Business
Thirty-five Oakland restaurants are participating this week in Oakland’s first Restaurant Week, a project of Visit Oakland, the city’s official marketing organization. Lauren Callahan reports.
Mike Taft isn’t an artist in the traditional sense. But when his entire live-work apartment complex was having an open house art party on Friday—one that he founded and organized—he was of course going to find a way to entertain the crowd. “I’m grinding down a piece of plywood with an angle grinder,” the industrial designer said with a grin.
Workers at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse were robbed at gunpoint Tuesday evening when two men forced two of the store’s employees, who were in the process of closing for the day, to hand over money from the cash register as well their own wallets.
Typically when people think of scones, they think of the muffin’s inferior pastry sibling—a dry, crumbly thing that tastes like flour. But Remedy Coffee is serving up scones that are not typical. With flavors like huckleberry cream, cheddar scallion and blood orange along with a texture that’s buttery and flaky, they melt in your mouth more easily than a cupcake.
Every morning Ronald Robles gets up and hand-grinds different kinds of fresh pepper—white, Sichuan and black. He also hand-makes three types of mayonnaise; there’s garlic-flavored, chili and regular. Robles is the owner and chef of Fiveten Burger, one of the newest food trucks to come out of Oakland, and he’s dishing out what he calls “America’s favorite food”—the burger.
Plans to open a sex boutique in downtown Oakland near a school and several youth program offices have caused some mixed reactions among neighboring businesses, although opponents seem unlikely to appeal a recent decision by the Oakland City Planning Commission allowing the shop to operate within close proximity to a school.
For North Oakland residents who don’t live near a farmers’ market, there’s now a new way to purchase organic produce. Phat Beets Produce, a volunteer-run collective that aims to connect small farmers to urban communities, is now taking orders for their “Beet Boxes.”
In the hustle and bustle of today’s society, it can be hard to find time for mundane tasks like doing laundry, grocery shopping and organizing your closet. But websites offering personal assistants to run your errands for you have been popping up all over the web.
The week before Christmas is the busiest time of year for Oakland’s mail carriers, so reporter Roberto Daza tagged along to see how they get the job done.