Indoor dining is on hold in the North Bay for the foreseeable future, dealing a major setback for restaurants and bars that were hoping to salvage summer during the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, there are ways to support the local food industry, and last month, a Santa Rosa teacher launched an endeavor to highlight North Bay businesses and restaurants owned and operated by people of color, giving residents a guide to where they can support Black lives in the community while eating well.

Kelly Cramer, who works as a teacher at Roseland University Prep in Santa Rosa, made the ever-expanding online spreadsheet of Black, Immigrant and People of Color Owned Restaurants and Businesses in Sonoma County after looking for one like it on internet search engines.

“I just thought that it deserved to exist,” Cramer said at the time. “After much thought, I decided to also include all people of color and immigrant-run businesses because, although Black businesses need to be amplified now and always, I simply just wanted to keep this resource all in one place so people can continue to utilize it for the future, long after it’s trendy.”

Black-owned North Bay restaurants on the list include more than 250 restaurants and businesses. For North Bay food lovers in need of some real comfort, four spots stand out in Sonoma, Marin and Napa counties.

Buster’s Southern Barbecue has been serving up authentic Louisiana-inspired cooking in Calistoga since 1965 and has become a staple of the community. The restaurant serves up top quality tri-tip, pork and beef ribs and more with choices of mild or spicy BBQ sauce and their sandwiches, served on garlic toast, are a popular lunch for locals. Outside dining and take-out is available. busterssouthernbbq.com.

Bariadelli Caribbean Gourmet Pizza is located in northwest Santa Rosa, and specializes in authentic Caribbean cuisine, catering, take-and-bake gourmet pizzas and food-truck services. Now open for online orders, Bariadelli brings bold flavors to its menu, with items like Jerk Chicken Pizza and a Caribbean Supreme that features rice and beans, creole chicken, jumbo shrimp and fried plantains. bariadelli.com.

Marin County residents can also find Black-owned restaurants and chefs in their backyard, with locations such as Caribbean Spices Restaurant in San Rafael. Since 2009, Caribbean Spices makes Haitian and Creole cuisine, and the restaurant has been offering outdoor dining in addition to catering options with specialty dishes like oxtail and creole snapper. carribeanspicesdba.net.

Also based in San Rafael, Forrest Fire BBQ is the culinary soul of owner and pitmaster Forrest Murray Jr. Murray learned to cook from his family, and he puts that familial love into his food. Forrest Fire BBQ is a mobile operation, and Murray caters throughout the Bay Area with a menu that includes St Louis–style pork ribs, sirloin beef ball tip steaks and pulled meat sandwiches with all the sides and sauces. Forrest Fire BBQ also pops up at Marinwood Market on certain weekends, with ribs, hot dogs, corn on a stick and more on hand. forrestfirebbq.com.

“A disproportionate percentage of Black and POC-owned businesses have closed during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Cramer says. “Supporting these places is just ultimately good for everyone. Plus, so much good food and wine is on this list! A ton of places I can’t wait to try.”

Find the full list at bit.ly/SOCOPOC.

Alexandria Brown isn’t a foodie, but she wrote this year’s most compelling North Bay book on food. In fact, Lost Restaurants of Napa Valley and Their Recipes, released in April by The History Press, was written while its author lived in a kitchenless apartment. In it, Brown—a historian—uses restaurants-past as a lens through which to tell stories of the immigrant and people-of-color communities that shaped the esteemed culinary region. 

At first, Brown—who has master’s degrees in library science and U.S. history—wasn’t eager about her press’s proposal to write about restaurants. But she did a bit of research and soon got excited about the project. 

“I found all of these people of color, immigrants and women who were doing really interesting things with food but whose stories had never been told or had been white-washed,” says Brown, who is a Black woman raised in Napa.

While focused on Napa, Lost Restaurants is also a book that traces how “exotic” and “foreign” foods become “American” classics. 

