The roots of the farm-to-table movement run wide and deep in the East Bay. Berkeley’s Chez Panisse and its co-founder and executive chef Alice Waters are icons of the movement, which promotes the use of local, organic ingredients and sustainable farming practices. Today, we see farm-to-table’s influence in everything from third wave coffee shops to school garden programs. But restaurants with innovative business models are still at the core of the trend, each applying environmental practices that work best for their menus. Here are snapshots of three East Bay eateries keeping the principles of local, sustainable cuisine close to heart — and hearth.

Camino 

3917 Grand Ave., Oakland. CaminoRestaurant.com

At Camino, the menu changes daily, but the culinary philosophy stays the same: Quality ingredients reign supreme. Chef Russell Moore, who co-owns the Grand Lake restaurant with his wife Allison Hopelain, opened Camino in 2008 following a twenty-plus-year career at Chez Panisse. When asked to describe Camino’s approach to cuisine, Moore kept it simple: “We’re kind of an idealistic restaurant.”

That idealism — which seeks to honor each ingredient as fully as possible — is grounded in a set of strict rules. All of Camino’s produce and dry goods are organic, while all meat (except for beef) is purchased as whole animals from local farms. Moore doesn’t buy non-locally or from distributors at all, even when that means sacrificing ingredients that he might otherwise want to use. 

Moore also uses a variety of vegetables and herbs grown by one of the restaurant’s neighbors who approached him about supplying Camino with produce from her home garden a few years ago. Moore, who was Chez Panisse’s produce buyer for twelve years, was initially skeptical of the offer. “[The neighbor] asked me to send her a list, and I sent her a list of many, many things,” Moore explained. “A few months later, she brought them all in.”

Now, Moore says he will sometimes receive vegetables and herbs from her up to one or two times a week, though he doesn’t usually ask for specific ingredients anymore. “I might just say, bring what you have,” he said. “Our menu’s different everyday, so it’s easy for us to roll with what we get.” He might receive anything from yácon, a type of South American tuber, to herbs like lovage, Vietnamese cilantro, or anise hyssop. In addition to trading with his neighbor, Moore also receives extra produce from a friend who runs a school garden program in Atherton. Sometimes, he brings in fig leaves and fruit from his home garden in Richmond, too. 

Moore doesn’t limit this homegrown mentality to produce. Camino also has an exchange with local beekeepers, who use Camino’s rooftop to house their beehives. In return, the restaurant receives some of their honey once or twice a year.

Grocery Cafe

2248 10th Ave., Oakland. Facebook.com/GroceryCafe

Grocery Cafe might be an unassuming name for a Burmese restaurant, but this East Oakland eatery’s cuisine is anything but bland. Its dishes are seasoned with herbs and spices grown in the restaurant’s courtyard garden, where owner William Lue tends to a variety of flavorful ingredients, including the world’s hottest chili peppers.

“Whenever someone discovers the new, hottest chili — I jump [on] it,” Lue explained. “I find the seeds and I grow [them] myself.” Right now, Lue is growing both Carolina Reaper and Trinidad Moruga Scorpion chilies, which are currently ranked the first- and second-hottest peppers in the world.

According to Lue, who has been a prominent figure in the Bay Area’s Burmese food scene since the Seventies, the weather in Oakland is perfect for growing the plants and herbs he uses. In addition to chilies, he grows a variety of standard herbs on site, including mint, basil, and chives. He also grows less familiar plants, such as Moringa and Kaffir lime trees. Kaffir lime leaves are used as a garnish for many Burmese dishes, and Lue uses the shredded leaves to add brightness and texture to nan gyi thoke, a type of cold noodle salad.

When the courtyard garden doesn’t produce what he needs, Lue turns to another local source, the Old Oakland Farmers’ Market (Fridays, 9th St. between Broadway and Clay St.), to stock up on fresh produce. He is also currently developing a partnership with Fresno farmers that he hopes will make certain ingredients, like Moringa seeds and Roselle leaves (a type of hibiscus), more accessible in the United States. 

According to Lue, Burmese cuisine’s rich flavors remain unfamiliar to a majority of American diners. He hopes to change that. “Lots of [herbs and spices] need to be introduced to Western palates,” he explained. “It feels good to be able to introduce them and be able to use them in my cooking and my restaurant.” 

