Business
For those who can’t decide between a Sunday morning bike ride and dutifully going to church, Manifesto Bicycles has been helping Oakland cyclists have it both ways. Since 2008, the locally owned bike shop on 40th Street has been hosting “Bike Church,” an irregular Sunday morning gathering at Manifesto, where attendees can listen to music, enjoy street food and catch up with one another.
Like many successful businesses, Oakland-based Blue Bottle Coffee started small. Owner James Freeman, a classically trained clarinetist, began by roasting coffee beans on a baking sheet in his own oven. But now, eight years later, Blue Bottle is big time.
Trees, plants, benches and grass (or something like it) popped up around Oakland on Friday on stretches of concrete usually reserved for cars.
Many of the food trucks we see cruising around Oakland, like Jon’s Street Eats and Seoul on Wheels, post up in Emeryville during the lunch rush. In addition to being full of office parks with lots of hungry customers, Emeryville also has a streamlined permitting process that makes it easier for these mobile restaurants to park, cook and serve. But this may all change. According to an article in SF Weekly’s SFoodie blog, the Emeryville City Council is looking at…
The controversial Airport Connector, a tram that would connect BART to Oakland’s airport, could soon be under construction after a decades-long debate. “For the first time in the 25-year history of this project,” a BART spokesman says, “we may be seeing shovels hit the ground in the next month or two.”
The second annual Taste of Temescal, an event celebrating a smorgasbord of culinary delights, sold out to hundreds of attendees on Tuesday. For $30, locals sampled signature items from each of the 23 participating restaurants on Telegraph Avenue.
After years of contest, Acting Governor Abel Maldonado signed an agreement Tuesday to expedite the start of construction on the Oak to 9th land development project. Beginning as soon as 2011, the waterfront property along the estuary south of Jack London Square will be rebuilt over the next two decades.
The volunteer group Habitat for Humanity, which helps low-income working families buy homes by investing their own labor in the construction, invited neighbors and first-time homeowners on Saturday to the completion of Habitat’s Edes Avenue development in East Oakland.
Oakland’s Neldam’s Danish Bakery had been in business 81 years before it closed in July. Reopened last week as Taste of Denmark, the new bakery plans to expand its offerings to include Asian pastries, tres leches cakes, and other delicacies from the modern city’s many cultures.