Green Papaya Deli's namesake. Photo by Rudy R.

In July, I was working on a feature article about Lao food in East Oakland for the food section of a major Bay Area daily newspaper. In very early August, a few weeks after I'd finished the first round of interviews, I found out that newspaper's food section was merging entirely with that of another large newspaper operated by the same company, gutting staff (and its already flimsy freelance budget) in a frantic cost-shearing maneuver. Since my piece addressed a unique ethnic community largely confined to a single neighborhood in one distinct part of Oakland--San Antonio--it wouldn't jive with the company's broad new regional focus. At least, that's what my freshly-canned editor told me when she delivered the bad news.

I was deeply bummed--not just because I'd already logged a bunch of hours researching the article, but because the food--as well as the people I'd met, their stories, and the traditions they associated with what they enjoyed eating--seemed so deserving of attention.

I first became really curious about Lao food nearly two years ago, after a tasty meal at Champa Garden, the somewhat venerable Lao restaurant on 8th Avenue east of Lake Merritt in San Antonio--one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the Bay Area, home to close-knit populations of African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians in almost equal proportions. I tried to draw distinctions between its dominant flavors and those most prevalent in the more familiar cuisines of its Southeast Asian neighbors. Like Thai, Lao thrives on interplay between sour and spicy, crunchy and soft, and both cooked and raw ingredients. The effect however is different. Extreme tastes and textures--intense, bold, lush--somehow find lovely balance in the most homespun preparations, and the combinations feel wilder, more jarring. Truly bitter greens are tossed in barely sweet lightly-dressed salads with herbs and raw marinated fish. Crispy fried rice comes wrapped in sheets of iceberg lettuce with preserved pork bits, lime, and scallions peppered throughout.

With Champa Garden as my starting point, I began a gradual tour of Lao flavors in East Oakland. First, I visited Vientian Cafe, a rough-hewn eatery situated a few blocks outside the San Antonio neighborhood, on a barren block of Allendale. The food was uniformly spectacular and stunningly inexpensive. Baked sausage with lemongrass, onion, and chiles--a thin, churro-like cylinder, dark-brown, crusty, and cracked on a bed of raw shredded cabbage--and kao piak, a noodle soup with chicken, nutty fried garlic, and pork blood, particularly stood out.

On several occasions, I lunched at Green Papaya Deli, a tiny storefront on International Boulevard at 2nd Ave. Cynthia Senephansiri is the owner; her mother Lily cooks. For 15 years, the family owned a video store renting and selling tapes and, later, dvds of Lao and Thai films. Its market was niche to begin with, and as people bought and rented movies less and less anyway, the store's business dwindled to a dangerously frail level. About a year-and-a-half ago, Cynthia had the idea to open a restaurant. In the dearth of Lao restaurants around town she saw an opportunity to bring authentic versions of the traditional Lao dishes her family loved to people who had never before encountered them. In the beginning she had no formal restaurant experience, but now Lily spends 7 days and nights a week behind the stove in the kitchen barely visible through the window behind the counter. From time to time, she pads into the tiny dining room to make sure customers are eating the food she sends out with satisfyingly palpable enthusiasm. Lily is small, and her voice is quiet, but her smile sparkles like few I have ever seen, dwarfing everything else in the room, engulfing diners in a luminous maternal aura as she murmurs fretfully about the cleanliness of their plates. I have already written about Green Papaya's otherworldy Lao-style chicken soup, but Lily's papaya salad--vivid, shockingly hot, and pungent with a tamarind-laced dressing made-from-scratch--deserves a very special mention.

The first time I visited, I ate the salad with seven chiles and gently steamed at my corner table. The second time I came through, I tried it with twelve and felt, as I desperately seized fistfuls of heat-dampening sticky rice, as if my chest might explode if I dared to down another slippery forkful. According to Lily's nephew Ken, the restaurant's waiter, his aunt will add up to twenty for the most masochistic (and showy) of chile-fiends. Of course, he had to immediately assure me that I, being white and American, could always expect to receive considerably fewer chiles than I'd request. He meant that kindly, I think, but I did feel a twinge of disappointment. I had been proud to hang, at least for half a plate, with twelve, but my "twelve," as it turned out, was actually more like "six," my "seven" just a few. Ken showed me a massive bag of the mean-looking chiles, and I felt better. They were gnarled blue spikes, each only a third the size of my pinkie--sort of like wicked appendages to a knight's armor. I was even happier to learn my personal expectations for success exceeded Ken's. He chided me for trying to eat an entire order by myself, explaining that papaya salad, especially such a molten rendering, is meant to be shared amongst three or four hungry people, as one sweet, searing passage in a harmonious array of tastes, not a meal in and of itself, or even a snack through which a solitary and stubborn ignoramus should struggle.

