San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
First Ohlone restaurant opens
Groundbreaking cafe brings rare traditions to UC Berkeley
It takes no less than six months to make acorn soup, a simple but meaningful Ohlone dish.
Acorns must be gathered in the fall, then cured for months until they’re ready to be cracked open and milled into a powder so fine it fits into the weave of a traditional sifting basket. It sits in water overnight — drawing out any bitterness and leaving only sweetness behind — and then cooks down into a thick porridge.
It’s one of the most traditional dishes served at Cafe Ohlone, the much-anticipated and groundbreaking Ohlone restaurant that recently opened in Berkeley. Cafe Ohlone served its first public meal in its new home, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, on Sept. 1. The restaurant opened with limited reservations-only tea hour, lunch and brunch. In October, dinner service will begin.
Cafe Ohlone’s debut marks a momentous historical occasion — particularly given its location at the Hearst Museum, which is in the midst of repatriating remains and cultural objects to native tribes.
The food, made by coowners Louis Trevino and Vincent Medina, are a living reminder of Indigenous foodways and history, like that acorn soup, which became inaccessible after regulations and the privatization of land made gathering impossible, Trevino said. When an elder in their family tasted the soup for the first time in years in the new space recently, memories flooded back, they said. Desserts include a black walnut cake, which Trevino re-created from a family recipe and sweetens with native candy cap mushrooms.
Instead of a la carte menus, Cafe Ohlone offers a series of set meals. For the most casual weekly tea hour ($33), they are serving snacks arranged on redwood boards, like chia flour brownies and fried seaweed with locally gathered teas. During weekend brunch ($110), the boards are more substantial with dishes like the acorn soup, smoked hazelnuts and duck prosciutto served with Acme bread and yerba buena, a native herb. At a recent event for the owners’ families, elders wrapped the prosciutto in the green yerba buena leaves “so it had this minty, salty, savory thing going on,” Medina said. There is also luscious Mt. Tam triple cream cheese from Bay Area cheese darling Cowgirl Creamery — a more modern inclusion.
“It’s this mixture of very oldtime Ohlone culture mixed with contemporary lived experiences,” Medina said. Weekly lunch
($44) focuses on seasonal foods, such as fresh seafood caught in San Francisco Bay, that accompany native foods like a watercress salad tossed in a blackberry and bay laurel dressing, which followers of the Cafe Ohlone pop-up may remember. Look for special drinks, like rose hip mixed with sparkling hops, a reference to the hops fields of Pleasanton, where native people living in Sunol once worked, Trevino said. They’ve even repurposed the salad dressing by freezing it into spheres and serving them with Topo Chico mineral water.
Come October, dinner ($165) will be the most elaborate meal, with dishes like braised quail, venison tartare, Olympia oysters and hazelnut flour pasta with watercress pesto. They plan to highlight local seafood; think halibut crusted in hazelnut flour, served with a salsa made from nasturtium seeds. When Dungeness crabs are in season, they plan to serve the sweet crab meat with a tart gooseberry sauce for dipping.
When diners arrive at Cafe Ohlone, the first thing they see are photographs of Medina and Trevino’s family and illustrations of native tribes from the 1800s projected onto a scrim, or an opaque cloth. Inside the cafe, which took over the Hearst Museum’s outdoor courtyard, are shellmounds (native ceremonial places and burial sites), a hanging curtain made of opalescent abalone shells, redwood tables and an abundant garden blooming with fragrant sage and yerba buena. QR codes accompany the garden so people can learn about the native plants. Recordings of voices of Ohlone elders and children speaking Chochenyo, the tribe’s native language, play from speakers hidden in “singing” valley oak and manzanita trees.
The restaurant has been a long time coming for Trevino and Medina, who started Cafe Ohlone as a pop-up before the pandemic. And there’s a lot at stake: not only educating diners about Indigenous history, but hopes for healing a longpainful relationship between UC Berkeley and the Ohlone people and preserving a dedicated cultural space for the Ohlone people in the Bay Area. Berkeley approved a one-year pilot for Cafe Ohlone. To exist beyond that, it will need to rely on its own revenue.
Medina and Trevino see the space as “a world reimagined” — meaning, “our world, when it’s under complete Ohlone stewardship,” Medina said.