Diablo Dish - March '09 Oakland restaurant scene still not slowing down; and more.
BY JULIE MILLER DOWLING
What? The economy is bad? Seems the Oakland food scene hasn't heard that yet.
New restaurants are popping up faster than mushrooms and doing it in style. Sumo wrestlers and taiko drummers dazzled at Ozumo's opening, and the procession of royal restaurateurs planning openings in the new Jack London Square project continues undeterred. "A lot of the talent in San Francisco actually live in the Oakland area, and they want to be a part of the expanding dining scene here,” says Will Miller, vice president of leasing for developer Ellis Partners. "Despite the economy, the fundamental demographics are strong, and they’re looking at Oakland's long-term sustainable dining scene."
Rockridge's A'Cote is opening a new small plates restaurant in, you guessed it, Oakland. Although the Park Boulevard opening is months away, the concept is Pan-Latin, highlighting Mexican and Central and South American cuisine.
Meanwhile, Lake Chalet Seafood Bar and Grill plans a June opening on the top floor of the renovated, century-old Lake Merritt Boat House, where it will serve modern American cuisine. Also coming to Lake Merritt is Sidebar, a new gastropub serving upscale pub food, microbrews, and classic cocktails, which opened in early February. Also in February, Piedmont Avenue was slated to get Adesso, which will serve grilled panini and house-made salumi just two blocks from owner Jon Smulewitz's other eatery, Dopo. The downtown Oakland lunch crowd recently got Banyan 14, Thai and Vietnamese "street food" with a healthy California twist. The owners aim for a 100-percent green eatery, with a progressive recycling program, compostable packaging, natural meats, sustainable seafood, and organic veggies. Also emphasizing green business is Awaken Cafe on 14th, which will soon expand into a 3,500-square-foot lounge, with an organic wine and beer bar, coffee and teahouse, performance space, and expansive art gallery. Whew!
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Since you're already online, here are some helpful links:
In other quarters, however, some entrepreneurs report an upswing in how Oakland customers are responding to efforts to make their businesses special.
"It's going awesome, actually," said Cortt Dunlap, who owns the Awaken Cafe, at 414 14th St. "Since we opened in April, we've found that especially downtown there's a vacuum for independent, community-minded, sustainable business."
Dunlap said he and the business's co-owners discussed the project for years, hitting up friends and family to invest and working hard to get a sense of what neighborhood regulars would want in a new cafe.
"Before we opened, we had a town-hall style meeting; we did conference calls; put out fliers," Dunlap said. "We asked, 'What do you want in a shop like this?'"
The answer, according to Dunlap, was a call to show off Oakland's thriving artistic community, and a desire for "green collar jobs." Dunlap responded with an artist's gallery that cycles monthly and a strict green-product regimen.
"Green materials are between 5 and 15 percent more expensive, but it's what people want these days," he said. Dunlap also said he took a page from San Francisco's Gratitude Cafe, offering friends and early customers a deal that makes them feel like surrogate partners in the enterprise.
"We said that if they buy a $1,000 gift certificate, we would give them a 25 percent value bonus on top of that," Dunlap said. "If they say, 'Hey, I can see spending a thousand bucks in this place over a long time,' it works for everybody. We keep track for them of what they spend and we know their face and their name. ... Everybody wants that 'Cheers' experience, you know?"
"When the Golden Bull bar closed shop last year, denizens of Oakland's club scene gasped a collective beer breathed WTF!?! But when Awaken Cafe opened in the space a couple months ago, the promise of a cool new downtown business district continues to emerge. And besides, now there's somewhere to nurse hangovers on those Saturday mornings after Art Murmur. Run by Burning Man veterans Cortt Dunlap and Kari Christensen, Awaken serves up fair trade java, healthy snacks and organic tea and wine with a Burner's flair in a funky cool atmosphere. For the moment only the small upfront coffee bar is open to the public, but the coming months promise a late night lounge/art gallery/performance space out back featuring a rotating cast of your favorite Oaktown artists and rabble rousers."
"Want to see a model for successful and rapid environmental action? Don't look to the federal government—check out your own town. Here, our list of the 50 communities that are leading the way. Does yours make the cut?"
"Bring Home the Burning Man: Two 30-something entrepreneurs who met at the festival in the desert open a cafe and performance space in O-town."
By Andrea Lampros
"Two Burning Man veterans who believe in unbridled creativity, the power of community and, well, excellent coffee are launching a cafe and performance space in the heart of downtown Oakland, set to open soon...."
"The Obama party has started early by the time I arrive on the block of 14th Street between Broadway and Franklin, which sports that sure sign of gentrification, an art gallery. Next door is the Museum of African-American Technology; next, in an historic building with a restored Art Deco verdigris facade, is the Awaken Cafe, neighbor to the old but sturdy Central Building, new home to the Obama California Campaign. Campaign workers, the hip-hop guys from Blackalicious, who will perform later in the afternoon, and the merely curious wander in and out of the old office building, elevatoring up and down from the third floor campaign suite, not quite finished, hastily painted in red, white and blue. Out on the street, Obama volunteers, some of whom I know from my previous forays into Obama territory, mingle with friends and the press. Cameramen record the scene, even though not much is happening yet, unless you count the shake and shimmy of the kids' inflatable jump hut."
