Fresnoland81%
Curating a Vibe: Meet the Moses McQueen’s bar manager bringing a personal touch to historic Armenian Town 54%
By Vince Mancini75%
7/14/2026, 3:46:08 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Availability Heuristic, and Ambiguity (Equivocation), with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 22.9% saturation with 328 hits. Analysis detected 2,625 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,430 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 53% and a BS Rank of 54% (8,789 of 19,036 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 53.80% of the article peer group.
It’s easy to drive into downtown Fresno and see the stately old mansion with double-decker porch on Van Ness and Ventura occupied by Moses McQueen’s, and think “I want that to succeed.”
Most Fresnans dream of a thriving downtown, with vibrant businesses celebrating our rich history, in exactly the way Moses McQueen’s is trying to do – built out of the historical Elia Mansion and one of last vestiges of Fresno’s turn-of-the-century Armenian Town.
It’s a cool story, and it’s easy to see what drew Moses McQueens’ owners to want to turn it into a bar.
The building itself evokes visions of New Orleans, or of Rainey Street in Austin, Texas, that famous strip of bungalow-homes-turned-bars.
What if we could have that, but with a Fresno twist?
The dream is contagious.
The tougher question is how to turn that dream into cocktails and food – those things that bars and restaurants actually have to sell in order to make money.
Moses McQueens’ ownership team, Miguel and Diego Arambula, Diego’s wife Chandelle, and partner Phillip Kliewer, were strong on the dream but maybe a little fuzzy on the details.
There’s an air of We Bought A Zoo about the place.
“Diego was close with some people in the downtown community, and he’d heard people talk about wanting some kind of bocce ball bar, a place for people down here to hang out, to go for lunch and after work,” says Miguel Arambula.
“I think for a year or two there might’ve been an office conversion thing on the table, but that was just too boring for everybody to get excited about.
And so we ended up with this bar idea, without any of us really being in the industry.
I’m doing a sort of job-craft thing, where you invent the job you want to have.”
Going in without a road map and learning things on the fly was part of the process.
You can almost sense it in the air at Moses McQueen’s, which is part of the charm.
And also, dare I say it, very Fresno.
“Just do stuff” is practically a civic motto here, not to mention an urban planning philosophy.
The challenge was that restored historical homes, generally speaking, don’t typically have things like large commercial kitchens and ample space for walk-in fridges.
In the end, they opted to run the kitchen out of a truck out back.
McQueen’s has an abundance of seating for patrons, with multiple patios and an upstairs section, and a minimum of infrastructure for serving all of them.
And as we’ve established, neither the Arambulas nor the Kliewers came from the food and beverage industry.
So it was that the task of designing a menu to fit this unique space fell largely to General Manager Dawn Cianci, head chef Vance Edwards (who has since left), and bar manager Alexa Leyva Martinez.
Despite being an avid home cook (with past experience as a line cook, and a few pop-up food businesses under her belt), and an experienced bar manager (Leyva Martinez came over from Que Pasa), designing a menu from scratch in a place not originally designed to be a bar was brand new for her.
The main bar at Moses McQueen’s in Downtown Fresno.
“It was kind of challenging to me, and my initial thought process was like, ‘oh, I need to create something that’s really commercial,’” Leyva Martinez says.
“I thought the menu needed to look like a Yardhouse cocktail menu – I wasn’t really putting any personality into it.
Then when she saw my first draft, our GM, Dawn, said ‘Well these are good, but try putting a bit more of yourself in them instead.’”
It was essentially the same mandate the McQueens’ team had given Edwards, whose personal menu of Afro-Caribbean bar food McQueen’s still serves.
Similarly empowered, Leyva Martinez took the prompt and ran with it, designing a cocktail menu as personal as she could dream up.
“The ‘Who’s Your Mama’ was based off my relationship with my mom,” Leyva Martinez says.
“She’s a huge fan of the Salty Dog at Richard’s Prime Steakhouse, and so I kind of flipped that into what bartenders would probably call a Spicy Paloma.”
“And then the ‘Cheating Death’ was inspired by my grandpa.
He was in the Vietnam War and was shot in the head and survived and earned a Purple Heart.
And then, years later, he got a really weird stomach cancer, stage four, but they did an experimental surgery that he wasn’t expected to survive, but he survived.”
Other cocktails are less personal, but draw on (what else?)
the history of the area.
“The history of the building inspired cocktails like the ‘ ‘Hey Darlin’’ and ‘The Pink Kitten’,” Leyva Martinez says.
“I was researching Fresno’s bar and club history, and in the 70s, topless bars were really prominent.
There was a whole strip of topless bars on Belmont.
We had a guest here who said that she would have to go pick up her dad from one of those bars.
The ‘Hey Darlin’’ is a riff on a ‘Shirley Temple’, like an elevated dirty Shirley.”
Downtown Fresno’s free-wheeling history is something you rarely hear people talk about anymore, but it triggers my own long-dormant secondhand Armenian Town remembrances.
Like that there was house of sex work (in modern parlance) near my great-grandfather’s shoe repair shop in the area.
My grandfather and his two younger brothers, legend has it, would fight over who got to deliver the sex workers their shoes (which they often delivered on roller skates, just to further paint a picture).
The way these memories filter down through the generations and undoubtedly pick up exaggerations and embellishments along the way is already happening within the microcosm of McQueen’s bar menu.
“I love the bartenders’ takes on it, too,” Leyva Martinez says of her menu.
“Like the other day I overheard one of them tell a patron, ‘Yeah, so the ‘Cheating Death’, that’s because our bar manager’s grandpa was really hard to kill.’
I thought that was so fun.”
The way Leyva Martinez’s cocktail menu is full of stories, inspiring stories from bartenders and patrons (and food writers) alike dovetails with McQueen’s larger mission.
“We met the guy who used to live upstairs for a decade,” Miguel Arambula says.
“He used to rent the house, but he knew the family that owned it, the Elia family.
The daughter was Ann, and she had this place called Ann’s Beer Mug, over on Belmont.
She was, according to her, the first female to own a bar/liquor store in Fresno.
Everybody who knew the family was like, oh, that’s classic.
Ann would love that her childhood bedroom is literally a bar.”
The patio, restaurant truck, and beer garden at Moses McQueen’s.
Just as you might expect from anything relating to Armenian Town, there’s also a William Saroyan angle (McQueen’s is only a few blocks from the Saroyan monument at Van Ness Ave and Tulare Street).
“Apparently William Saroyan used to steal lemons from the Elias’ lemon tree,” Miguel Arambula says. (personal aside alert: another of my grandfather’s stories was also about Saroyan, who allegedly never paid for his shoe repairs.
“We never would’ve made him pay, but he didn’t even offer …”)
The way McQueen’s brings something personal to the downtown area makes it hard not to bring something personal of your own, especially if you have family connections.
The sense you get is that it’s less about specifics of the food and cocktails you can get at Moses McQueen’s, and more about the feelings they inspire.
The bar interior and secret bookcase at Moses McQueen’s.
“The party girl in me will never die,” Leyva Martinez says.
“I remember this specific era since I’ve been living in Fresno, 2015-2019, it was like something in the air, where no matter what, there was always something to do.
The No. 1 thing I wanted to curate here was that vibe.
Fresno happens to be one of those places where for some reason once you hit like 35, you just stop going out and you just stay home.
I’m fighting against that.
I want our age group to be wide.
I want everyone to enjoy coming here.”
“Make downtown cool again” feels as succinct a description of Moses McQueen’s mission statement as any.
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