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
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