Tigerlily

1513 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. TigerlilyBerkeley.com

Tigerlily quietly opened in North Berkeley in January 2015. The restaurant is the second collaboration between Farm League Design & Management Group and East Bay restaurateur Deepak Aggarwal, who opened East Bay Spice Company together in downtown Berkeley in 2013. According to Joel DiGiorgio, co-owner of Farm League Design & Management Group, the unobtrusive opening was part of their plan.

Like East Bay Spice Company, DiGiorgio wanted Tigerlily, which combines Indian spices and cooking techniques with an emphasis on seasonal, local ingredients, to open with a flexible focus, then evolve according to the local community’s taste. Now, just a few months after Tigerlily’s first anniversary, the restaurants is looking to expand its bar menu.

According to DiGiorgio, beverage service is an often-overlooked site of sustainability in the restaurant industry. “Focusing on local beer … sounds too easy to be revolutionary, but it really is,” he said. This is because there are high environmental costs required to import foreign beer kegs, which have to be shipped on boats and then transported to California on trucks or trains. Once empty, the California restaurants then have to ship empty kegs back to their foreign breweries. “It’s extremely stressful on the environment,” said DiGiorgio.

Tigerlily’s bar menu boasts a host of beers from local breweries like Berkeley’s Fieldworks and Trumer Pils, as well as local spirits from Alameda-based St. George Spirits and Spirit Works in Sebastopol. In addition, the cocktail menu uses a variety of herbs, including mint, lemon verbena, rosemary, and lemon thyme, from DiGiorgio’s own extensive home garden. “[Tigerlily uses] a lot of garnishes, we do a lot of our own house infusions — we’re infusing our own cordials, our own syrups … and that requires botanicals and spices,” DiGiorgio said.

But Tigerlily’s emphasis on sustainability and local cuisine isn’t limited to its bar menu. Whenever possible, the restaurant uses local produce, and even sources some of it from DiGiorgio’s family’s organic farm in Sonoma County. This year and next, DiGiorgio says that Tigerlily will be using tomatoes from the family farm for its most popular dish, fried chicken tikka masala, and in cocktails such as the restaurant’s tandoori-baked pineapple Bloody Mary.

“We’re not nearly as sustainable as we truly want to be,” DiGiorgio said. “I don’t know if we ever will be.” Although Tigerlily hasn’t mastered the most optimally sustainable business model, it’s clear that DiGiorgio — and other East Bay restaurateurs — can take small steps to get there by making the most of local resources.

We are all dangerously dependent on the automobile. Today, more than one billion motor vehicles clog the global commons, emitting more than a quarter of all the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions driving climate change. In California, cars and trucks emit 40 percent of all GHG emissions. And the frustrating reality for Californians is that jobs are further away from affordable housing than they’ve ever been; mass transit still isn’t well-funded; and for most people, it’s just so much easier to get around in a car. So, it’s hard to imagine a rapid shift toward a sustainable post-automobile transit utopia. In the meantime, lots of us don’t have a choice. We’re stuck with cars.

Also, let’s face it. Cars are sexy, and fun to drive. They thrill us with a sense of freedom. They’re extensions of us, vessels of identity, meditative spaces, toys to play with. So what’s an aspiring new car owner to do?

Well, one could embrace nihilism and purchase a gauche SUV, something morbidly grotesque like the 2016 Toyota Sequoia, a $45,000 suburban insult to nature named (without irony?) after a genus of plant life — the Jurassic redwoods of California — that may very well go extinct during the coming mega-droughts and firestorms fueled by the thirteen miles per-gallon hubris of millions of proud SUV owners. Or with a little more style, one could buy a muscular dirty-tailpipe eight-cylinder classic, say a 1966 Ford Thunderbird, and careen figuratively toward the cliff that is climate change.

Or maybe the future of transportation could be different. Perhaps new technologies will virtually eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. Recent developments in California might be just what we need to shift gears toward a future in which car buyers can make choices that don’t entail participation in ecocide.

“Cars will be here for as long as I’m here, and probably as long as my kids are here,” Richard Battersby told me in a recent interview. Battersby, who is in charge of the City of Oakland’s vehicle fleet — several thousand cars, trucks and other contraptions — said vehicle emissions are being dramatically reduced. Battersby is optimistic about the pace of technological change.

