Jonathan S. Young stands beside the bar inside Sangria & Salt, his new Caribbean restaurant in the longtime former Cha Cha Cha site on Mission Street.
Light pours through the front window, and a gold chain with a rooster glints on Young’s neck.
Young, 39, opened Sangria & Salt on Sept. 12 at 2327 Mission St. near 19th Street. He calls it his “dream” come true.
“It’s such an honor to be the one to give it a refresh while paying homage to what it was,” says Young, standing beside an enormous, horseshoe-shaped bar that is, at 140 feet, rumored to be one of the longest horseshoe-shaped bars on the West Coast.
It dates back to the days of former tenant Original McCarthy’s, one of the first bars to legally serve alcohol after prohibition ended in 1933.
The bar became Cha Cha Cha in 1997 and, in 2016, the original owners of the beloved Cuban-Puerto Rican restaurant retired and sold it and a sister location to Ifran Yalcin, a local restaurateur.
Yalcin closed the Mission Cha Cha Cha in 2022, reopened it in 2023, then sold both it and its Haight Street location to Onur “Oz” Ozkaynak, who put the Mission business (but not the name) up for sale in December 2024.
Young became friends with Ozkaynak through the restaurant industry and, when the chance came to buy, he took it.
The current decor draws inspiration from the building’s history and Young’s own past. The classic brick wall from the previous two establishments remains, along with a black-and-white photograph of the Original McCarthy’s owners.
Beneath the counter, peeking out from between the high-top chairs, is a freshly painted mural by artist Melanie Getman, who lived upstairs from Cha Cha Cha for many years. Its motif of Caribbean and Asian flowers is based on a tattoo that Young got a while back.
“This place is a fusion,” Young says. “With my touch, even more so.”
Now that the doors are open, Young hopes to fill the restaurant’s seats and see his dream fully come to life — a dream he’s been working toward since childhood.
Young got his start cooking at home, and took his first restaurant job at age 15 as a cashier in the Outer Sunset.
“My dad was the cook in the family. His name is Johnnie,” Young says. “I would watch him, and I learned that I’m kind of a natural at it.”
He describes his dad as very technical, someone who studied cookbooks and experimented often with his own variations on American and Chinese dishes. It’s a quality Young picked up and applies to his own work.
At 25, Young attended the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in San Francisco. In March 2020, he went on to open his first restaurant, Hot Johnnie’s, but then pivoted to Hot Johnnie’s pop-up events due to the pandemic.
Now, Hot Johnnie’s has a physical location at 18th and Castro streets, and it specializes in sandwiches made with pastrami smoked in-house. He takes pride in the homemade feel of the menu, and says the smoked ribs are “competition-worthy.”
As Young speaks about Hot Johnnie’s, he touches his gold chain, and tears gather in his eyes.
“I wear my dad’s chain now,” he says. “I wanted to pay tribute to my dad, and now that I have Johnnie’s, it’s like keeping his memory.” Young’s father died in 2011 at the age of 54.
He credits Hot Johnnie’s with preparing him to take on a project as ambitious as Sangria & Salt.
“This is too big of a project to learn on your first shot,” he says.
Young and his team, who he commends for their hard work, have poured countless hours into learning Cha Cha Cha’s recipes, perfecting technique and execution while adding new recipes of their own.
The result, Young says, is “inspired by the original.” The menu still has a tropical feel, but with more fresh ingredients. Menu staples include traditional Caribbean dishes like ropa vieja, lechón asado and vaca frita.
Young says 80 to 90 percent of the menu remains the same. One new addition is shrimp pasta.
“I created a pasta dish from the Cajun shrimp plate because it was the sauce that everyone loved dipping the bread in,” he says.
Young has also made a point to keep the menu affordable.
“I want people to look inside and be like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s nice; it’s probably too expensive for me to eat,’” Young says. “But then they see the price tag and they’re like, ‘Oh, maybe I can enjoy a nice evening here.’”
Sangria & Salt is open at 4 p.m. to midnight on weekdays and 10 a.m. to midnight on weekends at 2327 Mission St. in San Francisco. Reservations can be made here.