Daniel Azarkman, owner and operator of El Lopo—a sherry, vermouth, wine, and Spanish-inspired bar in San Francisco—said his appetite for eating well at home and elsewhere led to his career in the bar, restaurant, and hospitality industry. In fact, that early passion steered Azarkman into being the person who cooked at gatherings and the one who persuaded friends into trying every new restaurant.
“From there, I came to recognize that I couldn’t get my ‘fix’ from just having a good meal,” he shared. “I only truly had fun if I was responsible for other people having fun.”
In his early 20s, Azarkman’s best friend lived in the same apartment building and worked in the service industry. “We spent a lot of late nights getting stoned and making messes in each other’s kitchens,” he said. “I was pretty newly obsessed with Spanish gastronomy and bar culture after some formative early travel experiences, and he was drinking a lot of the ‘California Kool-Aid’ of the slow food kitchens he was working in. We found common ground in putting together ingredient-centric, seasonal dishes using Iberian flavors and formats. Eventually it prompted a conversation about what California cuisine might look like today, if the territory had remained culturally Spanish instead of being annexed by the United States.”
Azarkman’s experiences and interest in Spain and Spanish food and beverages eventually turned into El Lopo, which opened in 2019.
El Lopo: A Place in Between Bar and Restaurant
The idea behind El Lopo is that it’s a neighborhood bar from an alternate reality, where California is part of Spain. The bar specializes in sherry, vermouth, and Spanish-inspired bites that feature local, seasonal California ingredients. In addition, the business hosts weekly events and activations, curates an exclusive take-care-of-me monthly subscription, and leads yearly educational trips to Spain, as it prioritizes community and community engagement.
“We try to occupy a place in between bar and restaurant in that we take our products very seriously, but offer them in a loosened environment where there’s no prescribed way of behaving,” explained Azarkman. “We hope that everyone who comes in enjoys some food in addition to their drinks, but we discourage the appetizer-entree-dessert-pay mentality. And our choice in calling ourselves a sherry and vermouth bar is generally the most memorable quirk that first-timers notice. In our new hire orientation deck, we use the phrase ‘fun, food, and fortified stuff’ as what most differentiates us from the many other nightlife businesses in the area.”
Azarkman said he doesn’t know if he would define El Lopo as popular, but he can pat himself on the back for the enthusiasm of the people who do love the bar. “We’re small enough that we can make every guest feel seen and appreciated without reading from a script,” he said. “We’re proud enough of the work we do that we can afford to be both vulnerable and unapologetic in how we present it. Essentially, we try to be humans serving humans, and when we succeed at that, it really resonates with people.”
In Absence of Liquor…
The one thing that Azarkman and his team explain the most to customers is that all of their cocktails are based on sherry and/or vermouth, and that they don’t use distilled spirits at the bar.
“We aim not to be compensating for the absence of liquor, but rather showcasing the quality and versatility of our sherries and vermouths in how we incorporate them,” said Azarkman. “That being said, we know that we have to meet the average patron at least half way to ease them into this esoteric beverage category, so our most successful cocktails have usually been reinterpretations of recognizable classics. Our ‘old world margarita’ [briney manzanilla with sour orange] and ‘imperfect Manhattan’ [oloroso, amber vermouth, and house-preserved cherry] work well as ‘trojan horses’ for people who come in firmly believing that they are not sherry or vermouth fans.”
In addition to their sherries, vermouths, and related cocktails, El Lopo offers small dishes, such as: savory bread pudding with wild mushroom escabeche and caramelized fennel; mushroom toast with parsnip puree and butter-braised leek; and slow-cooked octopus with squid ink potatoes and pomegranate seeds.
“We usually update the menus twice a week, though an update usually just entails one or two beverage changes and one or two food changes,” noted Azarkman. “That amounts to nearly a full overhaul every six to eight weeks – apart from a handful of perennial staples – but it’s always incremental.”
According to Azarkman, changing the menu often has its advantages, as it keeps things “stimulating” for regulars and allows for seasonality and better waste management. “The major trade-off is that it asks a lot of the team; managers have to be nimbler in their purchasing and put more time into R&D, while line-level staff are constantly learning new processes and product information.”
A Creative Take-Care-of-Me Subscription Club, Annual Trips to Spain
El Lopo’s original, truly unique Take-Care-of-Me Club doubles down on the bar’s intense focus on retaining regulars, as Azarkman explained, giving customers loyalty incentives without the “kitschy punch card or the grind of a points program.”
“Once members are enrolled with a card on file, they never have to see a menu or a bill,” explained Azarkman. “We learn who they are and what they like, and whenever we see them, we can just start bringing them stuff. When they’re tired of us, they can just get up and walk out – though, usually there’s a wave and a thank-you – and we reconcile their tab on the back end. They also get some nifty perks like getting to send a free drink to a stranger on each visit and waived or discounted ticket fees for events we hold.”
