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In The Mix

The Mysteries of Chinatown

Start Your Tour With Moon Cakes and Noodles

    At 10 o’clock on a Monday morning, few people are out and about on Franklin Street in Oakland’s Chinatown. “I start early to avoid the crowds,” Naomi Friedman tells our small group. “Believe me, this area will be busy later.”
    Friedman is the owner of Cooking With Naomi in Berkeley. She offers market tours, cooking lessons, wine tours and chocolate tastings at www.cookingwithnaomi.com.
    We’ve gathered for a culinary-cum-cultural tour of the neighborhood. It so happens that we’re all from Oakland and Berkeley. We’re familiar with Chinatown—but from the outside. One and all, we have whizzed through by car many times, or dashed through on foot, or parked and zoned in on one of the many restaurants.
    But none of us have stopped to smell the spices, wonder at the vast array of exotic and familiar fruits and veggies—so reasonably priced—or to contemplate the array of mysterious dried ingredients waiting to be discovered when we slow down and savor the magic of seeing with new eyes. The day we meet on Franklin, it strikes me that “explore Chinatown” remains on my to-do list even though I’ve been living in Oakland for seven years and it takes less time to walk from my front door to the heart of Chinatown than to circle Lake Merritt, which I do regularly.
    Friedman’s tours take in such diverse neighborhoods as Berkeley’s Monterey Market district and the Gourmet Ghetto (popular with out-of-towners who find it difficult to grasp the meaning behind the name), Oakland’s Fruitvale and San Francisco’s North Beach and Clement Street. The tours came into being when people attending Friedman’s cooking classes asked where to buy specific ingredients. “I thought we’d better go shopping,” she says with a laugh.
    “And the tours can be more fun than the classes. They’re entertaining. You’re learning about a new culture and cuisine. And on a tour like this, you’re learning how to shop. When you go to Safeway, you go with a list to buy familiar things. Here, you browse and compare produce and prices and it’s a real experience.”
    Friedman, a longtime Slow Food advocate, starts by handing out a postcard-sized guide with store names and addresses, a sheet with a couple of recipes for those who want to try out a dish and a pen for note-taking.
    “One of the delights of Oakland’s Chinatown is that, unlike San Francisco’s, it’s not filled with crappy tourist T-shirts and cheap toys,” she says. “Real people live here, shop here and eat here.”
    Friedman shares some of her favorites—places like Yuen Hop Noodle (824 Webster St.), “for any kind of noodle you can imagine;” Sun Sing Pastry (382 Eighth St.), where I buy a sublime cream horn; Delicious Food Co. (734 Webster St.), where we snack on pineapple and lotus blossom moon cakes; Sam Yick Market (362 Eighth St.), “for everything,” says Friedman as we browse its extensive tea selection, shelved near the kitchenware. Her tours all end with lunch, and we have ours at Shanghai Restaurant (930 Webster St.). Friedman alternates lunches at Shan Dong (328 10th St.)
    As soon as we’re sated, Friedman sends us on our way to join the crowds thronging the busy sidewalks. We’ve had our close encounter with Oakland’s Chinatown. One and all, we have a new appreciation of the cuisine and culture on the menu in our own backyard.
    For information on tours, cooking lessons and more, see www.cookingwithnaomi.com or call (510) 525-7093.

 —By Wanda Hennig
—Mitch Tobias

A Friend In Cheeses

    The nuanced, sometimes complicated world of artisan foods—from salumi to vodka to chocolate—can be an intimidating place for non-foodies.
    But Oaklander Laura Martinez, author of The Everything Cheese Book, is working to demystify the gourmet universe with The Artisan Palate, a venture she launched to bring artisanal delights to the masses through the Web, special events and educational classes.
    “The Artisan Palate is something I started to get the word out about artisan food to give people a chance to learn more about what artisan food is all about,” says the former University of California business and finance administrator. Martinez shucked office work for a new career as a food enthusiast on the heels of earning an master of fine arts from the University of San Francisco. “For these things to stick around, people have to eat them. If we don’t buy them and eat them, these people go out of business.
    Martinez, 51, gives food lovers a basic primer on artisan food—“the best food in the world,” she says—as well as a roadmap for where they can find and try such products. That’s the basic intent behind the classes she’s doing at Paulding & Co.’s A Creative Kitchen in Emeryville. The kitchen is a commercial facility operated by Terry Paulding, a chef who trained at the California Culinary Academy who offers everything from cooking classes to corporate team-building events.
    “We hit it off right away,” Martinez says of Paulding, whose facility is where Pixar animators learned about culinary arts for accurate animation in the 2007 movie, Ratatouille.
    Martinez says she prefers to concentrate on one-subject food topics such as cheese, extra virgin olive, jams or vinegars. She says she strives to celebrate the delicious aromas and flavors of the foods, ultimately making them more accessible to their seekers.
    Martinez, a native of Carmel, is well versed in cheese, having worked three years behind the cheese counter at The Pasta Shop, and in olive oil, which she promotes for the California Olive Oil Council. She says she partners with other food experts and organizations whose expertise differs from her own in other areas for a broader, more comprehensive reach.
    “For me, this is really a second career,” she says. “It’s a chance to follow passion, and indulge in passions, in a way that you don’t necessarily get to do in a business setting.”
    For more information on artisan food events, including classes, visit www.theartisanpalate.com and www.pauldingandco.com.

