This British Pub in San Mateo Is a Riot of Late-Night Karaoke and Fish and Chips

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

At a little past 10 o’clock on a recent Friday night, we were seated beneath a deer head in a crowded dive bar in San Mateo while a Polynesian woman with flowers in her hair swayed in front of the karaoke machine, belting out the sweetest version of the Eagles’ “Love Will Keep Us Alive” you could imagine. Behind us, the faint smell of piss and weed emanated from the vicinity of the bathroom. In front of us, a steaming-hot plate of fish and chips so impeccably fried, we devoured the whole plate in minutes.

All of that about sums up The Swingin’ Door experience. This is a British pub on the edge of Silicon Valley that stays open until 2 a.m. every night, and is probably the most enjoyable, neighborhood-y dive bar you can find on the Peninsula. It was easily the most fun we had all week, in any case.

Even just pulling up to the building, we started to fall in love with the place — the weathered red-brick facade, the multiple coats of arms, the big neon sign blaring “FISH AND CHIPS” in bright white letters, the solemn King’s Guard soldier painted next to the door. Three flags were painted on top: American, British and (probably) the Irish tricolor, faded enough that I mistook it for France.

The Swingin’ Door hosts karaoke nights four days a week, and during our visit, almost everyone in the packed house was there to sing or to watch their friends sing. It made for a fun juxtaposition — the handsome taxidermy, dark paisley wallpaper and framed black-and-white photos of a London dock strike on the one hand; the grown men and women dancing around with a toy electric guitar on the other. There’s also a quieter bar area upstairs and a sweet garden patio in back for smokers, pool players, and anyone who wants to have a conversation without having to shout.

Of course, we’d come to eat. The menu here consists of your standard selection of (mostly American) pub food, with just a handful of Britishisms. This isn’t the kind of hardcore pub where you’ll find deeper cuts like steak and kidney pies, haggis or a Scotch egg. But it is one of a small handful of spots on the Peninsula where you can get a solid, real-deal plate of bangers and mash — the sausages charred and blistered until the casings are deliciously crispy, a scoop of Heinz Beanz on the side for good measure.

But the main reason to make a special trip to The Swingin’ Door, if you’re there for the food, is for those fish and chips, which is about as good a version as I’ve had in the Bay. Actually, what we ordered was the seafood platter for two — a low-key bargain at $30 for a whole mess of fried seafood: fat, briny little oysters, breaded scallops and shrimp, and a big pile of pleasantly chewy clam strips, in addition to two hefty pieces of batter-fried fish. The chips were thick steak fries and not especially memorable, but that fish? It blew away everything else on the plate, the audible crunch of its beer batter giving way to white flesh that was shockingly juicy and tender. I would have happily eaten a double order of just the fish.

For the more audacious late-night diner, the pub is also known for its variety of spicy and extremely spicy hamburgers — the kind they put your name on a “Wall of Flame” for finishing. (We weren’t in the mood to test our middle-aged digestive tracts quite so late in the evening, but we promised to cover ourselves in glory on some future occasion.)

Truth be told, The Swingin’ Door has more than enough charm to merit a visit even if you don’t plan on eating — and most of the folks in that packed room didn’t order much more than a basket of fries or onion rings with their pints of cold beer. Most of them, it turns out, were serious karaoke practitioners, and by God, they had come to sing.

I’ve noted before how I’ve always been too shy to participate in anything other than private-room karaoke. But I respect a well-run bar-style karaoke night, and The Swingin’ Door’s is one of the best I’ve seen. (Apparently, the renowned cookbook author J. Kenji López-Alt used to be a regular back in the day.) Part of what makes the vibe so appealing is how diverse a crowd it draws. Instead of your prototypical techie Silicon Valley demographic, the regulars who’d come out on this particular Friday night were a surprising mix of swaggy Polynesians, older Latinos, white Boomers in crisp button-down shirts, and sure, a couple of young startup worker types.

We watched a mild-mannered Latina lady hit every soulful note of Duffy’s “Mercy,” and then a bearded bloke built like an offensive lineman blew our mind with the smoothest, silkiest rendition of “Tennessee Whiskey.” (His buddies in the back screaming the whole time, “That’s my boy!!”)

By the time a crowd favorite named Sumo Joe took his turn in the spotlight with his big sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt, and brought the house down with the most high-energy, Polynesian-inflected version of “Achy-Breaky Heart” I’ve ever heard, we were already thinking about who we might bring with us next time — and, after we’d eaten our fill of fish and chips and thrown back some liquid courage, what we might sign up to sing.

The Swingin’ Door is open 11:30 a.m.–2 a.m. daily at 106 E. 25th Ave. in San Mateo. Karaoke goes from 9:30 p.m.–1:30 a.m. Wednesday through Saturday.