San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A different sort of rum bar
With Obispo, Thad Vogler embraces the spirit’s history
Electric drills buzz, and the aroma of freshly released sawdust wafts through the air. Thad Vogler is sitting at a table near the entrance of Obispo, his rum bar that finally opened three years after he purchased its $250,000 liquor license and five years after he first signed the lease.
“There’s no way this can’t be anticlimactic,” says Vogler. That was months ago. While Obispo became San Francisco’s longest delayed cocktail bar, it also became the city’s most hotly anticipated. For more than a year, drinks writers around the country have been writing about Obispo as if its opening were imminent, praising its novel approach to spirits selections and rum cocktails before Vogler, who also owns the bars Trou Normand and Bar Agricole, ever served a single drink. No pressure.
The greatest pressure Vogler faces, though, is from himself. If we’ve been waiting for Obispo for five years, Vogler, 49, has been waiting for it his entire career. This bar is the bar he wanted to open all along. Austere, unadorned and with a very sparsely stocked backbar, Obispo feels spartan compared with Bar Agricole’s award-winning industrial design or Trou Normand’s elegant white marble. It is his most personal bar, the establishment that gets closest to articulating his philosophy about spirits and bars and drinking — a philosophy sometimes referred to as “regionalism,” expressed at length in his 2017 book “By the Smoke and the Smell.”
His philosophy: We should be drinking and championing spirits that taste like the places they come from, that are made honestly — not jacked up with additives like caramel, for example — and that resist homogeneity. Vogler puts it another way: “Making drinks should be like making salads.” He’s believed this for a long time, but has grown increasingly vocal over the years, and sees both Trou Normand and Bar Agricole as only partial executions of it.
But with Obispo, Vogler feels like he might actually get it right. By serving only a small selection of spirits, all of which carry his rigorous stamp of approval. By offering affordable mixed drinks, some under $10. By partnering with the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) and the Calle 24 Community Council, organizations that represent populations with roots in rumproducing cultures. By serving those cultures’ foods — jerk chicken ($18), oxtail curry ($15), macaroni salad ($7). By featuring, instead of human-size ferns or erupting volcanoes, the stark folk-art paintings of Bill Traylor, an Alabama artist born into slavery, reproduced with help from MoAD.
In other words, Obispo asks patrons to engage in the history of rum — a history marked by colonialism, slavery and poverty.
That said, Vogler also just wants to make a good drink. “One of our main goals is to bring back the mojito,” he says cheerfully. In the interest of historical verisimilitude, though, his mojito harks to a 1934 recipe from the Havana bar El Floridita, with bitters, lightly stirred (not muddled) mint and a small amount of raw (not refined) sugar ($9). Vogler is also serving Floridita’s more obscure variations: Mojito Criollo No. 2 (with gin instead of rum; $11) and Mojito Criollo No. 3 (with brandy; $12).
Cocktails may draw the Mission District masses to Obispo, but those interested in sipping rum neat will be rewarded. The real jewel here is that tight, concise liquor selection. Vogler hopes you’ll swoon over Neisson and La Favorite’s delicate, vibrant renditions of rhum agricole — rum distilled from fresh cane sugar, rather than a sugar byproduct like molasses — from the French island of Martinique. So much does he love rhum agricole, which “tastes like a living plant,” that he named his first bar after it.
Vogler wishes he could serve the light, dry rums of Cuba here, but they still aren’t legal to import. (Obispo is the name of a street in Havana where Vogler once lived.) As an approximation, Vogler will carry Cuban-style rum from the Guyana producer El Dorado.
He wants to open your mind to the earthy, wild Jamaican rums from Hampden Estate and Worthy Park. These Jamaican spirits may be distilled from molasses (not a living plant), but they compensate with ample funk from their indigenous, open-vat fermentations. During those fermentations, Vogler says the smell at the Hampden Estate distillery is “mephitic” and “unbearable.” He likens the experience to “entering the bathroom after someone and just being like: What? How?”
This is intended as a compliment.
All this makes Obispo the adversary of pretty much every other rum bar in the Bay Area, which are generally the sort to feature thatch-roof huts and leviathan totems. When Vogler first conceived of Obispo, he wasn’t imagining his rum bar as an anti-tiki statement. “And then 400 tiki bars opened in the last three years,” he says, with only slight hyperbole.
“Now it becomes sort of an opposition,” he says. That’s fine by him. “I’ve come to kind of hate tiki.”
Part of Vogler’s beef with tiki is the same beef he has with just about every other bar, most of which are serving, in his words, “factory-made garbage.” Vogler finds this reliance on industrial spirits especially hard to comprehend at places here that pride themselves on farm-fresh produce and terroir-driven wine lists. “You’re taking the trouble of going to the farmer’s market, but then behind the bar you’re stocking McDonald’s.”
But tiki bars commit a secondary offense on top of that, in Vogler’s view — and it has to do with history. He hates how “apocryphal” tiki is, an irresponsible amalgamation of various island cultures with little regard for historical truth. Tiki “is just this weird white middle-aged fantasy,” Vogler says.
Meanwhile, he believes that fantasy isn’t nearly as compelling as the actual, true story of rum. “Rum is analog to the most brutal and fascinating chapter of human history in this part of the world, from New Orleans to Argentina,” says Vogler. Rum is “diasporic,” he believes, born from the collision of colonizing forces with enslaved populations and the native plant materials that surround them — sugarcane.
He knows that for a white man to open a bar centered on a “diasporic” spirit on 24th Street, in the heart of the fastchanging Mission, might attract some criticism. That’s part of why Calle 24 and MoAD are partners in the bar and will receive some of the proceeds. It’s also why the Obispo menu will be in Spanish, and all of the staff will speak Spanish, and prices will be affordable — to help make Obispo feel welcoming to its neighbors. But Vogler admits he is still grappling with the larger question.
“All I’ve hoped for is to engage in selling booze the way people sell wine,” he says. Vogler admires the way the wine world has established parameters to ask the right questions: Who made this? How was it made? Does it have a sense of place?
As Vogler speaks, a persistent drip can be heard from a supply closet. The drills continue to buzz in the background. Now, five years after the Obispo journey began, Vogler can see the finish line at last. As much as he comes across as a man galvanized by conviction, he also seems tired. Who wouldn’t be, after waiting this long for a contractor to finish building your bar? He’s tired of all his travel, which is constant, as anyone who’s read “By the Smoke and the Smell” knows well; he insists on visiting the producers whose spirits he stocks. Vogler has crammed in three more trips to faraway rum distilleries in the fall, before he and his wife welcome their first baby in January. These days, he hardly drinks.
Obispo is one bar. Another regionalist bar he helped create, Camino, just closed. Did Vogler think that his ideas — regionalism, terroir-driven spirits, drinks-as-salads — would have caught on with more Bay Area bars by now? He sighs. “I thought it would.”
He’s not particularly hopeful. “There is an inexorable end to a certain type of spirit production,” Vogler says. The dominance of larger liquor conglomerates in rum-producing countries — many of them impoverished countries — means that the small-scale, idiosyncratic rums that form the foundation of Obispo may not be around forever.
Are these questions too big for one little bar in the Mission? Maybe. “I cannot pretend to have the answer,” Vogler says, “but the conversation is very interesting.”
In the meantime, as of last Friday, he will be happy to make you a mojito.