Tyler Fenton is adding to his restaurant portfolio when he opens Bata on Wednesday, March 9, in downtown’s Warehouse Arts District.
Bata takes up 6,000 square feet of the historic 1930s warehouse at 35 E. Toole Ave. that had once housed a plumbing supply company before being converted to office and retail space in the 1980s, Fenton said last week.
It is the third restaurant for Fenton and his sibling partners Zach and Courtney, who also own the 10-year-old downtown pizzeria Reilly Craft Pizza & Drink in the former Reilly Funeral Home at 101 E. Pennington St. and a second Reilly location at 7262 N. Oracle Road, which they launched last August.
Bata was a long time coming. Fenton said he had originally planned to open as a multi-concept eatery in summer 2020, but the pandemic put those plans on hold. Once the city started reopening in the summer of 2020, Fenton switched gears.
Fenton said renovating the warehouse space, which takes up less than half of the 14,000-square-foot building managed by the family’s Fenton Investment Company, was a multimillion-dollar reimagining. They kept the original wood and metal bow truss ceilings, left the exposed brick and polished the concrete floors.
Tori Romo, sous chef, preps dried beets and other vegetables at Bata.
The dining room can seat up to 90 on two- to six-seat wooden tables. There’s also a long cushioned bench seat set up against a shou sugi ban soffit made from heavily charred wood similar to the way it was done in 18th century Japan.
The restaurant’s name also has Japanese origins, shorthand, Fenton said, for Japanese style grilling called robata.
“No, we’re not a Japanese restaurant,” Fenton, Bata’s executive chef, was quick to clarify, although he will draw from Japanese and other international cooking techniques in a menu that will focus on fire.
All of the dishes on the menu will be touched by fire in ways subtle — a beef tartare garnished with a fermented and flame-dried green onion powder — and not so subtle — grilled pork belly served with a sauce whose ingredients are burned in the fireplace. Even desserts are charred in tasteful ways, from its smoked chocolate mousse mille-fuille to the embered caramel on the koji ice cream.
The custom live fire hearth at Bata.
Much of that will be done in the wood-fired hearth in the open kitchen, where they will grill meats butchered from whole animals in house and vegetables sourced from local farmers. Fenton said 90% of the restaurant’s foods will come from within 400 miles of the restaurant — he wanted to be able to include San Diego, a favorite vacation spot and go-to for fresh seafood.
“Given how we are sourcing and using whole animal, the menu is going to change daily, not in a way that Poca Cosa’s was rewritten every day, but kind of micro tweaks,” Fenton said, referring to downtown’s legendary Café Poca Cosa, which closed in 2020. “A pig only has so much of each cut so a dish might be made with pork belly one day and it evolves to pork shoulder the next.”
A sliver of light shines on a table at Bata.
More than half of Bata’s small-plate menu is dedicated to vegetables from the honeynut squash dressed in a sauce that combines the seeds and skin with smoked butter to charred brussels sprouts with black apple and salsa seca.
Bata will open for dinner service only, from 5 to 9 p.m. Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and from 5 to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Fenton said he plans to open a bar in the basement of the building similar to the Toughluck Club in the basement of Reillys downtown. He hopes to open Bar Bata in May.
