San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The Bay Area’s most intriguing pop-up
Think you know California cuisine? Cafe Ohlone sets it straight.
On a recent Saturday evening, I was delighted to eat nuts, berries, fish and upland cress on a compostable plate while watching a Powerpoint presentation in a bookstore. The 11 attendees of Cafe Ohlone’s Saturday night pop-up dinner watched with rapt attention while co-founder Vincent Medina told the history of indigenous people in the East Bay. As we sipped stinging nettle tea and nibbled on walnut flour biscuits, he outlined the rich cultures of communities like his own, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, and how European and Mexican settlement of the area came close to destroying everything.
We had each paid $100 for this. If I had just looked straight down at that single plate, I wouldn’t have felt great about the money I’d spent. But after looking up and listening to the presentation, I changed my mind about how I considered its worth. I know that adjusting expectations of how much food $100 should buy is a hard sell, but stay with me here.
Cafe Ohlone is a pop-up that began in the late fall of 2018, the passion project of Medina and his partner Louis Trevino, a fellow activist and member of the Rumsen Ohlone community. Cafe Ohlone’s other weekly set meals are priced differently: This $100-per-head dinner is their priciest service by far. On Tuesdays, assorted snacks and teas are $15; on Thursdays, a single-plate lunch is $25; and on Sundays, a brunch meal is $50.
On these days, you can walk past University Press Books’ shelves of poetry, cookbooks and anthropological texts to find the two men presenting their takes on precolonial cuisine in the rear courtyard. They begin the service with prayers in two languages — Chochenyo and Rumsen — that the men learned at great pains by piecing together old recordings left by the last known fluent speakers. After dedicating a plate of food to their ancestors, the men serve their guests.
For Thursday lunch, I received a plate of smoked and baked Feather River salmon set next to a generous portion of Ohlone salad, made from upland cress, amaranth seeds, hazelnuts, blackberries and sorrel, dressed in walnut oil and berry juice. Also on the plate: a blackberry and bay laurel sauce, and a chocolate chia pudding. The ingredients before us were sourced from indigenous foragers, fisherfolk and purveyors; some were even foraged by Medina and Trevino themselves. Even the salt in the shakers on the table was gathered by the men and their friends from salt flats in the San Francisco Bay. As consumers, I think we realize that conscious sourcing is going to be more expensive, and those costs are compounded by Medina and Trevino’s dedication to working with fellow Ohlone people when they can. How much is that level of expertise, passed down through generations, worth?
During their lecture, which precedes every meal at Cafe Ohlone, Medina and Trevino detailed how they reconstructed the recipes through research, tracing them through the shadows of the cultural erasures and environmental degradation that followed colonization. In the rancherias and reservations, native Californians began to eat moles, tortillas and fry bread made from the rations they were allotted by colonial overseers. Thus, Medina himself barely knew anything about this food as a child. What they were able to bring together through this work, Medina emphasized, “is nothing short of a miracle.”
There’s an inherent assumption of value in a coursed-out meal versus one that’s just laid out on a single plate, but the presentation at Cafe Ohlone is just as intentional as the cadence of an omakase meal. This is how Ohlone people eat, by picking up salad in one bite and dessert in the next, then dipping into the sauce and seeing how the flavors play with each other through creative juxtaposition. In Rumsen, the word “mutt” refers to this act of eating everything all at once. When mixed with the blackberry sauce, the salad’s peppery greens took on a sharp character. I followed with a bite of salmon to chase that sharpness with smoke and oily fat. A sip of lemon-infused nettle tea quieted all of the flavors so I could reset and pursue a different permutation. It’s like reading through a choose-your-own-adventure book multiple times in one sitting.
“Repetition is very common in our culture,” Medina told me later via phone. When Ohlone people create art, tell stories and cook, words and concepts — memes — repeat and build upon each other with each iteration, like how fractals can create beautiful images by replicating a single pattern.
