has barreled into a circus of infused, fair-trade lubricants and patrons who are willing to wait for hand-crafted handies.
And wait they will. With establishments trying to one-up each other with different brunch and happy-hour specials, lines wrap around the block like a hand wrapping around a . . . thing that rhymes with “block.” The recent addition of coconut oil at a Mission District hotspot this past weekend had patrons eagerly waiting for nearly two hours. It’s out of control.
And yeah, the specials are nice now, but with this level of demand, it’s only a matter of time before a mediocre hand job costs eight or nine dollars. What’s next? A brunch HJ with hollandaise sauce? Oh wait, that’s already a thing. People, we’re nearly to the base of this extremely slippery slope.
I reached out to Will Jesse, the owner of one of the Western Addition’s most popular HJ spots.
“We got in on this trend prematurely, and it exploded way sooner than we anticipated,” he told me. He sounded exhausted, and I strained to hear him over the furious slapping in the background. “People start lining up a half hour or so before we open, and the whole day is just nonstop hand jobs ’til we close. We try to get through the line as fast as possible, but people have started Instagramming laboriously staged before and after pics, which only adds to the wait time for everyone else.”
Like every other craze that starts in San Francisco, we’ll surely see fancy hand jobs start to pop up in other cities in the next couple of months. In the meantime, I can only take solace in the fact that this trend will inevitably escalate and escalate until it finally sputters out.
