The Uptown Oakland sports bar closed February 8 after eight years under original owners. A six-partner local group called OIAST, LLC — led by Oaklandish CEO Angela Tsay — reopened it Thursday for the World Cup opener.

The Oakland Athletic Club opened its doors again Thursday at 59 Grand Avenue — the corner of Grand and Webster in Uptown Oakland — and hit capacity within an hour, with fans lined down the block for the FIFA World Cup opener. It had been dark since February 8.

The original room ran for nearly eight years under Miles Palliser and Ezra Berman (2nd Street Bar, LLC), who opened in May 2018 in a space that previously housed Izzy's Steak and Chop House. They closed on Super Bowl Sunday after revenues had bottomed out at roughly 70 percent of 2019 pre-pandemic levels. "We love it, we love Oakland, we love the community that we've built here," Palliser said at the time, "but at this time, the state of affairs for our business and Oakland in general, we just can't go on any longer."

The room didn't stay dark. A six-partner local ownership group, OIAST, LLC — the acronym stands for Oakland Is A Sports Town — took over the lease and rebuilt the kitchen. The group is led by Angela Tsay, CEO of Oaklandish (the certified B Corp apparel brand that already holds merchandise partnerships with the Roots, Soul, Ballers, Warriors, and Valkyries), alongside Oaklandish COO Aaron Higgins. The culinary weight comes from Chris Pastena, the former operator behind Calavera and Chop Bar; the bar program from Adi Taylor, co-owner of Drexl and Sandbar. Two regulars — identified only as Jesse and Fred — round out the six partners.

The new food menu, designed by Matt Rosson, replaces the previous bar-fare approach with dishes intended to draw on their own: disco fries with oxtail gravy and cheddar, a brisket sandwich with chimichurri mayo, crab and chicken sandwiches, a 50/50 beef-lamb burger, and pork belly pastor tacos, among others. Taylor built a bar program with 12 draft beers, wines on tap, and ten rotating signature cocktails. The physical plant remains essentially the same — a roughly 240-seat room with 37 screens and three projectors, with 20 discrete sound zones.

The Athletic Club is the official bar partner of Oakland Roots SC, Oakland Soul SC, and the Oakland Ballers, which gives OIAST a built-in programming calendar beyond the World Cup's 38-day run. The operators have said they want the room to function year-round — lunch, weekday games, the occasional off-day crowd — not just on marquee match days. That is the harder bet. The original ownership made the same pitch eight years ago in the same 240 seats on the same block. Palliser and Berman ran it as long as they could before the math stopped working; OIAST is taking over with a deeper bench of operators and a stronger roster of sports-team tie-ins. The room opened with a full house Thursday. The rest of the year will tell.