With hints of spring in the air, a new downtown Centralia bar now offers Hub City visitors and residents alike a spot where they can enjoy the sunshine, catch up with old acquaintances or make new friends while sampling wines from around the world paired with made-from-scratch Spanish cuisine — Bodega by OX.
The idea for Bodega was hatched by co-owners Samuel and Irene Cots Trevino, who initially opened up OX Centralia as a catering-faced business last summer at the former location of Boccata in downtown Centralia.
Their intention was renovation of the location for a dine-in restaurant featuring cuisine based on tapas recipes from Samuel’s childhood home of Barcelona, Spain. Funding for the renovations was to come from catering on the side along with pop-up dinner events for community members to get to sample what OX Centralia will have on the menu, as previously reported by The Chronicle.
While renovations for OX Centralia are still ongoing, Bodega was opened as a way to introduce Samuel’s cooking to those who don’t order catering or miss the pop-up events. It opened after the space formerly occupied by the bar 86’d on Tower less than 100 yards away from OX Centralia became available.
Originally opened in the summer of 2024, 86’d on Tower is now known as 86’d Reserve, and is still in downtown Centralia at 201 S. Pearl St.
The cozy, sunlight corner spaces once occupied by 86’d at 328 N. Tower Ave. are now where Samuel and Irene sample imported wines and tapas, along with getting to know their customers, as The Chronicle found out when it visited Bodega last week.
“Any bar in Spain, you talk with the owners. They’re there. They’ve been there for like 40 years, you know? You meet the owners and then you go there for the owners as part of the fun,” Samuel said. “Here, it’s kind of the same. You’re not going to come to a business. You’re going to come to ‘our house’ and talk with us and have fun. We’ll recommend you food and wines, and every time you come, there will be something different.”
As for the wine, they are from close to home for Samuel, like BCN "Mut" Vermut, a fortified wine imported from Catalonia, Spain, along with samplings from many other countries. In fact, Samuel and Irene are now offering the Bodega Passport Club, where members get a leather-bound wine log to collect stamps from their world-wide wine sampling tour.
Customers are invited to stay as long as they like, as Samuel is aiming to create a European-style dining atmosphere, where instead of concentrating on having people eat quickly to try to get as many customers through the door as many American restaurants do, the focus is on relationships and taking time to enjoy the food — of which there is plenty to sample.
While Bodega does not have the space or required ventilation for a commercial restaurant kitchen, Samuel was able to get the health department’s OK to use a sous vide-steam bath setup to heat dishes for customers in sealed mason jars. The main prep cooking is done at OX Centralia’s kitchen across the street, with the food then portioned into the jars and transferred to coolers at Bodega.
Some of the tapas Samuel sampled with The Chronicle included olives in both mojo rojo and mojo verde marinades; pisto, a zucchini stew with sofrito, Spanish paprika and parsley; and cocas, a Spanish take on focaccia with multiple topping options.
The cocas sampled featured fire-roasted bell peppers, onions and eggplant topped with olive oil and parsley. Other cocas include one topped with sobrasada (cured sausage), goat cheese, mesquite blossom honey and chives, and another with smoked salmon, burrata cheese, fresh dill, basil oil and a bit of fresh-squeezed lemon juice.
“Our tapas, they’re all like three to four ingredients,” Samuel added.
Also sampled was locally-made authentic “pa de pagès,” also known as Spanish farmer’s bread, from the Chehalis bakery The May Flour.
“For us as the Spanish people, bread is sacred, but there’s no good bread around unless you go to a bakery and make sure they source things properly,” Samuel said.
He and Irene met The May Flour’s owner, Sarah Burbee, at the Chehalis Farmer’s Market last summer. They worked with her on a pa de pagès recipe, which Samuel now serves alongside some of his dishes, like the pisto.
However, Samuel is expanding his menu to include samplings not just from Spain, but from some of its European neighbors. Another sampling served up was a lamb shepherd’s pie tapas Samuel cooked up for St. Patrick’s Day.
“It’s local lamb, from one of the farms here in Centralia, Triple H Family Farm. The fun part of it was we went there, we met the sheep,” Samuel said.
“The kids got to see the livestock, and the respect for what’s going on, and a family that’s doing it right,” Irene added.
Given food quality is his number one goal for cooking, Samuel wants to see the product origin, and he also intends to use every bit of the lamb he can.
“For example, like at OX, for prime rib, I’m going to order the whole cow, so we may only have 20 prime ribs until it's over. Well, we still have the round, the ox tail, the tri-tip, we have other parts. If you’re buying only prime ribs, you cannot source that back to each animal,” Samuel said. “At my other jobs in California, I switched the menus from getting pre-packaged salmon to fresh, whole fish. You see the animal. You respect the animal. You don’t waste it.”
And waste is something Samuel never does, to the point where he used scraps from the lamb he bought to make a stock, which he reduced and used as a marinade to cook the ground lamb for his shepherd’s pies.
While still concentrating on Spanish cuisine, Samuel intends to slowly mix in others aside from British including French, Italian and Portuguese cuisines.
“The thing that all of them have in common is that when we eat, we sit down, we relax, we have fun, and we just take more time to eat,” Samuel said.
Though some menu items have meat, there are vegan options available.
Ultimately, though, whatever their customers decide to drink and eat, Samuel and Irene’s goal remains the same — avoiding the American restaurant mindset of rushing customers out the door in order to serve as many tables as possible.
They instead aim to create a place where someone can come for a date, bring family or friends to spend time with, or even come by themselves to enjoy some alone time and maybe make a new friend.
Currently, Bodega by OX is open Wednesday through Saturday from 3 to 10 p.m., with possible plans to start opening for Sunday brunch in the near future. Being a bar, patrons must be 21 or older to enter. Walk-ins are welcome, though reservations are recommended as space inside is limited.
For more information, including the menu, visit OX Centralia’s website at https://www.oxcentralia.com/bodega or follow Bodega on its Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/bodega.ox/.
