Anna Mindess

Just before the pandemic hit, Chef Crystal Wahpepah was finally seeing the fruits of her labor. As the first Native American woman to own a catering business in California, she was in demand across the Bay Area and around the country, preparing her signature feasts of beautifully plated Indigenous dishes such as buffalo blueberry stew, three sisters salad with wild red rice, and blue corn flan with hibiscus berry sauce...

When does “cheese” not signify a wedge of creamy lusciousness? When it represents revenge, a hot date, or a bad hairdo. While the Danes nibble their Havarti, Cypriots enjoy their Halloumi and Swedes slice their Herrgårdsost, speakers of languages around the world creatively employ their various terms for cheese in their own particular idioms...

Antoine Hunter is a dancer, choreographer, dance instructor, and community activist who has performed around the world and received numerous honors and awards. He is also Deaf, a fact most people wouldn’t realize simply by witnessing his expressive body undulate gracefully to the music. The Oakland native, who identifies as African and Indigenous (Blackfoot and Cherokee), was born deaf into a family where everyone else could hear...

Attend almost any party in Brazil, and you’ll discover that the most popular guests are warm, cheesy orbs, crispy on the outside, moist and chewy on the inside. Pão de queijo (cheese bread) is woven into daily life, as a companion to the morning cup of coffee, then baked fresh all day long at stands, shops, bakeries, markets, and restaurants. No wonder it is one of the first things Brazilian emigrants miss when they leave the country...

The red, blue and yellow hands glowing outside the Parisian restaurant 1000&1 Signes are a tantalizing clue about what's waiting inside. Enter the modern space, receive a warm smile and a broad gesture of greeting from the owner, and suddenly everything becomes clear. Sid Nouar is Deaf (along with all of his staff) and uses sign language to communicate, and he is the first Deaf person to open a restaurant in France...

Back in February, chef Joan Gallagher and the employees of her company, Nourish You, prepared about 400 nutritious meals a day for students at three Berkeley private schools. She took pride in her signature kale salad, chicken noodle soup and hearty stews. Now that all the schools are closed, Gallagher is still busy cooking. But now she is making more than double the previous number of lunches. But those 1,000 meals a day are destined for homeless, and disadvantaged...

With the shelter-in-place order extended, Bay Area restaurant owners are preparing for another month of takeout-only service. Tee Tran, the 34-year old owner of local Vietnamese restaurant Monster Pho, views this crisis as an opportunity to repay the community and country where he found a home.

In 1989, when he was just a young child, Tran and his family escaped from Vietnam by boat and endured two years in refuge camps...

While Café Ohlone, California's first Indigenous restaurant, is shuttered as we shelter in place, co-founders, Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, take comfort in the fact that the protective measures we are all following have been practiced for many generations by their ancestors, the first inhabitants of this land.

Five beloved independent restaurants, all headed by immigrants, may be particularly vulnerable in our new restricted reality, since some have never had a website, done outreach on social media or used third-party delivery apps. Bringing in only 25-30% of their usual revenue, most are unsure how long they can continue, but they are determined to hang on...

Oakland residents are a talented bunch, from a juggler who deftly tosses clubs while perched atop a 6-foot unicycle, to a trick roper who plies the lasso and spins tales of the Old West, to a baker whose cookies and confections have swept the awards at the last two Alameda County Fairs. Wait a minute — all these talents belong to one man, who literally wears many hats...

Early this fall, 75 guests gathered in the dining room of a small Berkeley college for the fourth in a yearlong monthly series, Slow Food’s Celebrating Cultural Food Traditions Project. Three local chefs, Tu David Phu, Denise Huynh, and Hai Lam, prepared dishes representing Vietnamese tastes. The previous dinners featured chefs from Indigenous America, Northern Iran and Iraq, and Black America...

Amod Chopra, owner of Vik’s Chaat in Berkeley, washes his hands and sits down to lunch. Balanced atop a metal tray is a feathery light rice flour crepe rolled into a long, elegant tube, filled with a savory mixture of potatoes and onions. With his right hand, Chopra deftly tears off a piece of the crepe and uses it to pick up a bit of the potato and onion filling. He dips the bundle first in coconut chutney, then in spicy sambar, and pops it into his mouth.

My brush was tiny, more like something you’d use for nail polish. That was apt because I was struggling to paint the toenails of my dragon shadow puppet.

Dipping the silken brush into a pot of royal-blue ink, I tried to give its curving talons a proper pedicure.

“Wait, I thought you were all extinct ….”

It’s a frequent comment from first-time diners at Café Ohlone, but a welcome opener nonetheless at Berkeley’s first Indigenous supper club. Since Vincent Medina and partner Louis Trevino began serving pre-contact Indigenous foods on the back patio of University Press Books, the two have been feeding their patrons’ curiosity while satisfying their appetites.

When baristas hand over your low-fat latte, you probably don’t consider the paths that brought them to stand across the counter from you. But at 1951 Coffee Company, the Berkeley café that is staffed entirely by refugees, the baristas’ life journeys are actually the point...