Posted on 04/04/2022 6:56:22 PM PDT by nickcarraway
When it opens this spring at UC Berkeley, Cafe Ohlone will be a first of its kind, museum-like restaurant honoring every facet of Ohlone culture, from foraged indigenous foods to the Chochenyo language, which will be heard in songs emanating from among native trees.
Co-founders Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino started the cafe in 2018 in the courtyard of University Press Books. It was the first restaurant ever to showcase the foods of a people who have lived in the Bay Area for 10,000 years.
But this new, larger Cafe Ohlone will expand on that menu, introducing dishes like silky black oak acorn soup and seared venison backstrap, and serve as a community space for living Ohlone to attend language classes and other cultural activities. It comes on the heels of Oakland’s first Native American restaurant, Wahpepah’s Kitchen, which opened in November and whose chef, Crystal Wahpepah, is a finalist for the James Beard award for emerging chef.
“We want this to be a vibrant, thriving space to show our living culture, and where the primary goal is to provide that physical space our community has been lacking for so long,” Medina says.
And it will be housed in an unlikely location: In the courtyard of UC Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, an institution that has long grappled with charges of historical wrongs against the Ohlone people by holding on to sacred Ohlone objects and thousands of ancestral remains.
Medina hopes the restaurant’s presence will bring forth an era of cooperation with the institution, creating avenues for communication and partnerships that reach far beyond the kitchen.
“We understand that the cafe on its own isn’t going to be repatriating our ancestors,” Medina says. “But climate and presence make a difference. We want to see greater healing, new beginnings and strengthening the relationships that have been developing.”
As Medina told the Bay Area News Group, the outdoor restaurant will be divided into three areas. A gated entry will reveal what he calls a “curated culinary and educational ex
Native American fusion food. Buffalo burgers. Venison steak. Otherwise it won’t last the year.
Blackberries and shellfish?
English walnuts?
I looked at the menu.
Where is the Buffalo meat?
iirc the ohlones ate fried grasshoppers
I’d try it. Have eaten weird things all over the world and find most of it pretty interesting if not great. My dad, in the restaurant biz, would not allow any of us to say yuk with out trying it. If we tried and didn’t like any foods, we didn’t have to eat them.
Sounds like a waste of bait, to me.
Care for some Casu marzu?
My mom makes great frybread. And stew. Her native cooking is better than this restaurant.
I’d send you a frybread if you were next door. :)
Send your Mom’s recipe - I’ll post it on the cooking thread :-)
Black walnuts, and a Northern and Southern California walnut would be more likely.
This tribe is specific to the Bay area why would they put bison a food they would never have had access him since the bison did not extend to the Pacific in it’s historical range.
https://tankafund.org/the-return/
Berkeley was always great for cheap exotic restaurants, but this one will probably be pricey.
I experimented with them. Leached and then roasted, they are actually quite bland. They stay soft even after being roasted.
They are high in protein and would, in a severe pinch, be a nutritious additive to soups, sauces, porridge and stews. IMO, they should just be ground into meal before using.
It does take some time to prepare them. They shrink inside the shell if left in the sun for a few days. Out of their shells, they look like small peanuts. I leached them over a couple of days and then dried them in the sun. I did use the oven to roast them.
The blue jays spend most of the summer eating them and hammering the excess into trees for later. I think the squirrels and woodpeckers eat the blue jay stash, though.
That looks vibrant and thriving.
California never had buffalo, a Great Plains animal, so would not be part of their tribal diet, which is what they’re purportedly offering.
OTOH, the venison, ‘shrooms, & shellfish would be good, though I’m betting they use modern cooking methods, rather than “traditional”.
OTOOH, you probably need a professor’s salary to eat there, so it’s moot anyway.
You have to leach them, as I recall, from cub scouts.
Indeed!
Pulverize them, then sprinkle the fine powder on the fine-grain sand of a river bank. Then sprinkle water droplets onto the powder (using a small twig as an aspergillum). This is a time-consuming process! The powder will clump. Carefully remove finger-sized clumps from the river bank, rinse, and put into basket. Repeat.
Some small amount of very fine-grain sand will inevitably remain in the mush. This is why the teeth of the Indians was invariably ground down considerably by the time they reached their 40s.
I did this once when I was a kid in Sonoma County in the 1960s. I was expecting something tasty. Tried adding processed white sugar, cinnamon, milk, etc. - to no avail. Couldn't get more than two spoon-fulls down. Today, even as an adult, I would venture to say that, properly prepared, this mush would be barely palatable. However, if you are an Indian living on the brink of starvation, it would be delicious.
Regards,
I picked a few up off the ground many years ago. We would let our dairy goats out in the yard and they would gobble them up like candy. I did crack them first to get the seed out. Interesting that there is a way to make them palatable and I hope that info dies not become handy someday. :)
Squaw smoking pipe again
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