Food & Drink

When I arrived in the Bay Area, I was immediately made aware of and drawn to three matriarchal spaces: Alice Waters and her incandescent Garden of Eden. Bette Kroening, always front and center at her Fourth Street...

Stephen Phillips and his wife were saving up to buy a house—that is, until he asked to use that money to start making canned honey wine. Believed to be the oldest alcoholic beverage, mead is made by diluting...

Chas Barwick defines a good biscuit as, “One that doesn’t crumble to pieces when you bite into it, and really butter-forward.” Barwick opened Town Biscuits last fall with her husband, Will Kovach, a chef with 15 years...

This aging body doesn’t absorb sugar the way it used to. The heady days of rushes and highs are behind me. Whether it’s disguised in pastries, swimming in scoops of ice cream or layered in cake, sugar...

When we walked into the new Turkish restaurant on Berkeley’s Fourth Street, more than half of the tables sat empty. But without a reservation, even on a sleepy weeknight, they weren’t seating customers inside or outside on...

Since last fall’s crabbing season, Greenling Fish Market has sold locally caught fish—halibut, cod, rockfish and salmon—at the South Berkeley Farmers’ Market. The Greenling setup has a completely different backdrop at Fisherman’s Wharf in the city. I...

In 2021, Joyce Tang started Bake Sum at the Bread Project’s commissary kitchen. Five years later the bakery moved into a second location in Alameda. Since those first pastry box pop-ups in Berkeley, Bake Sum has expanded...