Food

Summer’s best friend likes fall too

For Ici Ice Cream co-owner, Mattea Soreng, the rainy weather and cool temperature is no deterring factor when it comes to selling cold stuff. Rain or shine, the lines at Soreng’s little parlor, which Soreng and Mary Canales opened three years ago on College and Ashby Avenues, never stops. “Yesterday we sold 325 cones, and that doesn’t include people who got cups, or people who bought bombes or bites,” Soreng said. That’s 34 cones an hour. A “bombe” in Ici lingo is two layers of ice cream…

At Taste of Temescal, diversity of food abounds

The diverse atmosphere of Temescal was replicated last night by the restaurants — from Mexican food to Indian food to Bake Sale Betty and ice cream sorbets. As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once said: “There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”

Meet Serina Elliott, future kitchen champion

In this video, we follow Serina Elliott, a Kitchen of Champions student from North Oakland’s Golden Gate neighborhood. Just four weeks into her program, Elliot aspires to one day become “a Food Network star.”

Bread Garden (not them, too!) considers shutdown

After 33 years, the owner of the Bread Garden bakery is considering closing down his shop. The bakery that in the 1970s helped ignite the Bay Area artisan bread trend is now in danger of becoming a victim of its own success.

Labor Day potluck pushes better school meals

Michelle Mapp and Rachel Carroll, of Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, took their 8-year-old daughter Lauren to Labor Day lunch yesterday, taking their seats at a white-cloth-covered table in the middle of Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Civic Center Park.    The menu, on their plates, at least, was enchiladas, red grapes, and freshly squeezed lemonade.  It was a community potluck–with a purpose. The three gathered at the end of one of five long tables lined with bright red apples. As Lauren alternated between…

Halal markets and a mosque draw Oakland’s immigrant Muslim community

At the River Nile Market in Oakland, which is slightly bigger than a city bus, the shelves are crammed with little bits of Yemen, Sudan, Egypt and Lebanon. Cans of fruit, meat and juice carry Arabic script as well as English lettering.  Glass buckets hold spices – cumin, nutmeg, cinnamon and za’atar, a mixture of herbs and spices popular in the Middle East.  Burlap bags of basmati rice spill into the aisles.  Three water pipes, or hookahs, perch on the…