Tried Bar Zola again. Very much my kind of place. Hint: order your own favorite cocktails and don’t bother with what’s on the menu.
Time to slide in is about 9:30, a little later, the bar will have people but there’s probably a spot. Chatted with the manager, they’ve got “full menu” (it’s still a very short menu) until 10, then “bites” until midnight (manager said he wanted meatballs only until 11 but he was “outvoted”), which means fresh pretzels and olives and fries, but most importantly, late night meatballs, so you can have something closer to an actual meal. I quiped that it would be two months before they stopped that foolishness, because so many places in the mid-peninsula try to go late but realize they can’t support it — he says it’s going great so far, with a LOT of people coming in between 9 and 10 ordering full meals. We’ll see!
They had a new #2 bartender guy (the main bartender recognized me and said “challenge him”), and he improvised a really nice cocktail, kind of a “naked and famous” mashup but taking it back to Gin instead of Mescal, and going with some kind of strawberry liquor which makes it closer to the original Last Word but I had requested something with Absinthe, so he did an absinthe wash, which put the sweetness of the strawberry in perspective. For an improvisation, it was extraordinary.
If this was a more popular forum, I wouldn’t mention how good they are 