Several of the book’s chapters focus on a specific cuisine. “Chili Queens and Tamale Men” tells the stories of Mexican-American cuisine in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

The chapter “Chow Chop Suey” explores three 20th-century Chinese restaurants that specialized in the wildly popular dish of the time. Brown’s book couldn’t tell the stories of Chinese food and local restaurants without also telling the story of Chinese immigration to Napa, xenophobia, racism and pervasive “model minority” myths. 

Brown likens her book to Padma Lakshmi’s new Hulu series, Taste the Nation.

“I feel like we’re doing similar things and our audiences are similar,” she says. “We’re both looking at history, food, race and immigration. We’re mixing these topics together in one big pot and doing it in a way that’s approachable but educational at the same time.” 

It’s worth noting that Lakshmi’s show began as a research project on immigration. According to The Atlantic, food was later chosen as a way to become more acquainted with the communities Lakshmi was investigating. Similarly, the intimacy and universality of eating are often what make Brown’s book—including its tough truths about racial inequity—palatable.

Brown says older locals will delight in the book and may remember going out as children to some of the mid-century restaurants spotlighted, such as the drive-in Taylor’s Refresher. The cover of Lost Restaurants, with its signature ’50s diner-esque font and vintage photographs, evokes this nostalgia. 

One photo on the back cover is meant to bait some readers who may expect a different book. 

“Reagan announced his gubernatorial campaign at the posh Aetna Springs in Pope Valley,” Brown says. “I really like the idea of grumpy conservatives looking and thinking, ‘Ooh, Reagan! Yes!’ Then they’ll open the book and find out that it’s all about immigrants and Black and Indigenous people of color.” 

What Constitutes a Restaurant?

Restaurants, as we think of them today (or as we thought of them throughout our lifetimes until a global pandemic began this March), are a fairly recent concept. 

As readers will learn, the French word restaurant initially described a rich meat broth that would restore one’s health. Later, it came to refer to the places that sold such broth.

In 19th-century Napa and other Western towns, restaurants weren’t places you went out to eat at for a fun time. 

“You ate where you could get food because you weren’t cooking because you were a transient man with no house and no wife or a woman who was working in a hotel,” Brown says.

With this in mind, Brown’s definition of “restaurant” was broad—covering any place that prepared and sold food to the public. That allowed her to talk about bars, resorts, hotels and wholesale vendors.

“We had a lot of home tamale makers,” Brown says. “Latinx women who were Californiana descendants who would make tamales and sell them to bars and markets.” 

Most of Brown’s research began with old newspapers and their advertisements, sometimes as spare as a note saying, “So-and-so is now selling tamales at this local grocer!” Many local newspapers are digitized through the Napa County Library, but Brown’s research also included a trip to the Huntington Library to look at some original Napa newspapers from the 1850s. 

From these leads, she could often learn more about restaurateurs by digging into census data and genealogy research to piece together fuller stories of her subjects’ lives. 

However, she sometimes met dead-ends.

“Old newspapers tend to be fast and loose with facts,” Brown notes.

She was fascinated to learn that two men of Japanese ancestry briefly owned a restaurant on East First Street—near where Oxbow Market is today—in the early 1900s. Their names, listed in two old ads, were spelled differently each time. Brown even looked in the Japanese internment database, but could find no record of them. Since their story is unknown, it doesn’t appear in Lost Restaurants. 

Brown wishes she knew more about these men.

“We don’t talk about Black people in Napa, but we really don’t talk about Japanese people pre-internment here,” she says. 

Though records of most early Napa restaurants aren’t difficult to find, little has been written about them. Unless someone was really famous, people didn’t write in-depth stories about restaurants of the time.

The Recipes

Brown’s book contains 18 recipes, though not all are user-friendly. Readers should keep in mind that, in many cases, people cooked over fire and their recipes didn’t offer cook times or temperatures.

“There’s a wedding cake recipe that has absolutely no cooking instructions in it and I wouldn’t probably recommend attempting it,” Brown says. 

There are two chop suey recipes presented—one from 1902 and another from 1931.

