BERKELEY, Calif. — Vincent Medina was in the fourth grade when he toured a Spanish mission with his class and heard an odd story about California. It featured primitive Indian tribes and friendly missionaries, and it didn’t sit right with him.
Mr. Medina, a member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area, was just a child, but he knew the truth was more complicated, and more brutal. His ancestry stretched back thousands of years here in the East Bay, and colonization had nearly wiped out his people, along with their traditions, languages and foodways.
At Cafe Ohlone, a small, enchanting restaurant that pops up a few times a week behind a bookshop in Berkeley, Mr. Medina tells a more complete story of the Bay Area, recovering and reconstructing its native cuisine to bring it into the present. Diners should go, not only to eat, but to listen.
CreditJason Henry for The New York Times
Dinners start with an informal lecture from Mr. Medina, while his partner, Louis Trevino, who belongs to the Rumsen Ohlone community from the Carmel Valley, plates the food. The set menus change from meal to meal, but brunches, lunches and dinners are mostly composed from regional ingredients: rainbow trout and sorrel, rose hips and hazelnuts, quail eggs and summer berries.
Seen through the eyes of Mr. Medina and Mr. Trevino, a couple who have been cooking together since 2017, the bounty of California is thrilling.
Palm-leaf plates are piled with sides of smoked fish and fingerling potatoes with thin, salty skins, slick with walnut oil. The slender bulbs of wild onions are cooked whole until they’re so soft, they’re almost candied and melt away on the tongue. Tea-soaked quail eggs gleam with heaps of trout roe and juicy, peppery cress.
But first, Mr. Medina, 32, shares slides of his great-grandmother, Mary Muñoz-Archuleta, wearing a floral blouse, her gray hair pulled back, and explains where he comes from.
He shares old illustrations of Ohlone men, gliding along the water in long, sporty boats made of reeds, that show off the bay as it was before colonization — lush and nurtured. When Mr. Medina refers to Berkeley, he calls it by its old name, xucyun.
Mr. Medina is charming, addressing the dining room in a powerful oratorical style. He speaks loudly, slowly, with purpose. And he’s got jokes. “They weren’t just hunters and gatherers,” Mr. Medina said of his ancestors one night, pushing back against the stereotypes he heard as a child. “They ate the most bougie food imaginable!”
The dinner table might seem like an odd place for a lecture, but Mr. Medina and Mr. Trevino don’t run an ordinary restaurant. Cafe Ohlone is part of the nonprofit organization they founded called Mak-’amham — meaning “our food” in Chochenyo, the native language of the East Bay — that also hosts cultural events for the Ohlone community.
You enter the popup through the quiet, pleasantly cluttered aisles of University Press Books. Seating is communal, outdoors, at large tables that hold about 40 people comfortably. Before dinner, Mr. Medina and Mr. Trevino carefully introduce every staff member working to pour tea, serve food and clear the tables. Many are relatives or friends.
And before diners take their first bites, Mr. Medina says a prayer of gratitude in Chochenyo. Mr. Trevino, 28, follows with a prayer in his community’s language, Rumsen.
My first thought was an obvious one: California cuisine wasn’t born in the 20th century. It wasn’t an invention of 1970s Berkeley or 1980s Yountville. It wasn’t created by chefs in restaurant kitchens. It thrived, in pockets across the region, long before it was identified as a movement in a food magazine.
Mr. Medina and Mr. Trevino interviewed their elders, and studied Ohlone techniques and recipes that were written down in the 1920s and ’30s. What they found was an earlier incarnation of California cuisine, fittingly fresh and local, farmed and foraged, diverse and polished.
Mr. Medina then worked at Berkeley Bowl, a specialty food store, to learn more about the business. He and Mr. Trevino experimented with updated Ohlone recipes, piecing together fragments, cooking for their community.
The kitchen sticks to pre-colonial Ohlone traditions as much as it can, generally avoiding gluten, refined sugars, dairy, soy, pork, corn and legumes. Cafe Ohlone does not serve alcohol, instead pouring infusions of herbs, fruits and flowers that Mr. Medina and Mr. Trevino often forage themselves. The chefs season with salt gathered from the shallow marshlands of nearby San Lorenzo Creek.
But the restaurant doesn’t recreate Ohlone foods as some kind of formal historical exercise. Though the food is accompanied by a talk and slide show, it reflects joyful interpretation and a lack of academic rigidity. Mr. Medina and Mr. Trevino seem to find pleasure in bending their own rules, taking small liberties here and there in the name of deliciousness.
“Why is there vanilla in the chia pudding?” Mr. Medina said on a recent evening, after pointing out that vanilla wasn’t native to California. “Because we like vanilla, O.K.?”
Mr. Medina also noted that Ohlone runners once drank chia seeds soaked in water before embarking on long, arduous trips to deliver messages to neighboring tribes (“the original Twitter”). But the chia dessert at Cafe Ohlone isn’t just runner’s fuel. It’s rich and satisfying — a sweet, sticky gray sludge that clings to the spoon, tipped with ripe summer berries.
On the same plate, Mr. Trevino’s gently chewy brownies appear, vibrant with fresh hazelnut flour, lightly sweetened with coconut sugar.
“This meal is a victory,” said Mr. Medina, addressing the dining room on a recent Saturday night as the candles twinkled inside abalone shells, and dinner wound down.
A few people had reached for blankets to cover their shoulders as the temperature dropped. They sipped a tart, fruity rose-hip tea and watched the D.J. on the patio, bobbing their heads. Others scraped at the last of the chia on their plates, picking up the fat blackberries and popping them into their mouths, staining their fingers.
Mr. Medina was right: This meal was a victory.
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