San Francisco Magazine Calls Oakland the "Bay Area's Next Scene"
The cover story from this month's issue of San Francisco Magazine is all about the new cool in Oakland:
"Street by street, the city is coming into its urban own -- one nightclub, art gallery, renovated building, shop, restaurant, and condo at a time. As would-be San Francisco homeowners and businesses chafe at the cost of living and operating there, Oakland finds itself on a relentless drive toward a modern-day revitalization akin to what happened south of Market in the '90s, or the incursion of youthful hipness Brooklyn has seen in the past decade."
To Burundi and Beyond for Coffee's Holy Grail By PETER MEEHAN
Duane Sorenson and a few like-minded coffee hunters around the country will go almost anywhere, do almost anything and pay almost any price in pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee.
Commenting on a Starbucks advertisement that appeared in the the New York Times, the July/August 2007 issue of Adbusters Magazine asked readers to reflect:
"Imagine a city, in which there is only one kind of coffee shop. One kind of burger place. One supermarket. One pub.
Remember what diversity felt like? The fun of discovering something unexpected, in a place you hadn't been before? Variety and local flavour matter for vibrant, healthy communities. Go ahead, ditch Starbucks -- and enjoy some local culture instead."
"According to research, coffee might actually have some health benefits, and it's one of the few drinks available these days that doesn't come loaded with sugar and calories. It might guard against gout, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, and other health problems."
We've been following journalist Ryan Tate's excellent stories in the San Francisco Business Times on the business of restaurants and the revitalization of downtown Oakland.
I recently stumbled across a tongue-in-cheek posting he made on his blog "Covers" in response to the Tribune story about the Awaken Cafe. I wrote him a note introducing myself and telling him that I had evidence that the suspiciously named Friend of the Cafe Larry Biggie actually exists. Biggie must have noticed the link on the Awaken Cafe web site, and also wrote to him. Which prompted this posting from Tate.
We think the exchange is pretty funny and like Tate's style! Let us know what you think!
"This level of coffee connoisseurship is new here, but why has it taken so long for us to catch on? Everyone knows that the Bay Area has pioneered most food categories: We make some of the best wine and most beautifully whiffy cheese in the country, and while the rest of the world is just figuring out what "organic" means, many of our progressive farmers have already deemed their practice 'beyond' it.
"Although Oakland functions as the port for all green beans arriving on the West Coast (and considering that coffee is the second largest commodity market in the world next to oil, that's a lot of beans), SF has long had a reputation for being an undiscriminating 'drip town.' (Or that's how Eileen Hassi, the perky 29-year-old who co-owns Ritual, bluntly puts it.) Especially when you compare us to the Pacific Northwest, home to such revered cafes-cum-roasters as Victrola Coffee Roasters in Seattle and Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland. Indeed, Joel Pollock, Stumptown's head roaster, says that he's thought of SF as a city offering only "really, really dark roasts and having no true interest in single origin." And when I ask Erna Knutsen—the grand dame who's run the SF-based importer Knutsen Coffees for the past 21 years (her beans end up at Thomas Keller's restaurants) -- what she thinks of her hometown's brew, she says this: "I'll give you a clue. I sell very little coffee in San Francisco."
"Gertrude Stein famously said about her home town, Oakland, California, that 'there isn’t any there there.' Surely she would have a different opinion if she were there today and, in fact, many green urban advocates like us wish we were there."
"On the third Thursday of September 2006, in a college auditorium in Oakland, California, 300 people came together to launch a new movement: a campaign for 'green-collar jobs' as a path to economic and social recovery for low-income communities."
"...But now Mr. Schultz is questioning whether Starbucks' drive for growth and efficiency has diluted that experience. In a blunt Feb. 14 memo, he warned executives that the chain may be commoditizing its brand and making itself more vulnerable to competition from other coffee shops and fast-food chains. The nearly 800-word memo questioned whether Starbucks' automatic espresso machines, new store designs and elimination of some in-store coffee grinding may have compromised the 'romance and theatre' of a visit...
"...In his memo, Mr. Schultz wrote that when in recent years the company switched to automatic espresso machines -- which have been used in some stores for at least five years and currently are in thousands of outlets -- 'we solved a major problem in terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time, we overlooked the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theatre.' Starbucks used to have all its baristas pull espresso shots by hand...
"'...While the current state of affairs for the most part is self induced, that has lead [sic] to competitors of all kinds, small and large coffee companies, fast food operators, and mom and pops, to position themselves in a way that creates awareness...and loyalty of people who previously have been Starbucks customers. This must be eradicated,' he wrote..."
