Chuck Berry, Billie Holiday, Marvin Gaye. B.B. King, Tina Turner, James Brown.

It’s Friday night at Club Waziema, and in a dimly lit room where these legends performed at all-night parties a mere half-century ago, a group of 20-something dudes is playing pool to the sounds of Incubus from a jukebox.

Let’s back up.

Waziema is a dive bar with hearty Ethiopian food, well-loved red velvet wallpaper, year-round Christmas lights, homey couches and newspaper-covered end tables. Located behind an unassuming storefront on Divisadero at Hayes, it’s the perfect go-to spot before or after a show at the Independent. And while the neighborhood around it has transformed over the past decade (more on that in a bit), Waziema remains dark, simple, cheap and familiar.

I’ve always liked it, but a couple weeks ago, I fell even more in love with Waziema when I learned about the bar’s history.

From 1959 to 1978, before the infamous “urban renewal” of the Fillmore district displaced a significant portion of the black community, Waziema was Club Morocco, a storied jazz and soul club. It was a bigger club then, with a horseshoe shape and two entrances; it wrapped around the space that’s now Popeye’s Chicken next door.

Then just one of several black-owned businesses in the neighborhood, Club Morocco belonged to a couple called the Robinsons, who decorated it in North African motifs in homage to the time Mr. Robinson spent stationed in Tunisia during World War II. They saw regulars like Herb Caen and Willie Mays, as well as a laundry list of musical superstars and, according to one legend, a stage show that incorporated live cobras.

But now, on a Friday in 2018, surrounded by bros clinking Bud Lights, with the weight of the bar’s history hanging romantically overhead, it was hard not to feel a little petulant, a little short-shifted by history in that way one often does in San Francisco: Everything used to be so cool, is the gist. And I missed it.

Then I started talking to Nebiat.

If you’ve been to Waziema, you’ve seen her. The watering hole’s co-owner and matriarch, Nebiat Tesfazgi is a petite and impeccably made-up woman in her 50s, usually found behind the bar. She pours beers with a smile, greets regulars with hugs and makes food recommendations to couples on dates, all with the ease of, well, a lady who’s run a bar for two decades.

Born in Adwa, a town in northern Ethiopia, Tesfazgi fled home at age 20, during the region’s civil war. Leaving everything behind, she joined a group of other young adults that included her now-husband, Giday Beshue. They’d known each other since kindergarten; Beshue was the best friend of Tesfazgi’s older brother. The group followed a guide who led them, on foot, to the coastal country of Djibouti.. Tesfazgi lived there until getting sponsored by a family in Peoria, Ill. A year later, she moved to San Francisco, where she had cousins. Beshue, meanwhile, immigrated to Canada after receiving a university scholarship.

How the couple reconnected, says Tesfazgi with a smile, is “a long story.” But by the time they got married at San Francisco City Hall in June 1989, both were also registered nurses. Tesfazgi, who received a degree from San Francisco State, worked in the psych ward at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, and Beshue worked at San Francisco General. The young couple rented an apartment near Alamo Square.

“The neighborhood was very different from what you see now,” Tesfazgi says on a recent Tuesday, as she pours me a Lagunitas IPA. “And there were no bars on Divisadero — this whole stretch, there were none.” Her husband decided that should change, she says, and began spending Sundays walking up and down the street, looking for an eligible spot.

This was the early ’90s, and the legendary Club Morocco had been boarded up since 1979. After learning the Robinsons still owned the building and lived in the neighborhood, the younger couple paid them a visit. Beshue “made me go first to knock on the door,” recalls Tesfazgi with a laugh. “He said, ‘A woman stranger is better than a man stranger.’”

The Robinsons welcomed them in to chat but were firm in not selling the bar. They owned other real estate and had been using that space for storage and private social functions. If they had been looking to make money off the place, they explained, they would have sold it a long time ago.

The younger couple thanked the Robinsons for their time and left. But Beshue proceeded to call once a week for more than two years — just to see if they’d changed their minds.

Then Mr. Robinson died. Tesfazgi told her persistent husband to leave poor Mrs. Robinson alone. But a month later, Mrs. Robinson called them. She told the couple to meet her at Popeye’s. And there, over chicken, the widow told them that before he died, her husband had said, “If you’re going to sell the bar, sell it to them.”