After my second meal at Green Papaya, I met the family. Lily came to Oakland in 1981. She told me the exact date of her arrival without a moment's pause to recollect. She likes Oakland, especially the weather. The restaurant is practically in her backyard; its kitchen, she says, is hers. Assertive and business-oriented, Cynthia drew firm distinctions between Lao and Thai, the cuisine to which it's frequently compared, suggesting that Thai food in the United States tends to be marketed to American tastes, whereas Lao restaurants, far fewer in number, are usually direct extensions of home-cooking traditions. According to Cynthia, restaurants identifying as Lao tend to rep their homeland's cuisine more faithfully precisely because the cuisine has no successful Americanized tradition. Thai restaurants are immensely popular, with instantly recognizable dishes -- like tom yum and pad thai. For this reason, many Lao elect to operate Thai restaurants -- to attract customers.

I also met with April Kim, the program director of the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, and Sokham Senthavilay, a Lao woman who has taught cooking classes at the OACC on a few occasions. Sokham showed up with an adorable child in her arms -- perhaps a niece or a grandaughter. As the little girl sat perched on the table, staring me down calmly, her frilly dress cascading over the edge like a curtain, Sokham told her story. She left Laos in 1978. After a few months in jail and a stint at a camp in Thailand, she headed to the United States in 1980, first to Seattle, then to Texas, and finally to Oakland, along with many of her 15 siblings. She used to cook at a Thai restaurant in Oakland but couldn't stand the hours. I told her about the papaya salad mishap, and she laughed, saying that she understood. Even when you're sweating and crying, she said, you always want to eat more than you should -- because the heat makes you feel so good.

Sokham believes home kitchens produce the best Lao food, and with obvious glee, described her weekend ritual in detail. Most Saturday mornings, she wakes up early and heads to the market. With her twelve brothers, sisters, and cousins helping, their own ever-expanding families milling around the house, she starts cooking at 10 a.m. and finishes by mid-afternoon: a full-blown banquet of larb, bamboo soup, papaya salad, grilled fish, and sticky rice accompanied by beer, Johnny Walker Black, and a kind of rice-derived moonshine called Lao Lao. Sokham lives around the corner from Green Papaya, but she's never been there. She rarely socializes or eats outside of her house. She agreed with Cynthia Senephansiri's claim about the scarcity of Lao restaurants. Though it's rarely advertised on menu, she added that some Thai restaurants staffed by Lao cooks can cook some dishes Lao-style if you order them that way -- like papaya salad, which she noted often tastes too sweet for her liking at Thai restaurants. She speculated Thai food might be more familiar to Americans because more Americans have been to Thailand and many more Thai immigrants have comfortably settled in this country.

Laos, Sokham explained, sits in the shadow of Thailand. With the end of the Second Indochina War in 1975, many Lao fled their country for fear of communist reprisals and, like Sokham, ended up in Thailand before finding their way here. Ken's grandfather was one of them too. In Laos, he had owned farms and houses, but after the war, the communist government redistributed all of his properties. Ken described his disappointment as vast and crushing. He went to Thailand and then to Cleveland, where he died after a year. From 1975 to 1996, the U.S. government resettled more than 250,000 Lao refugees in communities around the country, including an estimated 30,000 living in the Bay Area, many in East Oakland--where three modest restaurants stand as clear local evidence of Laos's gastronomic legacy.