Twice a year, El Lopo hosts a members-only Take-Care-of-Me Night, where the cooks and bartenders make whatever they like without concern for being practical, and guests get to be their guinea pigs.
Azarkman also engages with customers by offering them the chance to participate in his annual trip to Spain. “Somehow, I came up with a way to fund my expensive habit of flying to Spain and eating and drinking all the things,” he said. “First, it was justified as research for bringing new products and ideas back to El Lopo. Then it grew into a training effort, for our staff to speak more effectively and confidently about the things they make and serve. Neither of those paid for themselves, so I eventually pitched some regulars on paying for the privilege of tagging along. Since then, each trip has focused on a different region of Spain, with visits to the wineries, ranches, distilleries, bodegas, and canneries that define the local gastronomic culture.”
Azarkman hopes to expand to two trips to Spain a year, and there seems to be demand for it. “The main obstacle is getting El Lopo to a place where it’s a bit more self-sufficient without me,” he said.
Beyond Spain – Finding Inspiration in the Bay Area
Azarkman has worked as a hospitality entrepreneur, consultant, and scholar with 15 years of direct experience in the Bay Area’s food service industry. He’s cooked and served at upscale restaurants – including Nopa and Contigo – and he’s built new food programs for cafes and bars that previously served only beverages. He also co-founded and was the executive chef of a quarterly pop-up dinner series and catering brand called Drunk Supper, which built menus that paired local craft beverages with food.
Before he launched El Lopo, Azarkman served as an operations manager for The Whole Cart, which ran a fleet of more than 20 different food trucks on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif. There, he piloted and ran an incubator program called Instrucktional, which empowered aspiring entrepreneurs to launch their own mobile food businesses.
As a longtime professional within the San Francisco and Bay Area food scene, Azarkman finds inspiration everywhere, and in the good and bad moments. “What’s miraculous to me is that San Francisco’s food scene is every bit as stimulating in our ‘doom loop’ days as it has been during our boom times,” he said. “We’ve lost a lot in the last five to 10 years – some ethnic diversity, a bunch of tech money, and the disposable income that came with it, and quite a bit of international prestige as a beautiful and safe tourism destination – and you would think that all those losses would take an envelope-pushing service industry down with them.”
Azarkman believes that San Francisco restaurants are not getting as much love from the media and award programs as they did 10 years ago because – as he explained – they know their readers are “less likely to click on a business whose location they associate with a fentanyl crisis.” Yet, he said many are still in the city and doing “awesome things.”
“The persistence of local service businesses in both creativity and quality in the face of all that pessimism is how I know that the boom times will indeed come back, like they always do,” said Azarkman. “When the world is ready to come back and adore San Francisco, we won’t be rusty.”
Azarkman thinks the biggest opportunities for innovation in the local food scene have less to do with what’s on the plate and more to do with how the food is served and enjoyed.
“El Lopo’s food, while fantastic, shares a stage with so many other talented chefs and cooks that it’s difficult to stand out on quality or technique alone,” said Azarkman. “We try to break the mold by offering our products in a permissive and open-ended dining format. I like to say that if a conventional restaurant is like a novel, El Lopo is like a magazine. There’s no linear beginning-middle-end; you should be able to open it up to any page and put it back down without finishing.”
We Have to Sell Fun
Looking at the bar and restaurant industry, at least locally, Azarkman said the biggest challenge is that many of the adjustments our culture made for the pandemic are now normalized. “Delivery apps now feel like less of a luxury, and leaving home to go to dense urban areas just feels like more of a schlep when our work schedules don’t demand that we do it every day,” he explained. “Then there’s the sticker shock when people who have spent the last five years dining out less finally do, and their bill is three times what they remember it being in 2019.”
Azarkman said it falls on bars and restaurants to create new reasons to get people off their couches, because great food and drinks are no longer enough. “Now more than ever, we have to think of our jobs as providing services rather than goods. We have to sell fun,” he shared.
Aaron Kiel is an award-winning journalist and public relations professional in Raleigh, N.C. He’s worked in the beverage, tea, and coffee industries for two decades, as well as hospitality and technology. He’s a journalist at heart, but he also wears a PR and communications hat through his consultancy, ak PR Group. Aaron is a contributing writer/reporter for Questex’s Bar & Restaurant News and he’s a past editor of Questex’s World Tea News. In 2023, he was a finalist and honorable mention in the “Folio: Eddie & Ozzie Awards” for “Range of Work by a Single Author – B2B” for World Tea News, and in 2024, he won two awards for his work with Bar & Restaurant News, including a Gold Northeast Region Award in the American Society of Business Publication Editors’ (ASBPE) Azbee Awards under the “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” category, and a “Folio: Eddie & Ozzie Award” in the B2B article category for “Culture & Community.” He also received a 2024/2025 ASBPE Diversity Fellowship Award, which supports and recognizes diversity in the field of B2B journalism. Connect with him on Instagram: @adventurer_explorer or visit akprgroup.com.
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