When one bar closes, another bar opens. Isn’t that how the saying goes? After closing downtown Oakland’s Radio Bar, owners Alfredo Botello, Trevor Latham and Tim Tolle hired Jennifer Seidman as a consultant to refresh and rebrand it. The newly madeover space is now called Little Bird Bar. Once inside, look up at the ceiling. Light fixtures hang down in the shape of bird cages. Seidman made the cages by hand, one by one, before perching artificial birds inside of them.
Whiskey aficionados will recognize Seidman from her full-time gig as the owner and sometimes-bartender of Acme Bar & Company, in Berkeley. When we spoke on the phone, she described Acme as a neighborhood bar. “I use this analogy—Acme is like a warm, comfortable sweater,” she said. “It’s very welcoming. My staff is really lovely. We treat people very kindly.” She’d rather have one customer come in a thousand times than host a thousand customers who only come in once.
Acme, she added, is the only nationally award-winning whiskey bar in the Bay Area, after several others closed in San Francisco. “What I love so much about Acme is that bars are very much about community,” Seidman said. “One of my customers, a lovely gentleman, has been coming to my bar for 23 years. I remember when his daughter was six; she’s in grad school now.” When people make friends, meet or break up with partners at neighborhood bars and restaurants, she said, “they’re woven into the fabric of someone’s life.”…