A month or so ago, I covered the Center for Lao Studies' First Annual Banquet for the S.F. Weekly's online presence. In an email exchange following the event, the Center's executive director Dr. Vinya Sysamouth mentioned community members had petitioned Yelp to add a category for Lao food, and that Yelp had adamantly refused. Maybe, I wondered, because none of the three Lao-identified restaurants in the Bay Area limit themselves to serving Lao food alone. Vientian Cafe and Champa Garden offer some Vietnamese and Thai dishes. On Yelp, they're respectively identified as "Thai" and "Vietnamese," and "Thai" and, curiously, "Asian Fusion." Green Papaya Deli has a small Thai menu because, as Lily told me, she's concerned many Americans might not eat there unless they see at least a few dishes with which they're already familiar.

You can find the restaurant listed under "Thai" and "Deli" on Yelp.

Wandering the unfamiliar, blandly mall-like environs of Jack London Square, a kind of mini-Emeryville, only with space, better taste, and a harbor view, you might have wondered where all the food-seeking hipsters were. It was Friday night, after all, the opening of Oakland's Eat Real Festival, yet there was no waft of organic pork carnitas, no compostable spoons littering the ground.

But wait, what's in the hand of that guy strolling by? Was it a Mason jar filled with watermelon wheat beer? And was that the Soviet-red logo for Ritual Roasters coffee, painted on the side of a bike trailer peddling (by pedaling) a load of high-octane iced coffee? Hay bales for seats, toddlers clutching ice-cream cones while Mom and Dad downed a brew: this was definitely the place.

Friday's unseasonally balmy night ("Earthquake weather," nodded numerous passerby sagely, but that didn't seem to stop them from promenading along the waterfront, lemon-shiso sorbet dripping down their chins) made a perfect soft opening for the festival, which began with an open-air beer tasting ($25 for your own festival-logo'd glass drinking jar plus 8 tickets for filling it up, or $7 for a single serve) and ice-cream social.

Some real food to go with the beer would have been nice, but that would have to wait until the real crowds arrived on Saturday and Sunday. In the interim, then, there was the rare chance to sample and buy ice cream and sorbet from a dozen local makers with barely a line to be seen. Scream, Ici, Bi-Rite Creamery, Straus Ice Cream, Fenton's, Ceci, and more were scooping flavors ranging from pomegranate (Fenton's) to beet-lemon (Scream, and surprisingly good--like frozen borscht, in the tastiest possible way).

There was an open-air game of Edible Pursuit (who knew the popsicle was invented in Oakland?), a highly competitive canning contest (dubbed, of course, Yes I Can), live jazz and a whole lot of happy cone-licking kids.

Saturday, of course, was a lot busier, but the vibe stayed mellow. There was all that beer, for starters, and plenty of port-a-potties, and a lot of space to sprawl, wander, and lie out on the grass and watch the sailboats breeze by. You could check out the greywater recycling system set up by the crew at Aquaponics, watch cooking demonstrations, stroll through the expansive indoor marketplace to chat up farmers and artisanal jam-makers, or just go get more beer.

Or, if you wanted to eat, you could stand in line. It's inevitable, at events like this that are all about the food, that the main activity ends up being waiting in line. The lines weren't too bad, actually, but they moved slowly.

Very slowly. Watching four guys put together one plate at Jim and Nick's--one massaging the shredded pork into a ball and put it on the bun, one scooping the pimento cheese, another putting on the pickles and saltines, and a fourth chatting up whichever cute girl was handing over her money, I did a little minutes-per-plate x people-in-line math, and gave up, even though I was longing to try a plate made by a bunch of Southern barbecue guys who had driven their rig all the way from Alabama to crash the event and show the West Coast how to bbq.

The trick, I realized, was to pick one long line--like the one for Seoul Food's Korean tacos-- and then send your friends out on recon missions to the shorter lines, so you'd have something to eat while you waited in line for something to eat.

Where the recent SF Street Food Festival skipped actual street food for slimmed-down restaurant eats, Eat Real did keep it real, with taco trucks, soul food ribs and the Sexy Soup Lady in a pink apron straddling her three-wheeled soup cart. And the prices were right, too, with nothing over $5.

Of course, this meant was nearly everything was some culturally-inspired variation on meat and dough, all squeezed down to the size of a slider, from pulled-chicken barbecue on a bun and Korean spicy-pork tacos to pupusas and bite-sized brisket sandwiches. Finding vegetables (beyond salsa and coleslaw) took a little searching, and it helped it if you liked falafel, didn't mind patronizing the fancy-tapas truck of festival co-sponsor Whole Foods, or got there before the veggie-pie folks had sold through their entire inventory. For dessert, there was more ice cream, of course. And cupcakes!

