You wouldn’t know it from entering the Inner Sunset location of Fiorella, the hit San Francisco Italian restaurant, but there’s a stylish, 14-seat cocktail bar hidden on its roof serving Lambrusco slushies and pasta as a bar snack.
Opening Wednesday, May 18, Bar Nonnina, is meant to evoke “your grandma’s elevated dining room,” said Boris Nemchenok, who owns San Francisco’s three Fiorella locations in addition to Uva Enoteca and Violet’s Tavern. This is not a typical rooftop bar: It’s a diminutive, fully enclosed room with a ceiling that happens to be located on the restaurant’s roof level. Bar Nonnina’s secluded space consists of two tables and a bar, with no seats — this is a drink-standing-up situation — and a fireplace. The soundtrack will be all Italian music, and many of the drinks are served in midcentury glassware, to emphasize the grandma mood.
The atmosphere is distinct from the rest of Fiorella, and so are the food and drink offerings. At Bar Nonnina, bar director Dylan Henry is serving riffs on classic cocktails (all $16) made with Italian ingredients. Galileo’s Gaze, his take on a white negroni, includes strawberry-infused gin, with a big purple sphere of ice cube made with butterfly pea flower tea. For his martini interpretation, Colapesce, Henry infuses vodka with kombu and smokes Castelvetrano olives in Fiorella’s pizza oven. (It easily counts as an example of the coastal martini trend currently sweeping the Bay Area.)
There’s even a handmade slushy on the menu — the Slushy di Modena — made with Lambrusco wine, Piedmontese amaro and Sicilian blood orange liqueur. Using a hand-cranked machine from Japan, Henry shaves a mound of ice, then mixes it with the drink ingredients himself. The cocktail grows slushier as it sits in the glass, he said.
The Slushy di Modena cocktail, made with Lambrusco and amaro, uses shaved ice from a hand-cranked Japanese machine at Nonnina.
Courtesy Kelly PuleioMost of the drinks have a purple element, like that pea flower ice globe. It’s a nod to La Festa dei Nonni, a festival in Italy honoring grandparents. The signature flower of the festival is the purple-hued forget-me-not. (The fact that Nemchenok also owns a bar in the Richmond District called Violet’s, he said, is a coincidence.)
Bar Nonnina’s food menu from chef Scott Schneider is different from the main Fiorella menu, too. While all the dishes are nominally bar snacks, one could manage to eat a full dinner here, Nemchenok said. There’s a chilled seafood salad ($14), ricotta tortellini with peas ($20), beef crudo made with Flannery strip loin ($18) and a crudites platter with a stracchino cheese dip ($16).
One item, intended to be a post-meal palate cleanser, straddles the line between food and drink: the Scorppino ($14), a traditional Italian creation that’s essentially a boozy, drinkable glass of lemon sorbet. Henry’s version includes chamomile-infused grappa, a Prosecco floater and a sugar rim.
The Galileo’s Gaze cocktail at Nonnina, a riff on a white negroni.
Courtesy Kelly PuleioMiniature tasting menus are available: A flight of three bite-size cocktails (equivalent in total to about 1.5 drinks) costs $25, while three courses of food paired with three cocktails costs $75.
“In the Sunset, there’s not really anything that has this kind of vibe,” said Nemchenok. Fans of the now-closed Louie’s Gen-Gen Room, a cocktail bar that was hidden in the basement of the lower Nob Hill restaurant Liholiho Yacht Club, may find some similarities between that bar and Bar Nonnina — a distinct, slightly fancier, cocktail-focused experience within a larger restaurant.
To get to Bar Nonnina, you’ll first have to know it’s there. From Fiorella’s upstairs seating area, with a retractable roof, customers will open an unmarked door and find themselves in a narrow hallway lined with old-fashioned floral wallpaper, illuminated by purple lights, before entering Bar Nonnina’s cozy den. While the four bar slots are available for walk-ins, the other 10 are limited to reservations via Tock. A $15-per-person deposit is required for each reservation.
The crudites platter with cheese dip and the focaccia at Nonnina.
Courtesy Kelly PuleioFiorella’s Sunset location opened last summer. It’s the biggest of the Fiorellas — the other two locations are in the Richmond and Russian Hill — and the only one with a full liquor license, which made possible the idea of a cocktail bar. The menus of each location are about 40% different from each other, Nemchenok said.
Nemchenok intends to continue Fiorella’s expansion. The next location could be in Marin County or on the Peninsula, he said, though he doesn’t yet have any concrete plans.
Bar Nonnina. Opening Wednesday. 5-10 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. 1240 Ninth Ave., San Francisco (inside Fiorella restaurant). 415-404-6997 or barnonnina.com
Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior wine critic. Email: [email protected]
Twitter:
@Esther_mobley
