The Rundown Oakland San Francisco
Snail Bar Opens the Doors to Its New Upstairs Cafe and Bar
At long last, the café and hi-fidelity listening lounge from the team behind Snail Bar will open on March 7. Dubbed Upstairs, this new concept is located, you guessed it, upstairs from the critically acclaimed wine bar on Shattuck in Oakland’s Temescal District.
“We’ve been working extremely hard the last nine months on really creating something original—a space that can be a social club, a coffee shop, a hi-fi listening room, and a community gathering space,” says chef-owner Andres Giraldo Florez.
By day, the space acts as a café. By night, depending on the night, expect anything from low-key Latin nights to wine-fueled dance parties and DJs making for the perfect bookend to your Snail Bar reservation. It’s like a house party, and luckily, you’re invited.
Here’s everything else you need to know:
The café takes its coffee program seriously.
In true Snail Bar fashion, Florez is taking the coffee program quite seriously. He’s enlisted the help of Sammy Chang to manage the space and curate the beans. For pourovers, they’re sourcing green beans from Redfox in Berkeley and roasting themselves. “We kinda wanted to have the ultimate control and keep things fun and experimental,” says Florez.
Case in point: They’ll be co-fermenting coffee beans with fruits like apples, blueberries, and peaches to create different batches, accentuating the literal fruity notes of coffee to another level.
For espresso-based drinks like cortados and cappuccinos, Upstairs will feature a rotating roster of roasters from around the world, in addition to a selection of other drinks — like fresh juice and black tea shakers with tiramisu foam.
The café portion will be open from 8am-2pm Fridays-Mondays to start.
What about the food?
The food will run during the café portion of the day and will feature breakfast items to start. A breakfast sandwich contains a perfect French omelette with Spam glazed in a tare, between a soft fluffy pan de mie from Acme, slathered with an ultra-umami “magic” mayonnaise. The addition of cheese—a melty mix of mozzarella, comte, and gruyere—is optional but probably necessary.
Note: A vegetarian version of the sandwich comes sans spam and with the addition of a seasonal market green and a spicy salsa macha.
A yogurt parfait featuring a housemade granola leans more savory than sweet; it’s served with a whipped sheep’s milk yogurt, cut with creme fraiche and seasonal fruit. (Stone fruit season can’t come soon enough.)
And then there’s the “World Famous Cookie” by Natalie Avitia of the roving pop-up Petit Percebes; she did pastry in the past at Pasjoli in Los Angeles. The cookie is brown butter and buckwheat-based, both of which lend a naturally nutty flavor, and is filled with two types of chocolate from Valrhona—a caramelized white chocolate and chunks of dark chocolate. It’s topped with Mexican sea salt for that nice contrast.
The Perfect Order at Oakland’s Snail Bar (Drink Pairings Included)
As soon as chef-owner Andres Giraldo Florez opened doors in the summer of ‘21 to Snail Bar, his natural wine…
What about the wine?
Given Upstairs is literally upstairs from one of the best bars in the country (according to some magazine), expect the wine program to follow suit with offerings leaning low-intervention and natural. But whereas downstairs there’s a large focus on French wines, the upstairs will highlight more California producers.
“Right now it’s an important time to bring the light back on California and let people realize natural wine has been around for decades—it’s not just hype, it’s not just a trend. It’s a way of life and part of the culture.” says Florez.
The by-the-glass selection will be $10-$12/glass and feature NorCal winemakers like Stagiare in Point Reyes, Florez Wines from Santa Cruz, and Purity Wine out in Richmond.
But if you feel like going global, don’t worry, there’s also a reserve wine list where you can drink all the Burgundy by the bottle from Snail Bar below.
Beverage Director Alejandro Camacho is helping make wine-based low-ABV cocktails with N/A options as well. They’re quaffable takes on classic cocktails like a vermut carajillo, a soju gin and tonic, and a non-alcoholic Jamaica Collins.
Pro tip: Wine service starts at 11 a.m. during café hours if you feel like doing a little day-drinking.
Let’s talk about music.
There will be a big emphasis on music at Upstairs, which will feature a rotating cast of curators and vinyl selectors by day and DJs by night, which starts at 7 p.m. and goes until 2 a.m.
Upstairs’ GM Patrick Lotilla will be doing the bookings—he’s been DJ’ing for over 20 years in the Bay and is a resident DJ at Bar Part Time over in San Francisco. The program will be led by local DJs, with programming released at the beginning of each month.
“Each night will have a theme and an energy, and that will be apparent on Instagram,” says Flores.” We’ll do a flyer and a clip of type of music so you can tell what type of vibe you’re getting into before you come.”
Some nights could be Latin night, while other nights will be jazz night. Mondays will have more of a Japanese listening lounge vibe, while you can expect to turn up Friday and Saturday nights with DJs spinning high energy stuff through McIntosh speakers (if you don’t speak audiophile, know it’s that it will sound good). “It’s true high fidelity,” says Florez.
And lastly, the space itself.
If it feels like you’re in someone’s very well-designed house, that’s because you are—Florez converted an old apartment into the café and lounge space that is Upstairs. And to help furnish the place, he’s collaborated with some of the Bay’s best.
To start, he worked with the Eames Institute to help furnish some of the things with original pieces from the 1950s: the chairs in the DJ room, the surfboard coffee table, the iconic Hang-It-All.
The brown leather leather Percival Lafer couch “is like being on a leather hammock,” says Florez. Stainless steel countertops come from Dylan Denicke of Friendly Fabrication, who also helped with Friends & Family. All the art that hangs on the walls (and ceiling) is local, while Florez himself built some of the tables out of stones from the Berkeley and Oakland hills.
There’s also a fun collection of rare books sourced by record and bookshop Eternal Now. It’s a library system—if you want to check out a book, give them your ID, and they’ll let you read while you sip on a pet-nat.
“This is energy the town is needing right now,” says Florez. “We’re aiming to include S.F. and be inclusive as we can with the whole Bay to put something beautiful together.”
Omar Mamoon is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and cookie dough professional. Follow him on Instagram.