When I came back on a Saturday for dinner, the main course was plated similarly, though the portions were more substantial. My colleague and I left full, though not uncomfortably so. The meal literally overflowed before us: The table was decorated with plates of small hazelnut flour biscuits and heaping shells full of tart yellow ground cherries, perfect for popping into our mouths throughout the meal. The biscuits were light and crumbly, reminiscent of Lebanese maamoul cookies without any of that orange blossom water perfume, and I used them to sop up anything and everything juicy that appeared before me. We were given two amuse bouches: a bite of dried foraged grape, bay laurel nut truffle and mulberry on a watercress leaf — slight whiffs of PB&J here — and a piece of acorn bread that had the consistency of a Vietnamese meatball. Acorn flour, the main ingredient in the latter, takes days to harvest, shell, leach and grind; it has been the core nutritional building block of Ohlone society from the beginning. When cooked down into a paste and cooled, it takes on a gelatinous character that lovers of Korean dotori-muk (acorn jelly) would find evocative.
The main dish featured skewers of smoked salmon and black trumpet mushrooms, with the latter taking on the dank chewiness of grilled squid. Also on the plate were soft-boiled quail eggs, a heap of Ohlone salad and a pesto made from Indian lettuce. On that last item: Many of you may know Claytonia perfoliata better as “miner’s lettuce.” However, Medina and Trevino use the other term for it to divorce the green from the miners who, during the Gold Rush, enslaved and killed many of their people.
Medina, who is the main talker of the duo, regularly sprinkles linguistic tidbits like that into his lectures. I appreciated his reminder to avoid talking about American Indians purely in the past tense: “We’re right here,” he said with a smile. “We’re still alive.”
While I worked through my plate, Medina noted that the meal was inherently free from refined sugar, alcohol and gluten, because those components came after the Ohlone communities came into contact with outsiders. “Those things have caused a lot of harm in our communities,” Medina said, referring to how the Western diet has caused heart disease, diabetes and alcoholism to become epidemics in his community. So they swap white sugar for coconut sugar and serve tea at happy hour instead of liquor.
The meals that I’ve had at Cafe Ohlone, with all of their sensory pleasures and displays of the richness of California’s woods and rivers, leave no doubt in my mind that the local foodways had been doing just fine before Europeans arrived. It feels impertinent to credit the sustainable food movement with Cafe Ohlone, as some other commentators have, when their project is all about rebuilding what was normal in the past. “Farm-to-table is nothing new here,” Medina said. “To not acknowledge that is adding to our erasure.” This dynamic is akin to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: Precolonial cuisine cast the shadow that we’ve assumed was the real thing all along.
It’s not all gloom, though. After each of my meals there, the entire table was taught how to play traditional Ohlone games, which lightened the mood considerably. When we counted to three in Chochenyo with Medina and Trevino, it was the first time most of us had spoken loudly at the event. And when we played together with dice made with black walnuts and abalone shell, it was a tactile shift that broke the ice. (I was on the losing team both times and I’m still salty about it.)
Yet it was the lecture that convinced me of the value of the dishes in front of me, transforming the one-plate meals into precious glimpses into a style of cooking that was almost lost to history.
I needed to know that context to feel right about paying what I did, to know that tribal members harvested salt the old way and gathered tea leaves in the dead of night to make the meal. Think of it this way: As a Vietnamese American person, I can go out and eat bun rieu or hamburgers anytime I like, and at practically any price. That’s also one of the many reasons why we seek out restaurants, especially when we feel like a minority. (Who among us hasn’t at least checked out a McDonald’s while abroad?)
But for Ohlone people, being able to eat their own food at a restaurant — the dishes that affirm their senses of cultural belonging and shared human experience — has been near impossible.
It’s hard to tell if Cafe Ohlone is a true business or art project. There’s a looseness to the experience that tells me that the founders aren’t really in it for the money: You won’t meet any servers trying to upsell you $150 Perigord truffle supplements with your Ohlone salad. Yet like many rarefied tasting menu experiences, this project asks patrons to go beyond the basic idea of going out to eat for sustenance. Rather than emphasizing pure artistry, Cafe Ohlone’s story is what makes it valuable.