The team behind Oakland's Xingones converted their original Old Oakland space at 736 Washington St. into El Barrio, a Mexican sports bar that opened June 30, as the World Cup entered its closing stretch.

El Barrio, a Mexican sports bar from the team behind Oakland's Xingones, opened Tuesday, June 30, at 736 Washington St. in Old Oakland, arriving just as the World Cup entered its closing stretch, The Oaklandside's East Bay Nosh reported↗ (external source, opens in a new tab).

The room is not a new lease so much as a reinvention of one the operators already held: El Barrio takes over the corner space that was the original Old Oakland home of Xingones, refreshed and reopened under the new name. That makes it a format bet as much as an opening — a fried-chicken cantina reworked into a full-bar concept built around screens and shareable plates rather than lunch covers.

Behind it are Mayra Velazquez and Justino "Tino" Perez, who grew Xingones from a Sunday stall at the Laney College flea market into a brick-and-mortar operation, as Berkeleyside chronicled in 2019↗ (external source, opens in a new tab). "Xingones means badass," Velazquez told the paper then; both owners are immigrants from Mexico. El Barrio leans on that pop-up-in-a-bar instinct, trading plated meals for bar snacks — wings, tacos and burritos — alongside craft cocktails and beer.

The wings are the calling card, the dish the San Francisco Chronicle singled out this month in a roundup of favorite recent bites. Its Yelp listing puts hours at 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and Sunday, running to midnight on Friday and Saturday — a schedule tuned to the evening and late-night crowd a bar lives on.

El Barrio is at least the second Oakland sports bar to surface this summer, one of a run of rooms — from the reopened Oakland Athletic Club uptown to a broader wave of East Bay operators — wagering that a soccer summer can carry a bar into the fall.