One of the trends Battersby is excited about is electrification. About ten years ago, the Toyota Prius II won Motor Trend Magazine‘s Car of the Year Award. Ever since, hybrids, which consume less gasoline by relying mainly on battery power supported by a tiny gas motor, have been multiplying on our roads. Nationwide sales of hybrids shot up from 9,000 in the year 2000 to just under 400,000 in 2015, according to the US Department of Energy. The latest models, like the 2017 Chevy Volt, are capable of obtaining 420 miles of non-stop driving with a full tank of gas and fully charged battery, and upwards of 1,000 miles on a single tank of gas if the car is regularly recharged with electricity from a plug-in station.

Battersby, who lives in Fairfield and commutes into Oakland in his plug-in hybrid, said that consumers can expect the variety of hybrids and fully electric vehicles to proliferate. In fact, fully electric vehicles are already having success. While Tesla is the dominant brand, several of the big automakers are offering fully electrical models that are significantly cheaper. For example, the Nissan Leaf costs $29,000 and can stretch 84 miles on one charge. Of course, Tesla’s technology reigns supreme, and the company’s Model 3 (price tag $35,000) can travel 215 miles on a single charge.

But the manufacturing of electrical vehicles has a negative impact on the environment as well. Mining nickel and lithium for batteries is a source of carbon emissions and toxic pollution. And many electric vehicles are recharged with energy from coal-fired power plants — no better for the environment than the nihilistic 66′ Thunderbird option. But according to a recent study by University of Minnesota scientists Christopher Tessum, Jason Hill, and Julian Marshall, hybrid and fully-electric vehicles are far better for the environment if the electricity they run on is generated from natural gas, wind, water, or solar.

That’s good news for Californians who want to buy an electric vehicle. Less than 7 percent of California’s electricity comes from coal-fired power plants, and this should drop to zero after 2025. Meanwhile, new geothermal, wind, and solar projects throughout the state are displacing fossil fuels. Renewables already account for 25 percent of electricity generated in California, and the state-mandated goal is 50 percent by 2030. So if you buy an electric car in California, you’ll be charging it with green energy and running what’s probably the cleanest car in the world.

And that’s really the secret to the automotive industry’s technological shift: California’s proactive state and local governments are creating a growing market for alternative fuel vehicles, and the state is mandating a shift in our energy grid away from fossil fuels.

Oakland’s vehicle fleet, for example, is now about 80 percent alternative fuel (excluding police cruisers), with renewable diesel (produced from plant oils) powering Fire Department and Public Works Department trucks, and hydrogen and electric vehicles serving other city departments. While the public sector is miles ahead of the private car market, Battersby thinks that new state laws and incentives are already working to catalyze a transition away from fossil fuels.

“Without regulatory assistance, the petroleum industry has been successful at killing off competition over the years,” said Battersby. “But once you build in regulatory safeguards, like low carbon and emissions standards, that’s how you encourage private industry to get on board.”

California’s suite of regulations to help electrical vehicles flourish includes millions in grants handed out over the past decade by the California Energy Commission to help establish electrical charging stations across the state, and rebate subsidies of as much as $2,500 to people who buy electric vehicles.

But the big state initiative that will usher in the era of the green car is California’s Advanced Clean Car program. The state Air Resources Board is mandating that there be 1.5 million zero emissions vehicles in California by 2025, and that 25 percent of all state fleet vehicles be zero emissions by 2020. The state is enforcing this by mandating that auto companies make a certain percentage of the cars they sell in California zero emissions vehicles. If an automaker doesn’t sell green cars, then they don’t get to sell any cars.

Ultimately the state’s goal is to push California’s green vehicle fleet to become mainly powered by hydrogen, a fuel that emits zero greenhouse gases, but matches gasoline’s range and performance. Hybrids and battery-powered electric vehicles are a bridge to this vision.

It’s going to take a lot more political and technological innovation to get there, but those who are interested in hearing more details about California’s green car programs can attend the AltCar Expo at Oakland City Hall on May 20 and 21. Oakland’s Battersby will be there extolling the benefits of renewable diesel. There will be talks by Commissioner Janea Scott of the California Energy Commission and Professor Tim Lipman of UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center. And if wonky lectures about fuel cells and ozone levels aren’t your thing, automakers will of course be showing off the latest in hybrid, batter-powered, and fuel cell cars.