Bourbon & Branch was a San Francisco cocktail pioneer. Should we still care about it?

Summary: Bourbon & Branch changed the game when it opened in 2006. A theatrical enactment of a 1920s speakeasy, Bourbon & Branch shocked San Francisco with its requirement that all visitors make reservations, retrieve a password and show up at a specified time at an unmarked door on Jones Street in the Tenderloin. What awaited them inside was a fantasy of Prohibition-era San Francisco, dark and hushed and furtive. And drinks: complicated drinks. Expensive drinks.