Vox Media

Dianne de Guzman is a deputy editor at Eater SF writing about Bay Area restaurant and bar trends, upcoming openings, and pop-ups.

The North Beach space at 1371 Grant Avenue has been a neighborhood watering hole for over 100 years. Now the latest stewards for the corner bar throw open the doors on Friday, June 21, as April Jean. Led by industry vets and Bay Area locals Nate Valentine, Jamal Blake-Wiliams, and Joe Poz, April Jean reimagines the space as an approachable and affordable neighborhood bar. “This specific location is a very historical, long-standing location from a bar perspective,” Valentine says. “We wanted to bring something different than a lot of what’s in North Beach on the bar side.”

The trio scouted a bar space for two years until they found the owner of Grant & Green Saloon was looking to sell after 17 years at that corner. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime location,” Blake-Williams says. The bar is named after Blake-Williams and Poz’s mothers April and Jean, respectively, and the cocktail menu is themed around their childhoods, specifically snacks and meals their mothers would prepare. To be clear, there won’t be any actual food at April Jean, but the drinks will certainly fill in the nostalgia factor under Poz, who’s leading the cocktail program.

Pat’s Choice, for instance, is a play on key lime pie, starring agricole rum, plus falernum, sour lime, condensed milk, and “mom’s pie crust” — a small cookie on the side. The April Jean combines vodka with spiced citrus oil, amaro, lemon, and fizzy water, while Watermelon Mam! pairs tequila with blanc vermouth, lime, watermelon, and ginger. “He’s going back in the history of his life,” Valentine says of Poz. “He pulled these moments from both his grandparents and his mother, and their times in the kitchen — that’s where a lot of this comes from.” Along with the cocktail list, local beers will be on draft along with a curated wine list with two to three selections each of white, red, and sparkling. There are also three nonalcoholic options, including a house drink using seasonal ingredients. “It is a nicer cocktail bar for the area,” Blake-Williams says, “but we want it to be approachable to every single person who visits with drinks that are affordable and fair, and wines that are incredibly hard to find but are still priced reasonably.”

The interior of April Jean, a bar in San Francisco’s North Beach. — April Jean will soon start vinyl nights at the bar a few nights a week.

Valentine and Blake-Williams previously worked together at San Francisco’s Harper & Rye, Tipsy Pig, Lost Resort, and Peacekeeper, as first reported by Tablehopper. Poz, meanwhile, previously worked at August Hall. Beyond lending the bar its name, it’s a family effort in other ways. Valentine’s cousin helped with branding. Blake-Williams’s partner Brittany Busacca worked on the bar design with architect Nick Polansky and designer Julian Snellgrove, who brought in old-growth redwood for warm wood elements in the bar that complement the bar’s midcentury modern leanings. The team wanted to create a new space “without sticking out” too much from the neighborhood, Blake-Williams says, but “still paying tribute to North Beach and making it feel comfortable with our own flavor and our own touches.”

Valentine and Blake-Williams also say April Jean is a way for them to champion the city at large in the way they know how — through creating places where people can feel comfortable and have a great time, while they help build the next chapter of North Beach. “It’s really about doing something special for San Francisco,” Valentine says. “San Francisco is getting a little bit of a bad name out there in the world but that’s not how we feel about our city. We’re tripling down on San Francisco, we want to do more — we love this city.”