SF’s real summer is just starting. Here’s your new favorite rooftop hang

Welcome to Swig City, where we point you toward can’t-miss drinks at the best bars, restaurants, and rooftop Caribbean hangouts in the city. Cheers!

The milk-washed concoction looks like a frosted cupcake. Made from mezcal, pisco, and white vermouth, along with pineapple and passion fruit, it’s topped with a pale-orange foam flecked with lime zest. Despite having two distinct parts, its flavor is perfectly balanced: The tropical, lightly acidic creamsicle foam on top mingles with the potent, Mexican martini-esque liquid below. 

The $15 drink is called the Qué Bola, and it’s a standout at Cubita, a recently renovated rooftop bar six stories above the Mission. Operated by Back of the House — the group behind Super Duper Burgers, Flores, Starbelly, and other restaurants — it’s the successor to El Techo, which closed in May after a 13-year run serving margaritas and bar bites to the after-work crowd. 

Strung with lights, hung with fedoras, and sporting a mural of a glamorously made-up woman smoking a fat cigar, the rooftop destination makes its connection to Havana plainly felt: There’s even salsa dancing on Sundays. Adriano Paganini, CEO of Back of the House, has never visited the island but has always wanted a Cuban restaurant — and it rankled him that El Techo acquired a reputation as a Mexican restaurant when its menu was always pan-Latin. 

Cubita is pan-Latin, too, as the booze in the Qué Bola illustrates. Overall, the project is in keeping with the company’s MO of repackaging this-or-that cuisine into something approachable and affordable, with plenty of atmosphere and an equal emphasis on food and drink. Back of the House recently renovated another of its older restaurants a few blocks away, the Italian standby Beretta. But whereas Beretta is for late nights and date nights, Cubita is all about happy hour. 

Besides the Qué Bola — which roughly translates to “What’s up, dude?” and is among the best drinks I’ve had all year — there are other cocktails that evoke summery Caribbean languor; chiefly, the smoky, spirit-forward Havana Heat (añejo rum, high-proof rum, passion fruit, lemon, maraschino liqueur, and a flamed cinnamon stick, $20). In the mood for something more familiar? Gravitate toward a Cuba libre or mojito (both $15), the latter of which is also available in a large-format version that serves four or five people for $56.

Apart from a chorizo-beef burger, the 10-item food menu stops just short of offering proper entrees, with plantains, yucca fries, and chicken wings sharing space with beef empanadas and a halibut-and-gulf-shrimp ceviche. Lunchtime staple though it may be, the Cubano sandwich is a can’t-miss item, with the perfect level of pickled saltiness. Notably, everything’s under $20, except for a plate of six raw Kumamoto oysters ($24). They aren’t especially Cuban, but, hey, just about everybody wants to feel a little fancy on a rooftop.

The missing ingredient, though, has been summer itself, as warm evenings have been in short supply since Cubita’s early-June debut. Paganini is unsparing in his criticism of the climate. “This summer, the weather has been horrible,” he says. “We’re not packed when it’s foggy and cold, but we do a pretty decent business, considering.” Case in point: When I visited, on a calm late afternoon with a stationary fog bank cantilevered over Twin Peaks, the place was hopping.

However, Labor Day is just around the corner, which means summer in San Francisco at last — or let’s hope so, anyway. This city already has an impressive constellation of high-elevation hangouts, but Cubita stands out for two reasons. One is its outdoor location in the comparatively balmy Mission. The other, better still, is that its prices are well below those of more rarefied places like Charmaine’s in Mid-Market or Cavaña in South Beach (both of which, in fairness, are located atop hotels and have more extensive menus). Until American tourists can travel to Cuba for rum and cigars, we at least have this little taste of it in our midst.