“I know it’s kind of overused, but I call it a living room for everyone,” Dario Barbone explains, half sunken into a black couch. We’re sitting in his new restaurant, an oblong rectangular building with worn hardwood floors. A few feet away, past a rack of skateboarding magazines, a prodigiously healthy monstera plant fans out its leaves, one of a small legion of houseplants dotting the perimeter of the shop.
It’s a bit hard to hear him, though. On the other side of his 2,000 square-foot establishment, on a loft above the kitchen, Lil Rav4 is blasting a bouncy, high BPM remix of Tinashe’s “Nasty,” and the intermittent snare hits drown out the sound of Barbone’s voice. Rav4 is twisting knobs on a DJ mixer, which is positioned over the room like a church’s pulpit, and a GoPro clipped to a railing records his every move. In the Bay Area and beyond, fans log onto Fault Radio ’s Twitch channel to watch him work his magic.
Like Nickelodeon stepbrothers Drake and Josh , a radio station and Italian deli have become unlikely roommates. Studio Aurora, the hybrid kitchen/radio station/record shop/living room, opened in November 2024 on 14th and Valencia streets at the former site of the cafe Milk . In February of this year, Studio Aurora celebrated its grand opening .
Upstairs, a loft above the kitchen serves as the new permanent home of Fault Radio, a popular Bay Area nonprofit internet radio station established in 2018. In the daytime, Fault Radio’s general manager Mohit Kohli and a team of volunteers use the loft as an office. At night, it’s the stage for live DJ sets that are broadcast on Twitch and archived on YouTube . Tune in on a random evening, and you might catch DJ Dials , the head booker of 1015 Folsom, Lexapeel or Chungtech …