Bar Skula

Restaurant reboots from a beloved former team can go one of two ways: a nostalgia act trading on an old name, or a genuine second draft from people who already know what worked the first time. Bar Skula reads like the second kind. It's the new project from Maria Alderete and Rick Mitchell, the couple who built Luka's Taproom & Lounge into one of Oakland's longest-running dining-and-drinking rooms, and enough of the original team followed them over — including Jacob Alioto, Luka's founding chef — that regulars are meant to recognize faces, not just a concept.

The space itself has history worth knowing. Bar Skula took over 542 Grand Avenue, directly across from Lake Merritt, in what used to be Sidebar. That matters for the cocktail program specifically: bar consultant Jared Hirsch, who designed Skula's drink list, was previously the bar manager at Sidebar in this exact room, which means the person building the new list already knew the space's rhythm before a single new drink went on the menu. Hirsch's program leans into Iberian diaspora flavors, anchored by three distinct gin tonics as the backbone of the list, alongside named cocktails like the Pio Pico and the Reckless on Paper — specific enough that this reads like a considered list, not a generic "craft cocktails" menu filled in after the fact.

The kitchen side draws on Alderete and Mitchell's own travels through Mexico, Central America, and South America, built around a seafood-forward menu — oysters and ceviche get called out specifically in early coverage — while keeping a small set of vintage Luka's dishes on the menu, the burger and fries among them. That's a deliberate bridge for longtime Luka's regulars: enough of the old menu survives that the reboot doesn't read as a clean break, while the new seafood direction is clearly where the kitchen's actual ambition sits now.

One detail worth calling out on its own: every check carries a 1% surcharge that goes to Community Kitchen. Plenty of restaurants attach vague "giving back" language to a receipt line; naming the actual recipient is a smaller thing than it sounds like, and it's the kind of specific, checkable commitment worth taking at face value rather than treating as marketing copy.

It's worth knowing why this particular team reopening somewhere new is a bigger deal in Oakland than a standard chef-does-a-new-thing story. Alderete and Mitchell didn't leave Luka's Taproom & Lounge by choice. They opened it in 2004 in a then-quiet stretch of Uptown Oakland, in a building that had cycled through a cigar shop and decades as the Hofbrau restaurant before that, and over 18 years it became one of the restaurants most widely credited with turning Uptown into an actual dining-and-nightlife destination rather than a gap between downtown and the neighborhoods further north. As The Oaklandside laid out, Luka's closed in 2022 after a new landlord doubled the rent — a plain, unglamorous small-business story, not a choice to move on. Bar Skula is the same team's next chapter, four years later and a couple of miles south, and that context is part of why regulars are showing up expecting to recognize faces rather than treating this as an unrelated new opening.

Across the bay, Stray Dog opened the same summer on a similar bet — a room meant to work as a café and a cocktail bar without either half feeling like an afterthought. Practically, Grand Avenue across from Lake Merritt is an easy add to an existing lake-loop plan — walk or run the 3.4-mile path around Lake Merritt and land here for a seafood dinner and a gin tonic rather than treating it as a separate errand. As with any restaurant that opened mid-2026, treat the specific dish and cocktail names here as a snapshot of the opening lineup — menus at a place this new tend to move before they settle.