What it was, overall, was a fun local event, a late-summer festival that did feel very Oaklandish, mixing up $3 pupusas with $20 "Street Food" t-shirts.

Listen Live to Novella Carpenter on KQED 88.5FM Fri, Aug 7, 2009 -- 10:00 AM.

Listen to the audio archive of Novella Carpenter on KQED's Forum. (archive posts 8/07 late eve)

Farm City
Novella Carpenter took over an empty lot next to her apartment in Oakland's gritty Ghost Town neighborhood, and over the years turned it into a lush garden and farm complete with bees, chickens, rabbits and even pigs. Urban farms are popping up in even the most cramped corners of densely populated cities, fueled by a desire for good food and a closer relationship with what we eat. Carpenter joins Forum to talk about her new book, "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer."

Host: Dave Iverson

Guest: Novella Carpenter, journalist, urban farmer and author of "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer"

Explore and buy the book "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer" at Amazon.com

Farm City News: Novella Carpenter's blog

Listen to story and view a slideshow of Oakland's Ghost Town Farm on The California Report: Urban Farming in Oakland

It's 4 p.m. on a typical afternoon at Oliveto, and chefs and interns are hurriedly chopping vegetables, stirring pots, de-boning fish and preparing for that night's dinner service, which starts in 90 minutes.
Service people are rushing through the kitchen, carrying glassware or trays of olives. Dishwashers are trying to return saucepans to overhead hooks, without dropping one on someone's head.

It's a frenetic dance that occurs daily at the Oakland restaurant, and to add to the frenzy, it comes with a soundtrack. Many afternoons, Chef Paul Canales blasts acid jazz from the boom box. Nothing like some mind-bending music to sharpen your focus.

For the last two months, I've been part of this dinner troupe, as a stagehand -- a chef apprentice. Starting in April, I took a leave from my job as an editorial writer and columnist for The Sacramento Bee to intern at Oliveto, an Italian restaurant in Rockridge.

It's been a humbling transition. Until April, I worked in a cushy office and shadowed the power players in California's capitol. Now I'm on my feet all day in a hot, windowless kitchen, taking orders from young sous chefs.

Yet in the realm of unpaid sabbaticals, this one can't be beat. Anyone with an interest in food and cooking needs to work in a restaurant, particularly one like Oliveto. Concepts that once seemed so exotic and unattainable -- curing salami, turning out trays of handmade ravioli -- now seem within my grasp.

In recent weeks, I've filleted fresh mackerel, prepared soft shell crabs, cut up and cured pork belly for pancetta and braised porcini mushrooms for cannelloni, which I later rolled by hand.

I've also improved my knife skills. Dicing dozens of onions and carrots, day after day, helps in that regard.
That said, my initial performance was far from stellar. In one of his first assignments -- a test, perhaps? -- Chef Canales asked me to "turn" a potato. This involved peeling a small spud with a sharp paring knife, turning the potato with my left hand.

Within a few minutes, I had managed to insert the knife tip into my left thumb. Blood was running out. As I moved to the sink to wash and bandage the wound, I noticed a faded photocopy on the wall that offered instructions on dealing with an amputated finger.

"Reattachment is always possible," the sheet said. "Stop the bleeding and place the lonely piece in a wet towel..."

Yes, it was one of those "What am I doing here?" moments. But I hung in there. Before starting my apprenticeship, I had read Bill Buford's book "Heat," and recalled that Buford had stabbed himself within days of starting at one of Mario Batali's restaurants.

Oliveto, founded more than 20 years ago, has a long history of training interns, even those who are initially inept. Like other high-end kitchens, the restaurant's menu is labor intensive, especially in the spring and summer months, when farmers and suppliers deliver boxes of artichokes, beans and other produce to the kitchen.

Interns provide this labor for free. In exchange, they pick up tips, training and contacts they'll never get at culinary school. And if they work hard and show promise, they may get a shot at a paying job in the kitchen, should one open up.

People ask me: Is this just a temporary gig? Are you contemplating a career change?

I don't know. My presumption is that I will return to my newspaper job when my six-month stint is over. But I have to admit, the life of a chef is alluring, even with the absurdly low pay. "It gets under your skin," says Canales, who started interning at Oliveto 15 years ago after leaving a corporate telecom job.

