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The Restaurant Worth Crossing the Bay For: Bar Skula

One SF/Bay Area opening a day, chosen and checked. Today: the couple behind Oakland's late, beloved Luka's Taproom reopens across from Lake Merritt, ceviche where the burger used to be.

For fifteen years, Maria Alderete and Rick Mitchell ran Luka's Taproom and Lounge at Broadway and West Grand, the nightlife complex that food writer John Birdsall credited with helping define Uptown Oakland as a place where "serious" cooking and a dance floor could share a room. A 2022 rent hike, arriving on the tail of a pandemic sales hit, closed it for good. This week the couple reopened a few blocks over, and the reunion has been six years and one lease negotiation in the making.

Bar Skula opened July 1 at 542 Grand Ave., in the space that housed Sidebar until it closed in early 2024, directly across from the Lake Merritt pergola. Mitchell had wanted this specific storefront since before Luka's existed, and eventually talked Sidebar's owners into handing it over. He calls the result a "remix," not a resurrection: about a third of the menu is Luka's and Sidebar classics (the burger, the fries, mussels), the rest is a raw bar and ceviche program Mitchell has been planning since a decade of trips through Sinaloa, Baja, and Peru's cevicherias. The kitchen is run by longtime collaborator Wilson Mendez, with founding Luka's chef Jacob Alioto also back in the fold.

The dishes worth the drive: a ceviche Tapatio of raw rockfish in chili-cumin leche de tigre with cabbage, avocado, and pickled onion; a Nayarit ceviche of albacore in coconut milk with mango and chili de arbol oil; and a vegan version built from corona beans in aguachile verde, which Alderete named as her favorite on the menu. The classic Luka's fries return with a choice of lemon-garlic, aji verde, or chipotle aioli. Bar consultant Jared Hirsch, previously Sidebar's bar manager, built a cocktail list around what he calls an "Iberian diaspora" thread, from Spain and Portugal through Latin America to California; the Reckless on Paper pairs Spanish gin Nordes with coffee liqueur and manzanilla sherry, and the Caged Heat, a Sidebar holdover, gets remixed here with tequila and mezcal in place of bourbon.

Why this over everything else opening in the Bay this week: nowhere else has a chef-owner team reopening a shuttered neighborhood landmark with the same crew, the same regulars' favorite fries, and a genuinely new kitchen direction, all six days before this newsletter went out. That is a harder trick than a new build.

The room seats around the old Sidebar footprint with fresh decor, including a papier-mache sea creature Alderete hung by the kitchen herself. Bar Skula is soft-opening Thursday through Monday, 5 to 11 p.m., walk-in for now; no reservation platform has surfaced yet, so arrive early on weekends.

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