—Judith M. Gallman

ABOUT A Soft Rocker

Eternal Sunshine

Pop Icon Bart Davenport Starts Over in Oakland
    As the lead singer and songwriter of the Loved Ones and the Kinetics, Bart Davenport became an icon of the Bay Area indie rock scene in the 1990s and a big draw in Spain. The soft-rock essence of his musical personality truly bloomed when he launched his solo recording career. His 2002 eponymous debut, the stylistically eclectic Game Preserve (2003), 2005’s Maroon Cocoon and the recent Palaces (released September 2008 on Antenna Farm Records) have elicited references to the ’60s and ’70s psychedelic, folk and pop sounds of Brian Wilson, Love and Paul McCartney, and made him a star in Sweden, where Bread and the Carpenters share air time with such new acts as Dungen and Peter, Bjorn and John.
    For most of his 38 years, Davenport has lived in Berkeley. But in the spring of 2008 he moved into an apartment with his girlfriend on Piedmont Avenue. “I left North Berkeley for a myriad of reasons,” he says over a beer in Cesar’s sidewalk patio on a balmy evening, “but one is that it feels like it’s turning into San Luis Obispo over there, and something about Piedmont Avenue is just so amazingly uncool and wonderful. It’s so much more of a melting pot than anything in Berkeley these days. It’s a total community, unacknowledged, too. I had to live here to really get it.”
    Davenport feels renewed creatively as well. In another of his projects, the electro-soul trio Honeycut, he was writing “pretty dark” lyrics that reflected the fact that “my life was kind of taking a downward spiral,” he says. “When I started writing for a solo album [Palaces] again, it was more from the position of the worst is over.” As with all his solo projects, Palaces will draw the kinds of comments Davenport summarizes as “your music is just so sunny and happy—it’s all sunshine pop,” and “the perfect sound track to your breezy melancholy Sunday afternoon.”
    But, he advises, pay attention to the lyrics: “I feel like if it’s pleasing to the ear, people gravitate towards the whole sonic world, it’s only the words juxtaposed against that sound that has any tension.”
    For samples of Bart Davenport’s music and updates of his itinerary, visit www.myspace.com/bartdavenport.

—Derk Richardson

PETA Picks Oakland

Animal Rights Fundraisers Find a Home
    Celebrity activism, by the likes of Pamela Anderson, Paul McCartney, Alicia Silverstone and others, boosts the public profile of  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. But it’s people like Kristie Phelps who keep the animal rights organization humming on a daily basis.
    A five-year veteran in PETA’s Norfolk, Va., headquarters, Phelps came to work in Oakland in January 2008, two months after the PETA Foundation opened its office on Grand Avenue near Lake Merritt.
    Phelps works, as she says, “on the front lines of what PETA is known for,” especially animal entertainment campaigns such as PETA’s demonstrations against the exploitation of animals when the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus came to Oakland. But the PETA Foundation, with nine employees in Oakland, focuses on membership development and fundraising. To that end, in July 2008, the Oakland office began hosting monthly PETA Presents: Grand Events at the Lake. Experts and activists involved with specific issues (pets, anti-vivisection, anti-animal testing) educate and mingle with PETA members, of which there are about 3,500 in Alameda Country, according to Phelps.
    “The East Bay is a choice location for our office,” Phelps says. “People here in the Bay Area tend to be aware of the issues. … We always advocate a vegetarian diet as the best and easiest way that people can help animals, and here in the Bay Area the culture supports veganism. We are very fortunate to have incredible farmers markets where we can get healthy tasty produce. … The area has several vegan restaurant chains, such as Herbivore and Café Gratitude; and during the past year, a vegan soul-food restaurant, Souley Vegan; a vegetarian sandwich shop, the Breakroom Cafe; and a vegan boutique, Micio Mambo, all opened their doors right up the street from our office.
    “Unfortunately, we do hear about dog fighting and cockfighting in the area, so there’s no shortage of issues, even here.”
    For more information about PETA, visit www.peta.org. For more about the Oakland office’s every-third-Sunday events, call (510) 763-7382

