Went to lunch with the progeny at Homeroom. Old school mac n' cheese with a hipster twist. It was delicious! The $10 mac n cheese will definitely fill you up. Don't forget to try the homemade oreos.
FuseBOX
Inexplicably, my car slid sideways across College Ave into the path of oncoming traffic. The guy on the radio (live 105) shouted “There’s broken glass all over 9th street…” seconds before the station went dead. All the way down College people were streaming out of their houses, faces tight. People I recognized as natives. Native Bay Area people like to take earthquakes in stride. We smile at the freaked out newcomers and say “that was fun.” Not this one. I’ll never forget the creeping, sick feeling I had watching early helicopter footage of the Cypress freeway running through West Oakland. The anchorman ...
Taqueria Sinaloa
Maybe it’s just me. I’m tired. The news used to energize me and spur me into action, not make me want a long winter nap. But things seem so bleak now, with our dysfunctional government (controlled by slack jawed fanatics hopped up on personal ambition and bigotry) handing over the crown jewels, the welfare of the american people, to the robber barons. It makes me extremely angry. I want to fire everyone. Being this angry all the time makes me tired. When cynicism threatens to take over, I look around this place. The restored wetlands on the bay waterfront, the ...
Bourbon and Beef
Until I saw all the cute boys in the neighborhood, I was seriously pissed that my mom moved me to Rockridge when I was 14 (in 1975). I was a Berkeley kid. Moving to Oakland was uncool. The kids that hung out on the steps of Chabot School (smoking and drinking) were rivals to the kids who hung out at the 7-11 in Elmwood (smoking and drinking). It was a Jets/Sharks kind of situation. Well, without any real threat of violence. Oddly enough, my parents didn’t take my grievances about the situation seriously. With the perspective of an older person and the ...
Rosamunde’s Sausage Grill
Contrary to popular belief, Gertrude Stein did not disdain Oakland. Her so often repeated (and misquoted) line “there is no there there” was not an indictment of our city, but an observation made in painful nostalgia that the Oakland of her childhood (and her childhood home) no longer existed. The rural Oakland (pop 35,000) that she left in 1891 had given way to an urban Oakland (pop 300,000) when she returned in 1935. But her actual meaning doesn’t matter. The saying so perfectly represents the dichotomy between the perception of Oakland and the reality. To outsiders Oakland is either a thug ...
Trueburger
“Have you found my husband’s body yet?” my grandmother practiced saying in Spanish on her third day alone in the desert. She was in a VW bus in Baja. When it broke down my grandfather rode off on the 90cc Honda dirt bike across the sand dunes to look for help. At the time she was practicing her morbid Spanish, he was waiting for auto parts on the laid back schedule of a small Mexican town. The note he’d written and given to a crop duster to drop to her had (predictably) not made it into her hands. They were adventurous people ...
Grand Lake Kitchen
Getting knocked unconscious is (ironically) the most memorable experience I’ve had on Grand avenue. I woke up on the pavement after a car driving next to me honked so loudly that I swerved into a parked car and flew off my bike headlong and headfirst into the street. I was 12. No one stopped. Likely concussed, I rode home anyway. Later that day my mom yelled at me and my dog bit me. That’s the stuff of country songs right there. That was the summer I was taking sailing lessons on Lake Merritt. In those days, in the late summer and fall ...
Oakland the Heartbreaker
Being an Oaklander sometimes feels like being in love with a jerk. We’ve all been there, right? You can see nothing but his charms through your lust addled eyes but your friends and family are saying: WTF? In law school in San Francisco in the nineties, I overheard a fellow student say, “I’d never live in a suburb like Oakland.” Ouch. It sucks to hear what people really think of your lover. But in reality, Oakland has never depended on the larger city across the bay for its identity. Only San Franciscans compare Oakland to SF. Oakland’s had an image problem my entire ...
Bay Wolf
From the window of my school bus, I saw people (grown-ups!) ripping up asphalt from the park with their bare hands. It was 1971 and we were stopped (impeded by protesters) at People’s Park on Dwight Way. In my mind, I stood solidly with the people, hoping they would prevail against The Man. I’d decided a few years before which side I was on, when the National Guard helicopters circled above our house and the Alameda County sheriffs opened fire on Berkeley protesters (killing one and blinding another). I checked to see if my hair had reached my shoulders yet. I ...
Wood Tavern
In 1980, I had breakfast almost every day with the Moonies. I was a high school dropout with a 10 speed bicycle, a couple of pairs of jeans, and no prospects. I’d roll to College Ave every morning for my croissant and latte at the Aladdin restaurant, which everyone knew was run by Moonies. I resisted invitations from the (unpaid, we later learned) glassy eyed servers to come for dinner and indoctrination. I was only there because they had an espresso machine. Tres hip in those days. My job at the nearby gourmet sandwich shop (Curds and Whey, for the OG ...