Snail Bar Upstairs — Oakland’s Vinyl Loft
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Snail Bar Upstairs is one of Oakland’s most finely tuned listening bars, explore more in our USA Music Venues guide.
Venue Name: Snail Bar Upstairs
Address: Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California, USA (exact number not publicly listed)
Website: https://snailbaroakland.com/home.html
Instagram: @snailbaroakland
Phone: Not listed publicly
Spotify Profile: Not available
Oakland has always carried its own rhythm, distinct from San Francisco across the Bay. Its food, art, and music scenes thrive on intimacy and experimentation, favouring spaces where community matters as much as craft. Snail Bar Upstairs embodies that ethos. Opened in early 2025 as an extension of the acclaimed natural wine spot Snail Bar, it transforms a loft-like apartment space above the main restaurant into a hybrid café, bar, and listening lounge.
The first impression is disarmingly domestic. You climb a narrow staircase and step into a room that feels more like a friend’s apartment than a public venue. Sofas and mismatched chairs are scattered across the floor, bookshelves double as record storage, and a bar in the corner serves coffee by day and cocktails by night. The space is lived-in, warm, deliberately unpolished. Yet at its heart sits a carefully tuned sound system, compact but precise, filling the room with fidelity.
Programming reflects the venue’s casual spirit. Daytime hours see quiet playlists and selectors spinning soft jazz or ambient records, while evenings lean into funk, disco, and global sounds. DJs work with vinyl and digital alike, but always with restraint, guiding the flow of the night without dominating it. The intent is not spectacle but atmosphere — music as architecture, shaping the room’s energy.
Drinks mirror the dual identity. In the morning and afternoon, coffee and tea anchor the offering, building a café-like rhythm. By evening, the menu shifts to cocktails, natural wines, and a handful of beers, served with the same unfussy charm as the food downstairs. Nothing feels heavy-handed; everything feels balanced.
The crowd is eclectic, as you’d expect in Oakland. Students, artists, restaurant regulars, and locals drift in and out, some staying for a quick drink, others settling for the entire evening. Social media has already played a role in amplifying its appeal, with images of vinyl stacks and sunlit corners giving it the aura of a secret shared.
For Oakland, Snail Bar Upstairs is more than an addition to the nightlife — it is a marker of how listening culture can take root in unexpected places. It doesn’t mimic Tokyo’s kissaten or London’s audiophile temples. Instead, it translates the ethos of fidelity into a distinctly local form: casual, communal, and improvisational.
Stay until the last track of the night and the room carries a collective hum. The music winds down, glasses empty, and conversation softens. Walking back down the narrow stairs to Telegraph Avenue, the city feels altered — sharper, warmer, more attuned. Snail Bar Upstairs has done what the best listening spaces do: it recalibrates the way you hear everything outside its walls.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