Since April, I've been keeping a personal blog, which is largely focused on my day-to-day experience as a kitchen apprentice. For "Bay Area Bites," my posts will be more focused on classic techniques of Italian cooking, and tips and recipes I’ve picked up from working at Oliveto.

Here is one thing I've learned: There is no "magic" to preparing superlative food. The artistry that arrives on your plate at the best restaurants is not prepared by Houdini.

What separates great chefs from good ones is training, practice, creativity, attention to detail and a passion for the food they are preparing. All of these are within reach of home chefs -- those who prefer to do their cooking in more sedate settings, without a soundtrack.

Photo of a mackerel, from the Monterey Bay, right before I filleted it for that night's dinner menu. Photo by Stuart Leavenworth

As a part of Out and About in Rockridge, Market Hall merchants will spill out onto College Avenue for their annual "Picnic in the Street." Enjoy food and wine tastings, cookbook signings, music, and dancing. Children's activities include cupcake decorating and pumpkin painting. There will also be a Cookbook Exchange—bring a used cookbook and exchange it for another (remaining books will go to the Rockridge Public Library).

What: Picnic in the Street

Where: North Oakland's Rockridge Market Hall, along College Avenue between Shafter and Ocean View , adjacent to the Rockridge BART Station
Map

When: Sunday, September 28th, 2008, 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM

How: Admission is free! Costs associated with some activities

Why: At the Chefs Stage several cookbook authors and chefs will demonstrate recipes, discuss and sign their books including:

Joey Altman:
Without Reservations, How to Make Bold, Creative Flavorful Food at Home

Janet Fletcher:
Fresh from the Farmers Market—10th Anniversary Edition

Alice Medrich:
Pure Dessert, true flavors, inspiring ingredients, and simple recipes

Steve Sando:
Heirloom Beans: Great Recipes for Dips and Spreads, Soups and Stews, Salads and Salsas, and Much More from Rancho Gordo

This recipe from the original edition of Janet Fletcher's Fresh from the Farmers' Market, Chronicle Books is perfect for Fall. Keep your eyes open for persimmons, coming into season this month and next.

Quick Persimmon "Ice Cream"

Serves: 4

Ingredients:
2 ripe hachiya persimmons, about 1 pound total, frozen hard
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup buttermilk or half-and-half
Approximately 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
Gingersnaps, optional

Preparation:
Quarter persimmons carefully with a heavy knife. Remove the stems and any seeds. Halve each quarter crosswise. Do not allow the persimmons to thaw even slightly.

Put the chunks in the food processor wit the sugar and process until the persimmon is broken up into small pieces. With the motor running, add the vanilla and the buttermilk or half-and-half though the feed tube. Puree until smooth, stopping the machine to scrape down the sides once or twice. Add lemon juice to taste and puree again. Spoon into balloon wineglasses or compote dishes and serve immediately, with gingersnaps, if desired.

(Photo by brandondesigns)

As summer reaches its August peak (yes, it's foggy this morning in San Francisco) and as families get desperately creative with their staycations, I've been reminiscing about those old car trips of my youth: my mom hopelessly lost somewhere between Denver and St. Louis, my sister and I -- oblivious in the backseat -- singing "Popeye, the Sailor Man!" over and over and over and over, and our many stops at Church's Chicken and Taco Bell, the two places we were guaranteed to find spicy food.

Remember those days, long before Chowhound and Yelp, Google and Mapquest, when forays into new culinary terrain were truly crapshoots? (Cue up the old-timey nostalgia music...) To find good food in an unfamiliar town, you had to depend on three important tricks: Identifying well-fed locals with a keen sense of direction. Quickly judging a restaurant by the number and types of vehicles parked out front (or be strong enough to enter, scope out the menu and dining room, and then opt to leave a restaurant with absolutely no shame at all). And, most crucial of all, befriending taxi drivers and policemen.

Mom's Mad Skillz

Twenty-five years ago my mom, still shy and still learning English, had her own bag of tricks. She'd stop at a phone booth (OMG--remember those!), heft up the dangling white pages from its metallic tether, and scan the family names for Trans, Nguyens, Lams, Les and Dos. Then she'd invest the quarter or two needed to call up fellow exiles, introduce herself as some stranger rolling through town, and then quickly get to the point: where can I find some good food in these parts?

