In this age of infinite food blogs, carefully calibrated PR hype, and Yelp reviews posted five minutes after a restaurant first puts up a sign in its window, it’s easy for a food writer to get caught up in the chase for the Next Big Thing. In food, as in most things, we tend to prioritize the new and exciting over the steady and established — or what Bette Kroening, co-owner of the 34-year-old Bette’s Oceanview Diner (1807 4th St., Berkeley), calls the “old and exciting.”

But look: It’s a minor miracle if a restaurant can keep itself afloat for even three years — to say nothing of ten, twenty, or ninety years, as has been the case for Genova Delicatessen (5095 Telegraph Ave., Oakland), which has anchored Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood since 1926, but will likely be forced to close this spring due to a looming rent hike.

It’s instructive, then, to consider what “secret sauce” — to borrow a phrase from Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf — has helped keep these iconic eateries plugging along, as deliciously as ever, for all these years. When you sit down to eat a stack of pancakes at Bette’s or stand in the sandwich line at Genova, you’re getting a food experience that hasn’t been shaped by the latest culinary fad. What’s more, you are in a small but tangible way making a connection to East Bay history — a history that is, in the face of rising costs and displacement, in danger of being forgotten.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Bette’s and Genova is how little the places have changed over the years. Kroening said that when she opened Bette’s — with her husband Manfred Kroening and her friend Sue Conley, now the proprietor of the Point Reyes Station-based Cowgirl Creamery — in 1982, she drew inspiration from a diner that she frequented when she was growing up in Teaneck, New Jersey. A giant slice of cherry pie hangs from the ceiling near the entrance. An old-fashioned jukebox boasts an enormous, eclectic collection of 45s — and was acquired by Kroening and her partners even before they purchased the diner’s stove.

Then and now, the menu covered the gamut of American breakfast standards: pancakes, corned beef hash, home fries, and lots of crispy bacon. But instead of embracing your typical greasy spoon aesthetic, Kroening wanted her diner to have more of a fine-dining ethic. Everything is made with a little bit more care than you might expect from a short-order breakfast cook — the Eggs Benedict is topped with a beurre blanc sauce instead of hollandaise, and scrambled eggs are served soft and custardy like how the French prefer them. The menu has expanded a bit over the years, but Kroening has essentially been serving the same food for the past three-plus decades.

If anything has changed, it’s just that the restaurant has gotten a lot more popular — thanks, in part, to a 2010 appearance on the Food Network show Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, which Kroening credits/blames for the fact she can never take the diner’s famed soufflé pancakes — which are cloud-like and “kind of a pain” to make — off the menu.

Of course, with popularity comes a certain shift in clientele. When Bette’s first opened, Berkeley’s ritzy Fourth Street shopping district was mostly populated by home improvement stores — catering to hippies who had saved up enough money to buy a Victorian, Kroening said. Many of her early customers were carpenters and contractors. But even if Bette’s has become more of a tourist destination, for Kroening, the restaurant is still defined by its regulars. Come at 6:30 a.m. on a weekday, and you’ll see the same people crowded at the counter every day — many of them blue-collar folks enjoying a beer at the end of a graveyard shift.   

Recently, I braved the famously long line for weekend brunch for the first time in at least two years, and, if anything, the food was even better than I remembered — the omelet, tender in the middle and stuffed, French-style, with a simple filling of herbed cream cheese; the bacon, extra-crispy; the pancakes, fluffier than just about any other version in town.

Meanwhile, Genova Delicatessen’s second-generation co-owner David DeVincenzi, whose father bought the business in the Fifties, said the deli is one of the last vestiges of the time when Temescal was a thriving Italian-American enclave. DeVincenzi, too, has been working at Genova since he was six years old, when he’d get picked up every day at Sacred Heart Grammar School and dropped off to learn the trade from the old Italian guys in the back.

“You either learned or you got kicked out,” he said.

The sad news is DeVincenzi doesn’t have much hope that the deli will be saved — citing the fact that the landlords are being “completely unreasonable.” At most, he’ll try to install a counter inside the Genova’s factory on Broadway so that customers can buy prepared lasagnas and ravioli. But the deli counter will be no more. “All I can say is, ‘Goodbye,'” DeVincenzi said.

