The Alembic Bar is small and old-school, with wood-panelled walls, dimly glowing bare bulbs and a curved bar with a polished, hardwood top.

There are three bar stools, perfectly placed, as if waiting just for us. We slide on to them.

Cocktails are on the menu but forget sloshes of concentrated juice and a thimble of rum.

These are the pinnacles of retro sophistication, with layers of old and new flavours, and they sum up the neighbourhood in which we find ourselves.

The Haight Ashbury area in San Francisco is cool. In fact, it’s so hip that it has looped time and collided the 21st century with several bygone eras.

The main drag is lined with vintage dress shops. Some are recycling chain-store clothes at rock bottom prices. Others have pinched your granny’s curtains circa 1975 and turned them into cool orange sunflower skirts and the very best stock clothes that have been beautifully preserved from the 1920s onwards, looking for new owners who can rock their perfectly tailored lines once more.

There’s even a hat shop selling not just headwear, but the allure of an old-fashioned gentility.

The shopkeeper stands erect behind a till with raised typewriter-style buttons, offering sir or madam a style that will go just right with an oval face and a wardrobe of vintage with a modern twist.

The Grateful Dead lived around here, along with Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane.

It’s not hard to imagine them shopping in this selfsame store.

Back at the cocktail bar, the bartender is putting on a show.

Love is in the details here.

Herbs are being ground, spirits measured with test tube accuracy, there’s theatrical shaking, and then the ice is sieved off and the drink poured from on high, steaming cold.

I swear he bows slightly as he sets the glasses down before us.

I’ve never been a whisky lover, but he singlehandedly converts me with a concoction that softens the Laphroaig 10-year single malt Scotch with grapefruit and cardamom bitters. The sweet smokiness stuns my juice-jaded palate.

There’s a hat shop selling not just headwear, but the allure of an old-fashioned gentility

And straight from the garden comes the Southern Exposure, combining gin, mint, lime and a shot of celery juice.

We have a second round to celebrate and when our heads begin to spin, we snack on pickled quail eggs, hot roasted olives and fresh honeycomb with a melting cheese that tastes of the ocean.

I haven’t experienced flavours like this for years.

In the squinting, cool morning sunlight of the next day, the brigades of homeless people have mainly disappeared and the street loses its edgy menace, although an oversized pair of legs still protrude from an upper storey, shod in scarlet high heels and the ubiquitous graffiti, has got serious style.

After a breakfast of crepes and rosemary potatoes, we head west to Golden Gate Park.

There’s a lot for kids to do but this is a weekend for women who haven’t seen each other in two years and so we walk triumphantly past the playground and into the Japanese Tea Garden. Lawns of regimented, obediently green grass stalks are dotted with volcanic boulders. Pagoda roofs, laden with moss, balance over wooden temples several storeys high.

Among the gawking tourists (us), there is a pale woman in a pearl wedding dress, a Mexican girl in a pink bejewelled Quinceanera (15th birthday) ballgown and an Indian lady whose gorgeous ruby and saffron sari clashes with the reddish pink of the Japanese buildings.

Photographers are frantically snapping away at them, growling at people who stray into the photos.

We don’t want to do the traditional tourist route, but the Golden Gate Bridge has a magnetic pull.

Apparently, it’s impossible to resist getting a good look at this American icon, just as you can’t avoid San Francisco’s calf-sculpting hills, down which trams and kamikaze cyclists careen. We make our way to Fisherman’s Wharf to eat traditional clam chowder out of sourdough bread bowls.

These loaves, baked in the Boudin Bakery, are all descended from a starter dough made in 1849 and still baked to the same recipe.

You can buy loaves shaped like crabs, shamrocks, turkeys and pretty much everything in-between.

Just a few hundred metres from the bakery, sea lions bark as they fight for space on pontoons, oblivious to the tourists, and we get our fix of the bridge, rust-red against the cheerfully choppy ocean.

With no children to think about, time loses all meaning.

We eat breakfast at midday, lunch at four and talk into the early hours in a house just off the main drag, filled with antique French furniture, ornate ceilings and an incongruous red and black diner kitchen that somehow works.

To shake off the cobwebs the next day, we get out of the house with a walk in the Berkeley area.

We hike well above the city on a steep muddy path, with the bay wrapping around below us, anchored by the Golden Gate, half cloaked in cloud. Scrub jays pose in the trees and red-tailed hawks sail serenely overheard.

Later, as we venture out on to a darkening Haight Street again, I wonder if, like the emporiums, we’ve dropped a couple of decades along with the weekend responsibility for our offspring.

If we stay long enough, will we slip back further in time, crow’s feet and laughter lines receding as we slide back to when we wore the recycled fashions in their heyday?

But a look at the people living on the streets, hungry and battling their demons, suggests that the magic won’t last.

To eke out the last moments, I’ll have another of those Laphroaig Conventional Wisdoms please.