She recently visited me here in California, and I was reminded of her treasure hunting skills. As one of the last people in this country who still don't have an email account, she depends on the old ways. After we picked her up from the Oakland airport, she wanted to stop for a bowl of pho. We scrambled, with our iPhones and our keyword searches, to come up with a place that would hold up to her standards. While we were still trying to locate a good signal, she pointed us over to a group of people who looked suspiciously Vietnamese standing on a corner of International Boulevard. She rolled down the window and asked them where to eat. They gestured to two pho houses nearby. She asked them point-blank: Which one is better? Without hesitating, they pointed to…Pho Ao Sen.

And to the best bowl of pho I've enjoyed in a very long time. Yes, it's a dirty secret that San Francisco is severely lacking in this department. I've accepted mediocre noodles and, worse, lackluster broths as my penance for choosing not to live an hour south of here.

The Whole Chicken

Since pho bo has entered the general lexicon, I won't waste space talking about the beef version. However, I would very much like to encourage you to try pho ga long trung non. Roughly translated, that means chicken and rice noodle soup with innards and young eggs. (Queasy eaters might want to skip the next paragraph.)

If you've ever butchered a chicken, you'll know that along the ovary duct one or two diminutive yolks are awaiting nature's application of egg whites and eggshells. And if you grew up with my mom, you'll also know that gizzards, livers and hearts are delicacies worth fighting over at the dinner table. Even more than a well-executed bowl of beef soup, I admire a restaurant that can create a deeply flavored chicken broth, poach high-quality firm yet tender chicken meat, and present the hallmarks of a freshly butchered chicken: a plate of organ meats and young eggs. Nothing goes to waste, and all the flavors and textures are richly balanced.

At Ao Sen, along with an excellent bowl of pho bo, they've also perfected pho ga. If a plate of innards is not high on your list, order the plain bowl that comes simply with a plate of chicken meat on the bone. Both come with a ginger dipping sauce, whose secret ingredient is obviously chicken fat, so lovely that I ended up slurping it straight from my spoon.

Another wonderful thing about this Oakland outpost is that it opens at 8am every single day of the week. Since pho is a breakfast food, I've always been annoyed by the late opening times in the US. Ao Sen fills a long empty, much mourned gap in my comfort food lineup. Even its airy dining room reminded me of Vietnam, and the familiar fragrance of anise-infused broth that greeted us hit home immediately. Weakly brewed iced green tea, fish sauce on the table, and a straightforward menu all boded well, too.

Sharing and Respecting

My husband asked me not to write about this place, as he was afraid of what might happen if the restaurant started attracting people who complained about unfamiliar food culture (someday, I'll write a piece about the unfortunate conflict between Western diners' expectations and Eastern restaurateurs) or who would change the ethnic makeup of the patrons. Call it the Yelp dip. We've seen it happen, and it's always a sad and frustrating thing to accept what success in the US can mean, in the end, for those not centered enough to know their strengths and acknowledge their limits and bravely forge their way between the two.

But I trust that you, dear reader, will enjoy and appreciate and respect this bustling noodle house. I cannot tell you how excited I am that my mother found it, and I look forward to many sated returns. If crossing the Bay Bridge counts now as a road trip, I'm more than happy to start up the car.

PHO AO SEN
200 International Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94606
(510) 839-6821
Map

The work of Arthur Huang and Mary V. Marsh, perfectly calibrated for this age of confessional eating and exhibitionist documentation, examines the minute rituals of food. Currently on exhibit at Mercury Twenty Gallery in Oakland, the two artists explore our culture of consumption, how we ingest ideas, relationships and expectations along with a few basic nutrients and our daily dose of caffeine.

2002 Diet as Periodic Table

What do you get when you combine an MFA from RISD with a degree in biochemistry and molecular cell biology? If you throw in a healthy dose of OCD and lots of wall space, you wouldn't be surprised to find Arthur Huang's elaborate works of dietary classification. Using data-collecting systems of the scientific method, Huang recorded with painstaking detail what he eats for a year. The display of this information in ordered columns and rows, with their evocative colors shading obscure terminology, reveals beautiful patterns. His chart spans an entire wall. You can step back and take in the amazing human endeavor, or you can step close to study his precise data. He provides a helpful key so you can decipher the information in the table. I was delighted to see that Huang had included among his ten categories of food elements a few of my own favorite edibles: Salty Foods, Sweet Foods and Condiments.

