After the idea circulated in an Instagram post in late February, the James Beard Award-winning restaurateurs behind Cassava in North Beach have made it official: Yuka Ioroi and Kris Toliao will bring their talents back to the Richmond District, where they run their restaurant a neighborhood lot before moving to North Beach in October 2022. Next month they plan to reopen the doors to the space on Balboa Street that has housed Cassava for the last decade and turn it into a wine bar, simply called Wine Bar by Cassava. “People were used to us being there for ten years,” says Ioroi. “And we love this room.”
Initially, the couple hoped to find partners to operate the wine bar while they focused on keeping their relatively fledgling North Beach location on track. But Ioroi says it hasn’t been easy finding partners who share the couple’s ethos of how to run an equitable restaurant. For example, at Cassava, front- and back-of-house employees split tips equally, and all workers receive full medical benefits and a 401,000 with a 5 percent employer match. “The way we run a business is very different from the way other people do it,” she says. “So we’re just going to open it ourselves until we find a better opportunity.”
It should be a quick transaction. Ioroi says they will be making minimal changes to the space itself, moving some of the furniture that didn’t quite fit the North Beach location. One thing she’s excited to note is that after three years of covering the front of the space’s windows with wood planks, a move first made during the 2020 COVID-related closures, they’ll pull down the covers and let the natural light shine let in. Of course they plan to keep the panels with a colorful mural; You just bring them to the restaurant to decorate the room and add color to it.
Ioroi says she also hopes they’ll be able to keep the restaurant’s parklet in place. They removed the roof before winding up the Balboa room, but now she envisions installing tables with fire pits sunken into them since nothing covers the top.
As for the wine list, Ioroi says fans can expect a similar selection to Cassava. “We’re not natural wine people,” says Ioroi, laughing. “That’s not really my forte per se, so we want to stick with the classic regions and beautiful wines that we have [at Cassava].” That being said, they hope to expand their California wine selection, particularly to bring in more bottles from wineries owned by women and people of color. Ioroi says it’s not always easy to connect with these smaller women- and POC-owned wineries, but she wants the wine bar’s list of native bottles to reflect the condition, as does her — an Asian American — and Tolio know him. “We want to represent the California that we see,” she says. “And we want the wine list to reflect that.”
There will be a small food component in the wine bar, which means smaller plates and appetizers prepared by the Cassava team in North Beach to be reheated and finished in the wine bar. Ioroi says part of the motivation for going ahead with the wine bar on its own was a desire to create more shifts for the North Beach restaurant’s staff. The cavalcade of atmospheric flows and generally inclement weather that has plagued the Bay Area year-round has taken its toll on the restaurant, which is located on Columbus Street in a neighborhood with limited parking but usually high foot traffic.
But it’s also nice to know the neighborhood wants her back, she says. “The neighborhood is so excited about the idea.”
Wine Bar by Cassava (3519 Balboa Street) is expected to open before the end of April 2023.
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