Berkeley’s Cafe Ohlone is gone, long live Cafe Ohlone - San Francisco Chronicle

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The Bay Area’s first and only Ohlone food pop-up has shuttered following the permanent closure of its host, University Press Books in Berkeley, last month. Well, perhaps “shuttered” isn’t the right word.

“We don’t want to give the notion that we’re closed for good at all,” says co-founder Vincent Medina. “We’re always thinking of Cafe Ohlone as a fluid thing that can move past any one location.”

When I asked Medina and partner Louis Trevino how best to describe this transition, they emphasized that this wasn’t a closure in the traditional way we tend to think, though the Cafe Ohlone as I knew it, the one nestled in the back room and courtyard of a bookstore, would be gone for good. Like it or not, I instinctively tie the experience of eating with them with the herbaceous scent of nettle tea intermingled with the mustiness of books, opened and examined by countless thumbs: To me, the bookstore ambiance is as much a character in this as anything else.

Cafe Ohlone closed to the public on March 14, a few days before the Bay Area’s blanket shelter-in-place order. Yet the 2-year-old pop-up is just one facet of the work that Medina and Trevino do through their organization, mak-’amham. They have spent the duration of shelter-in-place continuing their work with Muwekma Ohlone tribal members: conducting Chochenyo language classes over Zoom, teaching Ohlone recipes via livestream, delivering meals to elders and learning the craft of making rope from the fibers of rushes and other plants. They’re also starting to organize socially distanced, masked-up salt gathering trips to the salt flats of San Lorenzo Creek in Hayward.

Trevino says that they’ve been taking things very slowly and returning to the lessons learned by their community during past epidemics. Family archives show that, after the mission era, their ancestors in the Bay Area’s urban centers would take to the hills to avoid diseases like the Spanish flu, tuberculosis and measles. They would send scouts once in a while to report on the situation; but in the meantime, they would wait it out. “That’s where we’re at right now,” says Trevino. Like the rest of the community, they’re staying cautious and waiting for the all-clear.

Even if they’re not in a hurry, Medina and Trevino are looking forward to the future of their project, and it’s going to be much more ambitious than another pop-up. “When we do have another restaurant it’s going to be a hyped-up version of what we had before,” says Medina. “It’s going to be sustainable, something that’s going to last. It’s going to be big.” They imagine a self-sufficient, standalone community space, potentially located closer to the core of the Ohlone community in central Alameda County, where the roots of their culture run deep. The space would be open for dining a few days a week, but it would also fulfill what the founders say is an urgent need for an Ohlone cultural space in the Bay Area.

“We have no museum, no dedicated cultural space beyond the homes of family members. We deserve cultural space for us. We’re the first people of this space!” Medina added, “Obviously the government’s doing nothing, so we’ve got to find a way to do it ourselves.”

Through brainstorming with their community and collaborators, Medina and Trevino have also developed a way to bring people the dining experience of Cafe Ohlone in boxed form in the meantime, set to launch in the late summer.

More than simply takeout, the monthly boxes are meant to be experiential and layered: “slow, intentional and curated,” Medina says. “It would be a sensory explosion of Ohlone culture.”

Bound up with handmade rope, the boxes would be filled with gathered herbs and flowers whose aromas would blast out as soon as they were opened: clarifying yerba buena, licorice-like artemesias, black sage, honey-scented manzanita blossoms. Underneath, you would find a seasonal Ohlone meal with all of the fixings, like acorn bread, fiddleheads, smoked walnut oil and chilled cuts of venison with cooking directions.

They’re also working on sourcing tapered candles from a local beekeeper to help set the mood. Ideally, these boxes would be made from sustainably sourced cedar wood. They estimate they will cost around $150, or the same price as the pop-up’s Saturday dinners.

Another key component will be a link to a private Vimeo page, where Medina and Trevino hope to host customized videos of them introducing the meal and sharing aspects of Ohlone culture, just like before. Community elders would be able to join in as well and record snippets of video to include.

“It would be be a collective effort again,” says Medina. The team is optimistic about the project and hope to make 50 to 60 boxes per month in a commercial kitchen. They say it would enable them to keep Cafe Ohlone alive while also allowing them the time to continue their community work.

In their announcement of this project on mak-’amham’s website, the team signed off with this sentiment, written in Chochenyo: “numma, ‘ewweh ṭuuxi huyyuwiš—truthfully, a brighter day is ahead.”

Soleil Ho is The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic. Email: soleil@sfchronicle.com

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