Alvaro Rojas’ first San Francisco bartending job, 10 years ago, was at a Marina district bar where he was the only bartender of color. He also happened to be the best bartender there, he believed. Yet “I was constantly being asked by customers, ‘Can I order from you?’” he remembers. “They just assumed that I was the barback.”

As Rojas, whose father is from Colombia, forged ahead in his career, he found that the stereotype stuck. The Latin guy must be the barback or the busboy, not the bartender or the server — and certainly not the manager or the owner. “Even if I was way better than the people I worked with, even if I hustled more, there was still that perception,” he says.

Now, that perception may be slowly changing. As of last year, Rojas owns his own bar: Elda, in the Mission. His business partner, Eric Ochoa, is Latino, too. For many years, San Francisco’s only high-profile Latino bar owner had been Julio Bermejo, whose family opened Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in 1965. But as they were developing Elda, Rojas and Ochoa noticed that a number of the other exciting new cocktail bars that had opened recently also had Latino owners, including Carlos Yturria (Treasury, White Cap), David Ruiz (Junior), Nicolas Torres (True Laurel) and Nelson German (Sobre Mesa, which opened Thursday, March 5 in Oakland).

This surge implies that bartenders of color have greater access to capital now than in the past, and that Bay Area bars might become more equitable workplaces for minority groups, offering paths to leadership that might not have been available previously. It’s not just Latin American bars, either: In February, Oakland saw the opening of Viridian, which explicitly identifies as an Asian American cocktail bar, with an accomplished set of owners who are all Asian American. Friends and Family, opening soon in Oakland, has marketed itself as a bar that will empower women employees.

Part of the impetus for creating these spaces, their owners say, is to help customers and employees feel welcome in a high-end cocktail world that has traditionally been very white and very male. “It’s not easy to break into these places,” says Rojas, who believes that “the workforce is still majority Caucasian.” By prioritizing diversity in his own hiring practices, and by leading by example, he hopes Elda can support an audience that may have gravitated away from $14 cocktails in the past.

And there’s another, maybe less obvious, consequence: These owners are expanding the possibilities for what a “Latin American bar” can be. It doesn’t have to serve margaritas in cactus-stemmed glasses or be decorated year-round with Day of the Dead paraphernalia. It doesn’t even have to serve Tequila.

“The Bay Area always talks about how it prizes diversity,” Rojas says. “But this feels significant in a new way.”

Carlos Yturria moved from San Diego to San Francisco 22 years ago because it felt welcoming. In San Diego back then, “if you didn’t look like Carson Daly you were not going to get a bartending job,” he says, referring to the former MTV “TRL” host. San Francisco was a refreshing antidote, a place where “everyone had blue hair and tattoos,” and “as long as you knew what you were talking about, you were hired.”

Still, Yturria notes that he never worked for a bar with a Latino owner. And he was conscious of the same prejudices that Rojas encountered, fearing that his Spanish name would confine him to certain jobs in a bar or restaurant. “When I was dropping off resumes, I felt like I would fall into the trap of ‘Oh, Carlos, he’s just a kitchen guy,’” he says. “I wanted to change my resume paper to really heavy stock, just something to set me apart.”

That didn’t hold Yturria back: He was named a Chronicle Bar Star in 2008, while working at Bacar restaurant, and then was in charge of the bar programs at popular spots including Rye, Range and Absinthe. It wasn’t until 2016, nearly two decades into his career, that he became a partner in a place of his own — the Treasury, which he co-owns with Bacar colleagues Phil West and Arnold Wong. Now he’s on a roll. He’s a partner in Palette Tea House in Ghirardelli Square, and with business partner Matt Lopez owns White Cap in the Outer Sunset, with another Sunset restaurant-bar on the way.

Although Yturria is the face of these cocktail programs, there’s nothing explicitly Latin about any of them. The Treasury, located in the grand Standard Oil building, serves classic cocktails to an after-work FiDi crowd. White Cap is a surfer’s haven with a constantly changing menu theme. The current theme: skiing.

If you go Elda: 3198 16th St., San Francisco Junior: 2545 24th St., San Francisco Sobre Mesa: 1618 Franklin St., Oakland Tommy’s Mexican: 5929 Geary Blvd., San Francisco The Treasury: 200 Bush St. #101, San Francisco True Laurel: 753 Alabama St., San Francisco White Cap: 3608 Taraval St., San Francisco

Read More

Elda, on the other hand, embraces its identity as a Latin American cocktail bar. But it’s conspicuously free of the obvious trappings. “Eric and I wanted to avoid certain tropes,” Rojas says. “We’re not gonna do any papel picado or that dark-wood cantina thing.”

At first glance, the bar feels more contemporary San Franciscan than anything else: It’s decorated with bright colors and live plants, and its drink menu reads like a liquid representation of California cuisine, full of seasonal produce.

A closer look, however, reveals Elda’s Latin roots. A drink called Vampiros, one of its signatures, is a California-fied version of the standard Vampiro cocktail, made with Tequila and fruit juice. (The Vampiro is itself a riff on Mexican sangrita, a spicy, fruity chaser to Tequila shots.) Elda’s Vampiros is made with vegetal mezcal, bright lemon and warming cinnamon, a deeply magenta concoction that’s served over crushed ice.

Rojas believes this sort of nuance wasn’t available to Latino bartenders several years ago. “For a long time, it was ‘If you’re a Mexican bar you look like this,’ or ‘if you’re a Cuban bar you look like this,’” he says.

A similar sort of understatement characterizes Junior, which opened in the Mission in late 2017. It’s overseen by David Ruiz, who has tended bar in San Francisco for more than 15 years; Junior is the first project in which he has equity. (His business partners also own the Hayes Valley bars Brass Tacks and Anina.) Ruiz knew that he wanted mezcal to be an important part of Junior, but he didn’t want it to be pigeonholed as a mezcal bar — or as a Latin-American bar at all.

“We wanted it to be an every person’s bar, to be accessible to the whole neighborhood,” says Ruiz, who also has plans for a restaurant in Marin County. Even though his family is from Colombia, not Mexico, his fluency in Spanish had helped him become immersed in the world of mezcal, as did living in Oaxaca for a period of time with his wife before opening Junior.

Quietly, Ruiz has amassed one of San Francisco’s best mezcal selections, with dozens of bottles arranged artfully behind the bar. It’s there for anyone to see, but you have to know to ask for it.

Junior exists in a neighborhood with complicated cultural dynamics. At 24th and Utah streets in the Mission, it’s one block outside of the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District, officially recognized by the city since 2014. The goal of the Cultural District is to preserve this corridor’s Latino history and to promote Latino business ownership in the face of encroaching gentrification.

Ruiz is sensitive to these dynamics, especially, he says, as the son of someone who came to the states from Colombia with nothing, and he wants to help maintain, not diminish, 24th Street’s distinctive spirit. “The city is in flux, but this is one of the last bastions,” he says. “It’s still neighborhoody, still loud, still has that old-school feel to it.” Junior may have $12 drinks, but it, too, is still neighborhoody, loud and old-school-feeling — and Latino-owned.

Much work remains for San Francisco’s bar scene if it is to move toward a more equitable ideal. Where are the women owners? Apart from this small, if growing, group of Latino bartenders, is there widespread access to opportunity — and capital — for all people of color? And the thorny questions of craft cocktail culture in contemporary San Francisco don’t go away just because a bar is owned by a member of a minority group. How are these bars changing their neighborhoods? Are they accessible? Who are they for?

Rojas, nevertheless, is optimistic that things are moving in the right direction. “If people go into more places and see people like me and Eric running things, maybe that changes how they see themselves,” he says.

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob