You’ll have to hurry if you want to make it to Bar Tako, a new Mexican-Japanese spot coming to San Jose in late February. The restaurant-ish space is a temporary installation — a limited edition, perhaps, only operating through June 2026.
Bar Tako is a project from industry vets Derek Belanger and Greg Nasser, alum of Back of the House and its many, many San Francisco restaurants. Mike and Grant Messenger, the family who owns the building that once housed Olla Cocina, tapped Belanger and Nasser to install a temporary restaurant residency until they can ready the space for its next permanent restaurant. “Mike decided he wanted to open his restaurant in this space, but because of all the activity happening in San Jose and the Bay Area over the next six months, he was really concerned about having a vacant dark storefront in the prime downtown area in San Jose,” Belanger says. “He’s been in this community, he owns several restaurants on the block; his family is really committed to making sure that downtown San Jose — and specifically San Pedro Square — has something open. So we had this idea of putting a limited time restaurant in the space.”
Inspired by Nikkei cuisine in Peru with its Japanese influence, the duo chose to make Mexico the foundation for their menu, due to the building owners’s ties to the country. Consulting with two chefs with backgrounds in Japanese and Mexican cooking, they worked on a menu “that’s mostly Mexican with threads of Japanese influence through it,” Belanger says. Dishes are designed for communal eating with sections of the menu broken down by a raw bar, robata grill, and specialty dishes. For the first portion, think sushi-grade fish hit with Mexican sauces and flavors, such as a local hamachi paired with a salsa verde. “Two things you just wouldn’t think go together, but go perfect together,” Nasser says of the item. Another dish from that section is a salmon tartare paired with mango-shiso pico de gallo and chips.
For the robata dishes, skewered meats like pork and chicken, vegetables, and fruit will all get their time over the binchotan charcoal, served with housemade masa tortillas and sauces with roots in Japanese or Mexican cuisine. The restaurant’s take on the elote will see ribs of corn hit the grill before getting dressed in Kewpie mayo, furikake spice, and yuzu. Okinawa sweet potato gets twice-cooked before it’s grilled for a final time, arriving tableside with mole aioli and cotija cheese. Bar Tako’s carne asada, meanwhile, comes with tamari-stewed tomatoes, cotija, and more of the aforementioned tortillas. The composed dish section is a catchall for items that don’t quite fit under the raw or robata headers, such as a togarashi shrimp taco; a shoyu-braised beef short rib tamal served with ancho chile sauce and pickled ginger; or an A5 wagyu with mole. (“It was a revelation for me when I tried it,” Belanger says.) The dessert menu is simple, but there’s an interesting standout: The restaurant will offer three different sweet tamales with different sauces, such as a red bean tamale in a miso-caramel sauce.
Thanks to a transfer of the liquor license, Bar Tako is also ready to live up to the bar part of its name. Tequila, mezcal, and Japanese whisky seemed like the obvious choice for a focus, and Erin Rae (who Nasser worked with on the opening of Flores in San Francisco) consulted on drinks. The team will also carry both Mexican and Japanese beers, but Nasser has also been focused on bringing Mexican wines to the table. He’s securing wines from Baja, such as Nebiolos and a Lambrusco-style chilled red wine, with the goal of introducing diners to four or six lesser-known (at least to this area) wines from that region.
So given all the food and drinks developed for Bar Tako, what happens if diners respond positively and want more at the end of the restaurant’s run? According to Belanger, “all options are on the table.”
“We love this idea,” Bellanger says. “I’d hate to see it just go away forever, so whether it runs its course and it ends in June, maybe that happens. Maybe it finds a new home somewhere. Maybe those influences transition into whatever the full-time permanent concept is in this space. We’ll let the community decide what they think about it … if they speak and say, ‘Hey, this is great,’ we’re not going to make it go away, we’ll find a way to have it available for people.”
Bar Tako (17 North San Pedro Street, San Jose) debuts in late February and runs through June 2026, and is open daily from noon to 10 p.m.
Dining and Cooking