Bars We Love: Sobre Mesa

Editor’s note: On August 22nd, 2021 Sobre Mesa will play host to a James Beard Foundation fundraiser, Taste America: San Francisco Bay Area. Tickets are $300 per pair and are still available.

1618 Franklin St., Oakland CA

It took Nelson German years to get his dream bar, Sobre Mesa, going in Oakland – and just over a week for COVID to shut it down. “I couldn't walk away,” the soft-spoken chef says. “We'd worked too hard, invested too much.”

Background

Walking away is not, in any case, German's style – instead he's always marched, one step at a time, towards what he wants. A Dominican-American New Yorker from Washington Heights, he went to the New York Art Institute's well-regarded cooking school and then landed jobs at Manhattan restaurants like the Gramercy Park Hotel and Joseph's. Though he was finding his way in New York's competitive scene moving up from line cook to executive chef-level positions, he let his wife, May, convince him to go West, moving to her hometown Oakland, and, in 2014, he opened his own restaurant there, the funky, fast-casual fish place alaMar.

“I hadn't intended to start a bar, but we lost our bartender [at alaMar], and I came out of the kitchen for a bit. It was fun being up there – and there was lots to learn about cocktails. I didn't know much about them.”

He did research trips to Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the Dominican Republic. “I wanted the drinks and flavors of the Caribbean, Latin America, West Africa,” he says. As he travelled, he refined further his ideas of what he wanted – and didn't want: “I wanted a bar that was tropical, but not tiki … something that spoke from the point of view of people from those places. I had in mind something sexy and classy. I didn't think Oakland needed another great dive bar.”

The bar's name, Sobre Mesa – Spanish for “over the table” is a term for the Latin-American tradition of lingering after the meal. “Your belly's full, you're relaxed and happy.” To enable these sorts of get-togethers, he put a couple of bigger, reservation-needed tables at the back – and one area can be curtained off, and served by a private bartender, from a stocked bar cart.

Developing the Cocktail List

Since many of the drinks would feature rum, he worked with Berkeley's Mosswood Spirits, to create a house blend combining rums from Florida, Puerto Rico, Louisiana, Barbados and Trinidad. He and his team then crafted a short list of signature cocktails and figured out their own takes on classic drinks. Then he developed the dishes to go with them. “Because I started it, people thought it was going to be a restaurant. But it's not. The drinks came first.”

All these pieces fell into place for the bar's March, 2020 opening, which had a sharp-dressed crowd of pro basketball players, fellow chefs and local politicians, circulating as the Oakland-based, Brazilian-music combo Namorados Da Lua played. The place looked lush, with big tropical plants (in pots and depicted in the wallpaper), bold colors contrasting with a long black bar, over it all a dangling moon lamp.“It went so well,” German says, “And, of course, nine days after that ... the world shut down.”

Setback and Surprises

As the mandatory closure extended from weeks to months to over a year, German secured what government bridge financing he could, offered cocktails to take out and, when they were permitted, built patios. “The street outside Sobre Mesa is a total wind tunnel, so we had to improvise some wind-blocks.” He also appeared on the long-running televised cooking competition, Top Chef, a season filmed in Portland. On the show, he injured his knee running through an Oregon orchard in search of fruit to use in a dish. “I'm a New Yorker – this outdoor thing?” On a more positive note, he says, “One thing that happened was the producers of In the Heights, [the new film based on the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical], saw me competing on the show, this Dominican guy from the Heights, and asked if we could host a launch event.”

When German got back to Oakland, the bar did so and reopened when authorities lifted the lockdown in mid-June. “Like everyone in this industry, we had to scramble this year, but somehow we made it through. All the stuff we put in place a year ago, the décor, the menus, the music, it's been waiting, ready to go.”

The Drinks

Rum Program

Staffing the bar is rum expert Sadé Stamps, who has to hand rums from all over. “Rum doesn't get as much respect as it deserves,” she says. “And also, the story of the African diaspora it's in these drinks made from distilled sugar cane.” A highlight: The clairin rums from Haiti, including one called Saint Benevolence. “Terroir is as important to rum as to any other drink,” she says.

Mai Tai

Stamps makes a mean Mai Tai, a version of the drink invented in the Oakland Trader Vic's in 1944 – and she recently taught a class at the bar in mixing them. The Sobre Mesa version combines a mix of agricole and Jamaican rums, dry curaçao, lime and a house-made coconut-almond orgeat.

Sobre Mesa

The bar's signature cocktail, the Sobre Mesa, is a version of the traditional Dominican drink, the mamajuana, a mix of rum, wine and honey, accented with spices and bark from the anamú tree. “The mamajuana,” Stamps says, “It's used for everything, a cure-all, an aphrodisiac.” Theirs is accented with grapefruit, and comes by the glass or the pitcher.

Lake Breeze

This is an update of that fruity 1980s party drink, the Sea Breeze, rebranded to reflect the bar's proximity to Lake Merritt. It adds hibiscus and mezcal to the vodka, cranberry and lime that anchored the original.

Classics, Reinterpreted

During the long preparation for opening the bar, German and a team of tasters worked up their own versions of classic cocktails. The Sobre Mesa Paloma has passionfruit in it; its Manhattan subs in a South African spirit, quinquina, for the vermouth that traditionally joins the rye in this drink; its Old Fashioned uses a sweet potato liqueur along with the usual whisky and orange essence.

The Food

“The food we do is not traditional bar snacks,” German says. “Only one of our menu items is fried.” The empanadas are Dominican style – “my mother used to make them for special occasions ” – but they're stuffed with steak suya, a steak flavored with a West African spice mix. The roasted stuffed plantain is a dish he prepared on Top Chef, a vegetarian version of a traditional Dominican dish that layers ragu and sausage and relishes on top of plantain. (He uses impossible meat and soy chorizo here.) The seafood restaurateur's short tapas menu also features some good fish options, a Caribbean version of Lobster Thermidor and a tuna crudo.

Bars, CocktailsAlec ScottAugust 18, 2021cocktail bars, travelComment