We Hung Out With the Cool Kids at This Vibe-y Asian American Cocktail Bar

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

The list of Bay Area hotspots that I don’t feel cool enough to frequent is too long to enumerate, but suffice it to say that Viridian, Uptown Oakland’s sleek Asian American cocktail bar, is near the top. With its pulsing electronic music, purple-pink neon glow, abundance of paper lanterns and psychedelic light show projected onto the walls, the vibe at Viridian is somewhere between a moody Wong Kar-wai film set (one of the owners’ stated inspirations) and a particularly stylish rave.

The main thing you notice, though, is how impeccably cool and well-dressed everyone is, from the bar staff to the patrons. Viridian draws an ethnically diverse crowd, but the clientele does skew young (20s and 30s), and it especially skews toward the demographic I’ve always referred to as the Cool Asian, in every single strand: good-looking Cool Asians in designer black-framed glasses, in muscle shirts or showing off intricate full sleeve tattoos. Cool Asians wearing trucker hats or vintage Japanese denim.

The one thing that made us feel we hadn’t come to the wrong place at 9 o’clock on a Friday night? The fact that the bar also serves some of Oakland’s best late-night food.

To be fair, Viridian only qualifies as a late-night restaurant if you’re grading on a bit of a Bay Area curve. The bar is always open late, so you can stay and nibble at your plate of garlic noodles for as long as you like. But the latest the kitchen ever stays open is 10 p.m., and that’s only on weekends. During our recent visit, a server started politely collecting last-call orders at 9:30 sharp.

Not that it mattered much: We appeared to be the only customers in the entire bustling, fully packed bar who had ordered any food whatsoever. No one else had purchased even a single lonely bowl of tater tots. Meanwhile, in typical fashion, we’d filled every available inch of our assigned counter space with plates and bowls piled high with braised meats and pickled greens.

Anyway, I get it. The vibes at Viridian are great, and the cocktails are spectacular — and I say this as someone who’d never describe themselves as a cocktail person. The signature Tomato Beef, a magically crystal-clear tequila drink that tastes like the purest essence of a ripe summer tomato, might be my favorite cocktail in the Bay Area. For a change of pace, this time I tried the Cafe Sữa Đáddy, a jet-black iced coffee concoction topped with a thick, fluffy cloud of egg foam. It was dangerously sweet and smooth.

What we’re here to tell you, though, is that you shouldn’t skip out on the food — that, in fact, Viridian is well worth a dinner or after-dinner-snack visit even if you don’t drink at all.

This is at least the third or fourth permutation that Viridian’s distinctly Asian American food program has gone through. When the bar first opened in early 2020, just a month before the start of the pandemic, it served almost exclusively desserts — elegant pandan custard pies and Thai tea tiramisu. It went through a period when the kitchen mostly served fancy reinterpretations of dim sum, and then various stretches when every intricately plated dish would have looked right at home at any three-star palace of fine dining.

The current food menu, which launched just a few weeks ago, is probably the simplest, most bar-snacky edition yet, leaning toward homey diasporic Asian flavors in a way we found especially enjoyable. There was piping-hot “mala spice chicken tempura,” which turned out to be spicy chicken nuggets, essentially, served with a carrot-flecked sweet chili dipping sauce — but such a tasty rendition that McDonald’s really should have consulted with them before launching its own tepid version. There were tater tots served with a sour cream, chili crisp and chive dip. It wasn’t anything fancy, but a must-order for anyone who likes munching on hot, crunchy carbs when they drink.

Our favorite dish might have been the huge mound of cucumbers that came coated with a thick layer of fiery, extra-crunchy chili crunch — the ideal bar snack. As delicious as it was, the portion was so abundant that we still wound up taking half of it home.

Meanwhile, the best thing to order if you want a hearty dinner-dinner, or to just sample a few different things, is the donburi. The rice bowl comes topped with a generous portion of mirin-glazed pork, crushed peanuts, pickled mustard greens topped with pork floss, and fresh cilantro. Taken all together, it was just like eating a deconstructed gua bao (pork belly bun) — pure comfort to my Taiwanese American soul.

We must have looked like we were having a good time, because toward the end of the night, one of those Cool Asians (black dress, tattoos) sitting just down the counter from us leaned over to ask what we’d recommend from the food menu. She and her date had already eaten before they came, but they’d noticed how delicious we made everything look when we were eating it. (This is, in the end, our one specialized skill.) So, we talked up the cucumbers, and the donburi, and the chicken, and…

“So everything’s good,” she said, laughing. And you could tell she believed us, too.

Viridian is open Fri.–Sat. 5 p.m.–2 a.m. and Wed., Thu. and Sun. 5 p.m.–midnight at 2216 Broadway in Oakland. The kitchen closes at 9 p.m. except for on Fridays and Saturdays, when it’s open until 10 p.m.