South Park + Cold Bar: Now Open for Business
Our newest cafe in South Park debuts our first-ever Cold Bar, serving zero-proof, cocktail-inspired coffees, shaken or stirred.
Our newest San Francisco cafe is an irresistible collage of past, present, and future. Author Jack London was born around the corner, and the tiny, circa-1855 green space, South Park, is just outside our door. Inside our cafe, music plays on vintage speakers as we offer comforting pour-over coffees and unveil coffee innovations.
Cold Bar—our first-ever (zero-proof) bar—offers mixed, iced, poured, shaken, or stirred concoctions using our single-origin coffee, Oji, and cold-brewed coffees. Cold Bar’s original recipes were developed by our in-house training and quality control experts, as well as crowdsourced from Blue Bottle staff from every corner of the company.
The result of this collaboration is a cocktail menu both intimate and grandiose, offering delightful new ways to experience our coffees and learn about the range of flavors inherent in each single origin.
For the design of this cafe, we worked with the firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson(BCJ) to transform a former ground-floor retail shop (Jeremy’s) into a luminous open space. BCJ’s design reveals the site’s inherent beauty by stripping away the frivolous and unnecessary, and elevating only the most essential attributes of the architecture.
Every aspect of the site, from the custom millwork to the lighting fixtures, is designed to inspire lingering coffee breaks and prolonged meals. In the afternoon, the sun comes through the interior wooden lattice that frames the entryway, creating a kaleidoscope of shadows.
We hope that you will visit us at South Park soon to experience it firsthand, but in case you can’t, here’s a cocktail recipe from Cold Bar to try at home.
Oji Old Fashioned
100 grams ice
20 grams Oji coffee*
15 grams jasmine simple syrup
Twist of orange peel
Place the ice in a mixing glass and add the Oji coffee and jasmine simple syrup. Stir for 15 seconds. Garnish with a twist of orange peel, and strain into an Old Fashioned glass (or any vessel your grandfather might have liked) over one cube of ice.
To make the simple syrup:
Steep 5 grams of jasmine tea with 100 grams of boiling water in a pitcher or carafe for 3 minutes. Strain and add 25 grams of organic cane sugar. Let sit until dissolved. Allow to cool to room temperature before using in the Oji Old Fashioned.
South Park is open every day from 7am—7 pm, and is located at 2 South Park, San Francisco, CA 94107.
*Oji is available at select Blue Bottle cafes.