—Derk Richardson

Media Shelf

New Releases From East Bay Musicians

CDs
Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands, Live (Spruce & Maple Music, www.laurielewis.com)
While new enthusiasm for acoustic American roots music was kindled by Alison Krauss and Nickel Creek and inflamed by the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Berkeley fiddler and singer Laurie Lewis has been crafting her gorgeous folk, bluegrass and old-time country music for three decades. This set of 18 traditional, modern and original tunes, recorded live during March 2007 tour stops in Oregon and Washington, presents the instrumental virtuosity, vocal blending and down-home humor of Lewis’ superb band: mandolinist Tom Rozum, guitarist Scott Huffman, banjo player Craig Smith and bassist Todd Phillips. On everything from such trad gems as “Diamond Joe” and “Worried Man Blues” to pieces by bluegrass legend Jimmy Martin, pop tunesmith Irving Berlin and contemporary songwriters Si Kahn, Billy Joe Shaver, Kate MacLeod and Lewis herself, the all-acoustic ensemble sets a high standard that even the sharpest Nashville cats might struggle to attain.
         
Bart Davenport, Palaces (Antenna Farm Records, www.antennafarmrecords.com)
Since his harder-rocking mod and bluesy garage-rock days fronting the Loved Ones and the Kinetics, Oakland resident Bart Davenport (in addition to singing lead for the electro-funk trio Honeycut) has been indulging his unabashed passion for sunny late-’60s and early-’70s soft- and psychedelic-rock. On his fourth solo CD, Davenport treads a middle path between the relatively lean approaches of 2005’s Maroon Cocoon CD and Seal the Deal! EP and the lush pop and pastoral moods of 2003’s brilliant Game Preserve. Building from a duo foundation with Honeycut’s Tony Sevener on drums and percussion, the golden-throated Davenport plays guitar and bass, adding keyboards, pedal steel, strings and oboe played by Bay Area stalwarts Kelley Stoltz, Tom Heyman, Herve Salters and others. Beyond his built-in fan base, Palaces will delight anyone with a soft spot for Arthur Lee and Love, Boz Scaggs, bossa nova, Philly soul, the Carpenters and Bread.        

—Derk Richardson

Books
Grassroots Philanthropy, Field Notes of a Maverick Grantmaker by Bill Somerville with Fred Setterberg (Heyday Books, 2008, 127 pp., $30)
Bill Somerville is the founder of Oakland-based Philanthropic Ventures Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promises grants to worthy causes with 48-hour turnaround. Now, in no-nonsense style, the king of grantmaking action offers a straightforward manual on how to get results based on five easy principles (No. 3: Take  Risks) and seven concrete pieces of advice  (No. 4: Empower Executives). A must-read  for all foundation paper-shufflers.

Playing by Melanie Abrams (Black Cat, 2008, 284 pp., $13)
UC Berkeley writing teacher Melanie Abrams, wife of novelist Vikram Chandra, debuts as a novelist with a sexually charged tale of passion, starring an anthropology graduate student, Josie, obsessed with Ghanaian burial rituals and doing double duty as a nanny; her 6-year-old charge, Tyler, a tyke who’s fixated on facts and figures; Tyler’s mother, Mary, a charismatic doctor; and Josie’s love interest, Devesh, a handsome older Indian surgeon. Abrams’ story tracks Josie and Devesh’s sadomasochistic forays and Josie’s reckoning with her troubled past.

She Had It Coming by Mary Monroe (Kensington Books, 2008, 293 pp., $24)
New York Times–bestselling novelist Mary Monroe of Oakland, whose specialty is family and interpersonal relationships and their associated messes, presents a doozy of a situation in her latest book. The main character, Dolores Reese, vows to stick by her man, Floyd Watson, during his prison days but falls for a free man, Paul Dunne. Can she pull off a double-life charade? Can she juggle a third love interest?
Or will karma, as Monroe’s title hints, get her?

—Judith M. Gallman