Mrs. Robinson became a mother figure after that, helping the couple sift through relics for months as they prepared to reopen the space. The biggest hurdle: red tape around the liquor license. A city commissioner showed Tesfazgi a map with their whole stretch of Divisadero outlined in yellow, meaning it was a high-risk zone, essentially too crime-ridden to be eligible for new bars.

But by this point Tesfazgi and Beshue were fixtures in the community. They had small children; they knew the neighbors. Those neighbors went to work, collecting more than 700 signatures on a petition to allow the couple to open the bar. It took two hearings to get approval. Their friends all crowded into the legislative chamber at City Hall, including one woman with her 3-month-old infant.

Club Waziema finally opened its doors in December 1999, with conditions: limited hours and a beer-and-wine-only liquor license, a far cry from the anything-goes place it had once been. But the Morocco was not forgotten. Photos of the jazz greats of yesteryear lined the walls.

Twenty years later, the corridor once deemed too dangerous for a bar is the city’s fastest-growing foodie hot spot: tapas, omakase, gluten-free baked goods and pour-over coffee have replaced many of Divisadero’s liquor stores and gas stations — to say nothing of the black-owned boutiques and beauty salons that preceded them. Che Fico, the sleek new Cal-Italian restaurant topping critics’ best-of-the-city lists, sits two blocks (but a world away) from Waziema’s humble interior. On weekends, 20-somethings flock to Emporium, the vast arcade bar that opened across the street last year, while spots like Madrone, Fly Bar and Horsefeather mean a discerning cocktail enthusiast has plenty of options.

More Information To order: Vegetarian combo ($11.50), Ethiopian beers ( $5 ), Nibit honey wine ($6) Where: Club Waziema, 543 Divisadero St., San Francisco. 415-346-6641 When: 6 p.m. to midnight Monday through Wednesday, and until 2 a.m. Thursday through Saturday; closed Sunday.

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Some of those bars’ customers certainly wander over to Waziema for last call on weekends, but there’s also something in the place itself that seems to repel affectation. Anyone in a smart suit should be prepared to blend deftly in with the jeans and T-shirts. Besides, Tesfazgi and her husband aren’t concerned with the competition. The new neighbors have been good for business. Plus, she says, “it’s much safer.”

Perhaps most importantly, there’s not another establishment on Divisadero whose offerings overlap with Waziema’s. No other bar has the wallpaper, the history, the homemade Ethiopian food: the spongy injera made daily, served with spiced lamb or chicken stew, or the all-veggie platters with split lentils and collard greens, ideally paired with traditional Ethiopian honey wine.

Then there are the people. Tesfazgi and Beshue have worked to keep the bar a spot for locals. The San Francisco Tenants Union has hosted housing-rights boot camps there; the North of the Panhandle Neighborhood Association sometimes holds meetings in the back room — on the raised area by the pool table, under the skylight, where Chuck Berry once duck-walked.

As for the bar’s future: Though she’s pushing 60 and still works six days a week, Tesfazgi doesn’t foresee her workload changing anytime soon. For the bar’s first 10 years in business, she worked a daily shift as a nurse, then tended bar in the evenings; with young kids, she got used to sleeping three hours a night. But for the past decade the bar has been her baby, while Beshue continued to work for the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Their three adult children, all in computer science or software engineering, have careers and ambitions of their own. They help out on occasion but have no desire to take over a bar.

Then again, Tesfazgi sees no reason why anyone else should need to. Mrs. Robinson — who passed away last year, leaving the building to her son — gave the couple a “very reasonable price” on their initial lease, which doesn’t expire until 2028. When people ask Tesfazgi if she’d ever sell, she thinks about a few things: her customers, whom she considers family, and her friends all packed into the city hearing that day 20 years ago for support.

And then she thinks of the bar’s former matriarch, Mrs. Robinson, and the spirit in which she passed the bar to them in the first place.

It would take a lot of money, says Tesfazgi with a laugh. But mostly, one gets the feeling, it would have to be the right people. And they might have to ask every week for years.

Emma Silvers is a San Francisco freelance writer. Twitter: @emmaruthlessEmail: food@sfchronicle.com