“When you walk into Café Ohlone, you get to see a world reimagined.” That’s how Vincent Medina describes the experience of arriving for a meal at the Berkeley, California, restaurant that he opened with his life and business partner, Louis Trevino, last August. They’ve designed the space to pay tribute to the culture of the Ohlone people, the area’s original residents. Thanks to an intricate network of speakers, patrons entering the mostly al fresco space hear an ambient chorus of frogs, birds, crickets, and mesmerizing dialogue in the Chochenyo language. “It’s all meant to be living,” Medina says.
Café Ohlone’s presence serves as a rebuke of sorts to the University of California at Berkeley, which was built on the land of the people who’d lived there for thousands of years and has housed Ohlone remains and artifacts for at least a century. The slow process of repatriation (the return of ancestral remains as well as Ohlone cultural inheritance) has yet to be resolved.
The menu celebrates traditional, hyperlocal ingredients such as stinging nettle and elderberry, venison and salmon, oyster mushrooms and acorns. “Our elders talk about acorns as a luxury food,” Medina says, and diners seem to agree: Café Ohlone offers a limited number of seatings each week (always booked within minutes of being posted on the website), and Condé Nast Traveler recently named it one of the best new restaurants in the world.
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