Helmed by a strong team, Salsipuedes channels Baja six blocks from MacArthur BART
Imagine never having heard a saxophone—then, suddenly, you hear one playing wild swoopy bass-driven music of a kind you’d also never heard before. Aghast, you’d holler, “What the hell?” or maybe even scream.
But then, if someone told you, “A genre exists called jazz, and this is it,” those sounds would suddenly have context, and you’d shiver with relief.
In that same vein, imagine confronting thick pink slabs of beef tongue served up in one dish with cactus, seaweed, green salsa, leafy greens, and uni, aka sushi-style sea urchin.
But then, if someone told you, “A cuisine exists in Ensenada: a wine-country-meets-the-beach, Pacific-Rimmy parade of confrontational fusions just like this,” you might then relaxedly tuck into this now-contextified tongue.
This scenario might unfold for real at Salsipuedes, self-described Baja-style “seaside barbecue” spiked with a bit of the ol’ tapas-bar and izakaya. It was opened in August along a residential stretch of North Oakland’s Market Street by a power-broker partnership after a creative crowd-funding campaign.
These partners include married pair Jay Porter and Katie Mayfield, who before opening Salsipuedes, opened another Oakland restaurant, Fruitvale’s popular sausage/burger/beer bar the Half Orange, which they opened in 2013. The two had left San Diego, their home turf, behind; they owned two now-closed restaurants, The Linkery and El Take It Easy, there. Another Salsipuedes partner is artisanal ice-creamer Luis Abundis, owner of the also-popular Nieves Cinco de Mayo in Oakland and San Francisco. Yet another is San Diego Culinary Institute-trained executive chef Marcus Krauss. He departed a plum post at St. Helena’s triple-Michelin-starred Restaurant at Meadowood to join this team, whose gradual buildup and summertime soft opening set the gustatory grapevine abuzz.
From such a culinarily credentialed group, you’d expect confidently cutting-edge creativity—and that, in this 25-seat, big-windowed corner space formerly occupied by a nail salon, is what you get, from the sashimi-esque, yuzu-ponzu-sauced, serrano-chili-dressed raw-black-cod tiradito on down.
It’s a compact menu of about a dozen dishes, including starters, mains, sides, and dessert. But each dish is almost the equivalent of several-dishes-in-one: a bold but almost calculatedly divisive study in contrasts that will excite some and flat-out scare others. Behold, for instance, the “octopus melt bao”—chewy amethyst sous-vide octo-chunks, plump Oregon shrimp, melted Mozzarella, “sea beans” (the increasingly trendy seashore succulent also known as pickleweed and glasswort), sweetish salsa, and snowflaky poufs of air-light, crunchy-fluffy chicharrones stuffed into fluffy folded-over rounds of Chinese-style steamed-bun dough. Soothing, seductive, and five different kinds of soft, it virtually reinvents (or even obviates) the sandwich—if you eat it with an open mind. For dessert, aromatic rose-petal ice cream is festooned with sweet-sour pickled strawberries then doused with shiso-leaf tea, which is messy and makes it melt, and, if you’re the type who takes ice cream slowly and seriously, might make you embarrassingly mad.
According to its owners, Salsipuedes doesn’t serve Mexican food. Rather, it’s food resembling that served in a certain town in . . . Mexico.
“What we serve here is obviously very influenced by what’s happening in Ensenada,” Porter explains. “Right now, the best chefs are there, and so are some of the best ingredients—the best shellfish, the best seafood. Baja has great wine and great olive oil.
“And the culinary scene there is getting more and more global. Top chefs from Copenhagen, Brazil, San Sebastián, and Japan are there, all of them cooking together, using all those fantastic ingredients. That scene inspires what Marcus is doing here.
“A restaurant that looked like this and offered this menu would be very familiar and normal in Ensenada,” Porter adds, gesturing toward a small but busy open kitchen, observed intently by barstool-perched diners and drinkers, overhung by strands of dried persimmons the color of a surfside sunset.
Seizing that sea-salty, surprise-spangled Baja ball and running six blocks from MacArthur BART with it, Krauss plates stir-fried shishito peppers—those tender, smoky, slightly sweet izakaya icons—with juicy grilled peak-season peaches and jelly-like dollops of Japanese-style salted plum. Sumptuous roasted corn and crumbly cheese frame a shimmering, borderline-sweet scoop of nixtamal nieves—basically, hominy ice cream—crowned with salsa, seagrass and . . . hmm, what? Sunny tussocks of trout roe. What could be more obvious?
Into his heirloom Rancho Gordo-bean cioppino go clams (naturally) and seaweed (contextually). Sourced from the Philo-based Mendocino Sea Vegetable
Company, seaweed also flecks the corn nuts, which comprise an aptly crunchy, surfy-turfy, comfort-food counterpoint to an avant-garde array of drinks.
These include vermouths, ciders, heavenly Heidrun radish-blossom-honey sparkling mead, local and Mexican beers (rightfully popular here is authentically fruity Cherry Kush gruit from Jingletown’s Ale Industries) and wine: Managed by Bradford Taylor, who owns Grand Avenue’s Ordinaire Wine, the list includes such red/white/pink/sparkling eclectica as Domaine du Possible Le Fruit du Hasard from France, Louis-Antoine Luyt Pipeña from Chile, Quinta das Bageiras Colheita Branco from Portugal, and Bengoetxe Getariako Txakolina from Spain. Non-alcoholic options include East Bay-brewed House kombucha and housemade agua fresca del día; try the vivid, intense hibiscus-blossom.
Hi-neighbor geniality, bouncy music, white-tiled and turquoise-painted walls, a gleaming wood-paneled bar, and white-metal barstools beckon, battening Salsipuedes’ status as a bar: Granted, not the type of bar that might have embodied bygone days here in the Longfellow District, which after the 1876 establishment of the Sacred Heart Parish became Oakland’s Little Italy, but a bar that suits the current state of gentrification in what may or may not become Oakland’s Next Temescal.
With most of its floorspace occupied by a single communal table, Salsipuedes was designed to become a neighborhood hangout, the sort into which those who can afford it could slouch halfway home from BART for a post-work pick-me-up: a Cervecería Agua Mala Pilsner, say, or the Tuesdays-only Burger & Fries special, which is neither burger nor fries but rather a katsu-drizzled, golden-battered, wakame-kimchi-seasoned, white-bunned, “drowned” fried-chicken torta with a glass of draft beer and a serving of sea beans, tastily tempura-fried in rice-bran oil.
And in that neighborhood hangout, a spoonful of sourgrass chimichurri and a sip of Mexican Coke might make you expect to see, through those big windows, gleaming golden sands and a silky south-of-the-border sky. But you won’t. You’ll see the F bus hulking past. Salud! This is an Ensenada only of the mouth and mind.
Salsipuedes
4201 Market St., Oakland
510-350-7489
www.Salsipuedes.us
Open Tuesday-Saturday 5:30-9:30pm
Entrées: $14-$21
Beer and Wine
Accepts Credit Cards