If that’s true, it’s a damn shame, because there isn’t any other place like Genova in Oakland — nowhere else where you’ll find a whole lineup of wise-cracking deli men and bad-ass deli ladies who will assemble your sandwich to order meticulously, weighing out each portion of prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, and roasted peppers. There’s a strong case to be made that the “Genova Salami” — a monster of a deli sandwich stuffed with salami, prosciutto, mortadella, provolone, marinated mushrooms, and a nice hit of oil and vinegar — is the best cold sandwich you can buy in the East Bay, bar none.

So I plan to stop in for lunch every chance I get until the deli’s last day of business — probably sometime around May 1, DeVincenzi said. And, barring some final-hour miracle, that will be that.

That’s the basic truth of the matter: We need to appreciate places like Bette’s and Genova while they’re here. Because once they’re gone, they’ll be gone forever.

For 23 years, Thelma Harris Gallery has been a burst of color on College Avenue. It’s a gleaming trove of both historical and contemporary works by artists of color from around the world. Imported African masks and sculptures reign over the space, while bold, colorful paintings cover the walls. The gallery’s eponymous owner and curator specializes in contemporary painting and sculpture by Black artists and deals sought after pieces by WPA artists and Harlem Renaissance icons, including Palmer Hayden and Aaron Douglas. While Oakland’s largely DIY art scene tends to favor local emerging artists, Thelma Harris Gallery has matured into an anomalous destination for international collectors.

Much like their gallery, Thelma and her husband Terry Harris are vibrant and loaded with art world insights. They both speak with a speed that hits you like a jolt of caffeine, and they interrupt each other constantly to digress into nostalgic anecdotal tangents. The couple said they started the gallery simply because they’ve always been “art addicts.” Of course, the full story was slightly more complicated than that.

When she moved to Oakland in the mid-Seventies, Thelma Harris wanted to collect art by Black artists, but couldn’t find it anywhere, she said. After searching for years, in 1987 she finally decided that she should fill that void herself by becoming an art dealer. She hoped to become a platform for artists of color to sell their work, and a resource for local people like her who wanted to buy it. So, she took out a loan for $5,000 and started to collect imported African art.

Harris, who was working an office job at the time, wasn’t yet an expert on contemporary Black art. In school, Black history had basically been omitted, she said. “I think one time they mentioned, maybe, Jacob Lawrence. But if you blinked, you would have missed it.” But, throughout the late Eighties, Harris became intimately familiar with the scene by travelling to see shows specifically focused on showcasing Black artists.

Then one Thursday in 1990, Harris’ framer suggested that she start a gallery. That Sunday, Harris drove to a vacant storefront on Grand Avenue that had caught her eye. At nine the next morning, she called the owner from work in San Ramon and by her lunch break she was sitting in his office, showing off her paintings and artist roster. That evening, she returned to seal the deal. She offered him what money she could and paid for the rest in artwork. Not long after, in November of 1990, the gallery had its first show.

Despite having a gorgeous 45,000-square-foot storefront and a well-attended opening, Harris didn’t sell a single piece for the first few months. At that point, she and her husband considered giving up — maybe there just wasn’t a local market for original art by Black artists. But, based on advice from Terry’s uncle — “You just gotta be there when they’re ready” — they decided to wait it out a few more months. Business picked up a bit, and two years later, they moved into their current Rockridge location. “Here we are 25 years later,” said Thelma Harris. “You just gotta stick in there.”

That motto has repeatedly worked out for Thelma Harris over the years. For the first four years that she brought Bay Area artwork to a New York art fair, she didn’t sell a thing. People want to buy work by artists they recognize, she explained, even if they only recognize them because their work was at the booth the year before. Simply re-presenting the artists proved crucial. Many of the artists that Harris has worked with closely were still somewhat neglected by a white-washed art world when she began collecting their work. Now, their work is being bought by museums.

By continuously promoting artists like Claude Clark, Jonathan Green, Artis Lane, and Ed Dwight, the couple has played a crucial role in garnering recognition of and appreciation for their work. “Appreciation does not just mean money,” said Thelma Harris, “but appreciation of a culture.”

