From Levi’s fashion to restaurant design
There’s a thin, linear tattoo on Rachel Konte’s right hand that, at a glance, can be mistaken for a vintage piece of jewelry. Depending on the light, the ink appears to flicker, drawing attention to the floral pattern along her wrist.
When asked about the tattoo on a recent Saturday morning at Red Bay Coffee in Oakland, which she owns with her husband, Keba Konte, she raised the sleeve of a well-worn Army-green sweater and sighed briefly. “There’s actually an interesting story behind this.”
Over the next 15 minutes, Konte talked about her childhood in Copenhagen and her Norwegian and German adoptive parents before delving into the history of Danish porcelain from the 1700s. It turns out the tattoo is a re-creation of those designs.
“Danish people will recognize it,” she said. “Other people will see it as something more exotic. For me, it’s a little secret thing for my heritage.”
Konte is a storyteller. Over coffee and tea, she wove together the details of her sprawling career as a clothing designer and interior decorator. Buried within the stories was the revelation that Konte’s style has influenced several notable restaurants and cafes in the Bay Area.
She spent 15 years as a designer and director of women’s products at Levi Strauss before leaving the corporate fashion scene during the Great Recession. In 2012, she opened OwlNWood, a boutique clothing store on 9th Street in Old Oakland. The shop is known for its smallproduction, locally designed products like jackets, sweaters, perfumes and handbags, all of which Konte curates daily.
“Everything and everyone has a particular vibe and style. I try not to impose my style onto other people,” Konte said. “I truly love that magic moment where styles just seem to fit together. It’s the moment when a person finds something that they truly love and they just go with it.”
Konte’s path from designing handbags to designing restaurants has been more chaotic. Her solo operation often involves working on projects with her husband or, in the latest case, providing assistance to a friend in need.
Bay Area restaurant design has been dominated by high-powered companies like AvroKO, the company behind the design of George Chen’s $20 million-plus China Live project on Broadway and the recently closed Michael Mina destination RN74 in the Millenium Tower. Design fees can be high; upper-end projects like Adam Tortosa’s Robin in Hayes Valley reportedly paid as much as $25,000 in consulting fees to the owners of the San Franciscobased Ne Timeas restaurant group alone. In this highend world, with her nominal fees, Konte is an outlier.
Konte quietly entered the field in 2006 while still working for Levi Strauss. That year, she and her husband took over a space on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, formerly the home to long-standing Smokey Joe’s Cafe, and turned it into Guerrilla Cafe.
The result was a space with a distinctive Afro-activist appeal. The logo, which Konte designed, was a gorilla wearing shades reminiscent of Black Panther Huey Newton and a Che Guevara beret.
“One of the pieces that I put in there that I loved was this vintage lamp from Denmark. It was black and copper and really just fit the space well,” Konte said. “We had a rotating mural inside showing cultural icons as well. I brought in Eames chairs because I felt they fit the vibe of the space.”
Next for Konte came Chasing Lions, a cafe on the campus of San Francisco City College that she opened with her husband. The cafe sold artisan-roasted coffee, specialty drinks, handmade soups, salads and sandwiches. Once again, Konte took the lead on the location’s aesthetics and branding.
“The idea behind the name was just chasing something that was much larger than you. Being fearless. So that’s why for the logo I chose to go with the lion and those black and red colors,” Konte said. “I wanted the space to feel inclusive on the campus. It wasn’t a large space but having the color scheme throughout it made it flow.”
By this point, though her heart remained in clothing and accessories, Konte was adjusting to the restaurant design world. She recognized she had a knack for the process. Her most significant foray in the field came in 2014 with the launch of Red Bay Coffee.
The socially conscious, blackowned coffee company was pushed to prominence by its product and the fact that the brand wanted to transform what has historically been a homologous industry. Konte created the logo, from the fonts used for its lettering to the color schemes at its two locations.
Red Bay Coffee now has a national footprint, with wholesale accounts at 23 Whole Foods locations and 15 Safeways, as well as companies such as Pandora, Facebook and Square. The company sells the equivalent of 1.4 million cups per month. This surge in popularity recently helped Red Bay open a new coffee bar inside its 6,000-square-foot production facility in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood. Konte designed it, of course.
“I just loved how raw this space felt when I first saw it. The exposed wood on the ceiling, the blank walls, these floors, it’s just a beautiful space,” Konte said. She works within the new cafe on days when she isn’t at OwlNWood. “I loved the contrasting colors, like the black on the walls and the white paint in other areas. Plus, the industrial nature of the space, with our coffee equipment clearly visible next to the exposed wood, it just flows together.”
Konte said her most complex project to date has been Kaya, the Caribbean restaurant that Kingston 11 chef Nigel Jones and Daniel Patterson’s Alta Group opened in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood last month.
Jones also worked at Levi Strauss in the 1990s and 2000s with Konte before leaving the business to pursue a culinary career. He knew she had a great eye, so when Kaya, his first foray into San Francisco’s food scene, became a possibility, he reached out for her assistance.
Konte only needed to see the space once to understand what Jones wanted to convey: a Caribbean vibe that was representative of his culture and inviting to those unfamiliar with it. Before the concept had welcomed its first customer, it was already being identified as one of San Francisco’s most notable restaurants of 2018.
“The timing was just really tight with everything,” Konte said. “We only had a few weeks to get the space looking the way Nigel wanted, so that meant moving quickly. We also had to be honest about what could be accomplished in that time. I didn’t want to force my style onto Nigel, so we’d just discuss ideas, from the colors to logo and branding.”
The Kaya space is filled with warm hues, including a vibrant blue at the main seating island in the middle of the restaurant and along the bottom of the walls. The upper areas of the walls are a bright white. Recycled wood rims were added to the restaurant’s moulding and around the bar’s edge.
“It turned out beautiful,” Konte said.
For the moment, Konte adds, her restaurant design career is on hiatus. Kaya still has design improvements in the works. But she’s once again turning her focus back to OwlNWood and Red Bay Coffee.
Her coffee company recently secured the trademark for “To the People,” a phrase that previously belonged to the Black Panther Party. She said it provides a whole new avenue to pursue in terms of branding.
As a cool, 63-degree breeze curled through the main sitting area of Red Bay Coffee on this Saturday morning, twisting the rising steam from Konte’s cup of lemon-flavored Earl Gray tea, she halted the conversation for the first time in more than an hour and took a long sip.
“I’m not searching for new projects, but whatever comes, comes,” Konte said with a smile. “But then again, you have those magic moments where projects are just meant for you. You can’t ignore those.”