His periodic chart is part of an elegantly curated show, "Inscribere," at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, a gallery within the same complex as Mercury Twenty.

The Coffee Diary

While coffee may have once built empires and fueled revolutions, for most of us, it merely jump starts another workday. Mary V. Marsh bracketed a year of her life and then used the 327 paper coffee cups she purchased to record details of the moment. From mundane routine to memorable events, buying and drinking coffee become interwoven with people, places, movement and repetition. Picking up various cups to read her Sharpie-scratched words, I learned that she ate a pumpkin scone on one day, rode her bike on another and stood in a long line the day when Pete's was down two employees. As I recount this for a food blog, I must admit the experience was both familiar and eerie.

The works of both Huang and Marsh reveal intimate connections within large-scale systems. Even as you wonder about the ways of science or calculate coffee dollars and carbon miles, you can't help but feel connected to the daily lives of two living, breathing, eating individuals.

Mercury Twenty Gallery
25 Grand Ave. (at Broadway)
Oakland, CA 94612

Gallery hours are Friday and Saturday, 11:00 am - 2:00 pm, or by appointment. There will be extended gallery hours on Saturdays, August 4, 11 & 25, 11:00 am - 4:00 pm in conjunction with the Unread Book Project Reading Room. For additional information, please contact mercurytwenty@gmail.com.

In the early 20th century, the area now known as Old Oakland was the commercial nerve center of the East Bay. Today, after a few decades in the shadows, the blocks bordered by 8th, 10th, Clay, and Washington streets are bustling once again.

Exploring the area may only take an afternoon, but the charm of the neighborhood will draw you back time and time again. And, undoubtedly, as Oakland's tarnished reputation begins to shine again, Old Oakland will continue to flourish as well.

The best day to visit is a Friday, when the bustling Farmer's Market (voted the best by East Bay Express) is operating. Open from 8am - 2pm every Friday year round, you'll find everything from Asian produce to live oysters and other fish to all manner of flowers and potted plants.

Wander the streets, marveling at the gorgeous brickwork and Victorian architecture, then head to GB Ratto's, an Italian market that's been in continuous operation since 1897. The current site (827 Washington St.) includes a wonderful deli and cheese counter, along with all manner of pantry staples in bulk and specialty items from Europe.

By now you'll want a bite to eat. Caffe 817 at 817 Washington Street) serves up wonderful breakfasts, sandwiches, and salads (all made with organic ingredients) in a charming Tuscan-inspired atmosphere punctuated by artwork from local artists. Don't miss their perfect lattes and espressos, best enjoyed at a sidewalk table watching the world go by.

Continuing down Washington St., head to the Housewives Market (between 9th & 10th streets), housed in the former Swan's Marketplace building is an old-fashioned market with several vendors including a fishmonger, two butchers, a sausage-maker and liquor/wine shop.

The Swan's building also houses the Museum of Children's Art, or MOCHA. Founded in 1988, MOCHAs mission is to "ensure that the arts are a fundamental part of the lives of all children." This adorable urban museum is a great way to keep the kids entertained for a couple of hours--don't miss the drop-in workshops.

Spend the rest of the afternoon perusing the shops and galleries tucked away all over this little gem of a neighborhood. Don't miss A-1 Fish Market (which isn't really a fish market at all, but a store for anglers!).

As the day winds down, head over to Pacific Coast Brewing Company for a sampler of their tasty brews (I love their Imperial Stout, brewed in the style of the Russian Czars).

Dinner is at the newly-opened Tamarindo Antojeria Mexicana, a delightful small-plate restaurant showcasing the regional flavors of Mexico. Don't pass up the Cajeta Crepe for dessert.
And thus your day in Old Oakland comes to an end. Hopefully, you'll have a sense of the history that Oakland bears witness to, and you'll understand that the analogy that Oakland is to San Francisco as Brooklyn is to Manhattan really does apply.

posted by Fatemeh Khatibloo-McClure