Food & Drink

When we walked into the new Turkish restaurant on Berkeley’s Fourth Street, more than half of the tables sat empty. But without a reservation, even on a sleepy weeknight, they weren’t seating customers inside or outside on...

Since last fall’s crabbing season, Greenling Fish Market has sold locally caught fish—halibut, cod, rockfish and salmon—at the South Berkeley Farmers’ Market. The Greenling setup has a completely different backdrop at Fisherman’s Wharf in the city. I...

In 2021, Joyce Tang started Bake Sum at the Bread Project’s commissary kitchen. Five years later the bakery moved into a second location in Alameda. Since those first pastry box pop-ups in Berkeley, Bake Sum has expanded...

Laminated pastries are my primary vice. If they’re in any way descended from or related to their European ancestors, I’ve sought them out in every Bay Area county. But Scandinavian baked goods have never held my attention—at...

Umami Mart started as a blog and then materialized IRL as a pop-up in Oakland before expanding into its current incarnation as a specialty market and sake bar. Friends since childhood, Kayoko Akabori and Yoko Kumano were...

Shortly after Sightglass Coffee opened on Seventh Street in 2011, a friend of mine walked me through SoMa to the San Francisco cafe and roastery. The combination of exposed beams, cathedral-like windows, giant bags of coffee beans...

When Crystal Wahpepah opened Wahpepah’s Kitchen five years ago, Native food spaces were, even that recently, still hard to find. When she was a child, Wahpepah told me, she never saw or set foot inside a Native...