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Previous Years :
Best of Oakland 2008
Best of Oakland 2007
Best of Oakland 2006
Best of Oakland 2009
Our Multiculti Metropolitan Mashup
—By George Shirk
So we’re on this plane, flying into Oakland, close enough to home that we can see the East Bay hills rolling in lush green waves beneath us, and a woman in the aisle seat says, literally out of the blue, that this is the first time she’s ever been to Oakland and, um, “What’s it like?”
Ah. Loaded question.
“It’s a very unusual place,” was about the best we could come up with on short notice, “and it rocks.”
The trick in any such answer to a question like this is to somehow encapsulate the city’s wild diversity, and that’s also the trick in putting together a Best of Oakland issue. We’re all about taco trucks in Fruitvale and upscale restaurants in Rockridge; we routinely despair of downtown but lately find ourselves hanging in Uptown, and having a fine time of it, too; we agonize over the Raiders, Warriors and A’s, but we wouldn’t trade them for anything.
We are a muddle of contradictions and inconsistencies—one of two of the most ethnically diverse cities in the U.S. (along with Long Beach), with more than 150 languages floating on the Bay breezes, so says the 2006 U.S. Census.
In all, there are 377,256 of us here—34.1 percent white and 30.3 percent African American. Hispanic or Latino of any race comprises 25.9 percent of our population. Among the rest of us, 15.6 percent are Asian American, 0.9 percent Native American, 0.7 percent Pacific Islander, 14.6 percent from other races and 3.8 percent from two or more races.
No wonder, then, that this year’s Readers Poll yielded votes for 62 different favorite restaurants, 29 new restaurants, 32 different annual events, 23 grocery stores and 39 different places to people watch.The lesson? Keep a copy of the magazine with you next time you’re on a plane. Saves on the head scratching and stammering when you get hit with, “Oakland, eh?
What’s it like?”