Joaquin Miller once described the Bay Area as a “careless, languid Arcady,” freighted with the perfume of yucca blossoms, softened by warm sea winds drowsing over dreamy hilltops. That seems a far cry from today’s Bay Area: 8 million restless souls roaring across superhighways of cars and superhighways of information through the epicenter of the future. In Miller’s time, the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a thirst for lyrical tales of a wild American West, and Miller gave Eastern audiences, and locals, a vision of California untamed, a majestic vista so rugged that it earned him the nickname “Poet of the Sierras.”

Miller was larger than life. He joined the filibusterer William Walker’s mercenary assault on Nicaragua in 1844. He variously fought against, and alongside Native Americans, protecting their land from white settlers. He was briefly an Oregon judge. He was a horse thief, and some said a compulsive liar. But it was Miller’s bardic Occidental poetry that won him lasting notoriety.

A wanderer in many lands was I/a weary Ishmaelite, Miller wrote in “An Indian Summer.” [I] had seen the Crescent-mosques/had seen, The Druid oaks of Aberdeen.

In old age, Miller made his home in the Oakland hills, at a place he called “The Hights.” It was a dusty treeless escarpment. There, Miller re-planted the timber that had been cut to build San Francisco, and his saplings grew into the majestic redwoods and oaks that today shade Joaquin Miller Park.

At roughly five hundred acres, with trails that wind through canyons and loop atop ridges, Joaquin Miller Park is big enough to spend an entire day hiking in. Miller’s peculiar art, like a hybrid cross of William Blake and Buffalo Bill Cody, is physically evident in the weird monuments he scattered about his land. These include a secular tribute to explorer John C. Fremont in the form of a squat stone tower with a narrow window; the Browning Monument, a circular rook-like structure the poet raised to honor his friends; and the most bizarre — a stone pyramid that Miller erected in honor of the prophet Moses. The crumbling, ten-foot-tall pointed temple embodies the spiritual polyglot that Miller invoked in his poetry: Strangely wooing are yon worlds above us/Strangely beautiful is the Faith of Islam/Strangely sweet are the songs of Solomon/Strangely tender are the teachings of Jesus/Strangely cold is the sun and mountains/Strangely mellow is the moon on old ruins, goes a stanza in “Even So.”

Despite the forest it has become, Joaquin Miller Park is still urban. It’s located entirely inside the city of Oakland. It’s noisy, sometimes crowded, and littered with human artifacts, and much of the vegetation was seeded by human hands. Even so, visitors can still see a faded, mystical impression of what California once was, or what misfits like Miller imagined it to be: Here, cedars sweep the stream, wrote Miller about a California before its despoliation by civilization, and here/among the boulders moss’d and brown/that time and storms have toppled down/from towers undefiled by man/low cabins nestle as in fear.

Twenty miles south of Miller’s old home, in a similarly secluded fork of canyons branching into the East Bay Hills, was the hideaway of Agapius Honcherenko. Born in 1832 in Ukraine, Honcherenko helped wage a long and successful campaign against the tsar of Russia to end the institution of serfdom. A Russian Orthodox priest, Honcharenko wrote righteous tracts inciting serfs to rebel against their masters. For this, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in a Constantinople dungeon. Freed eventually, Honcharenko was smuggled from Turkey to London, while the tsar’s secret police and hired assassins — whom he called “Muscovite tyrants” — pursued him. He was shot, stabbed, beaten, and even drugged, but he survived to campaign against the Russian empire. He fled to New York City, and finally, in 1865, he escaped to the most unlikely fortress, a lonesome farm in the hills above Hayward. There, Honcharenko lived until 1916, all the time publishing a subversive newspaper that was smuggled into Russia and its territories.

Garin Regional Park now surrounds Honcharenko’s old “Ukraina” farmstead. The trails in Garin follow shaded creeks and arc up treeless sun-baked ridges, covered in sag brush and oats. Remnants of the old farm remain: gnarled fruit trees, rusted tractor parts. Cattle still graze private land nearby. Honcharenko’s house was destroyed long ago, but you can hike to the gravesite where he and his wife Albina rest eternal. And if you journey far back into Garin park and climb down into a steep ravine cloaked in olive and bay, you can visit the most unusual formation of rocks that protrude from the mountainside. Here, in the shade and shadows, more than a century ago, Honcharenko led spiritual ceremonies in a sandstone grotto to sustain his battle against tyranny.