“Every recipe would be like, ‘This is the official recipe for chop suey—this is exactly how they make it in China,’” Brown says, “and it would be completely different than the next recipe that made the same claim.”

Like many recipes of the time, readers are told what ingredients to combine (mostly animal offal), but not how much of them. 

That said, Brown tasted the parmesan polenta recipe from Caterina Nichelini, the late founder of the still-existent Nichelini Family Winery (established 1895), and it stands the test of time. 

Brown still hasn’t prepared any of the recipes herself, but would love to hear from adventurous readers who do. She can be reached through her website at bookjockeyalex.com

Watch the author read from Lost Recipes of Napa Valley and talk more with Chelsea Kurnick about her book here on YouTube at https://bit.ly/3fvwptP.

As the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests continue, artwork affiliated with the movement has become a flashpoint for disagreement in cities across the country.

On Saturday, July 4, a woman in Martinez was filmed using a small bucket of black paint and a roller to cover up the first, bright-yellow “L” in the city’s new “Black Lives Matter” mural. During the video, a man accompanying the woman calls racism a “leftist lie.”

The Martinez Police Department is reportedly now searching for this couple who defaced the artwork, which had been permitted by the city.

As nationwide protests continue, artwork has played a central role in Petaluma’s protests, raising conflicts among community members—and legal questions—over the past month. As a result, at a meeting on Monday, July 6, the Petaluma City Council weighed in on several art-related questions but left underlying legal issues largely unaddressed. 

The council approved the creation of a Black Lives Matter street mural without discussion. The artwork, similar to the ones cropping up in cities across the country including Martinez, will spell out “Black Lives Matter” on a yet-to-be-determined public street. 

Next, the council temporarily approved an impromptu art installation at the city-operated Leghorns Park, which, in recent weeks has become the center of a legal debate after a man visited the park multiple times to tear down signs, allegedly hitting one woman in the face with his elbow in the process.

Although numerous protesters witnessed the man in action on June 20, a responding police officer told protesters there wasn’t much he could do.

The officer, caught on film, explains that he cannot arrest or charge the man for removing and destroying the artwork because the artwork exists in something of a legal gray zone.

The city chose, at that time, not to enforce the municipal code that usually bars citizens from installing unpermitted art or signs in many city-owned spaces. Because the art was technically not permitted, the police could not prosecute the man for removing it, the officer says.

“We can’t play favorites, so to speak,” the officer comments. “If we’re charging him with taking down the signs, then we’d have to charge you for putting up the signs.”

In a series of interviews last week, the Bohemian attempted to clarify how the Petaluma Police reached this understanding of the law and who offered them legal advice. 

Deputy Police Chief Brian Miller said in an interview that the man’s decision to remove the art could be considered free speech under the First Amendment. He also said that the District Attorney’s office advised the police department that the man was “acting on behalf of the City” when he tore down and destroyed the signs.

The District Attorney’s Office denies they offered the department that advice, and City Attorney Eric Danly stated in an email, “The person who removed the signs was not acting as an agent of the City.” Nor did the public attorneys advise the police department that the vandalism of the artworks was protected as freedom of expression.

Although it is now caught up in a nationwide political discussion, the Leghorns Park installation had decidedly non-political beginnings.

Back in December, the Kindness Committee, a group founded by local high school students, began installing their artwork on fences at public schools and parks. The early installations included phrases such as “be nice,” “go for it,” and “be happy,” according to a presentation two of the group’s founders gave to the city council.

In June, as the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests began, the Kindness Committee began installing work in support of the movement at parks around the city. Only then did the students’ artwork become controversial, the Kindness Committee’s members and supporters said during the council meeting.

In mid-June, after some of the signs were ripped down, the Kindness Committee organized a “sign hanging party.” Some of those signs were ripped down as well, but local Black Lives Matters activists and sympathizers continued to add their own work to the Kindness Committee’s Leghorns Park display throughout the month.

In letters submitted to the council, a few residents criticized the appearance and political significance of the artwork. One man, speaking during public comment, said that permitting the artwork, even temporarily, could lead the city to slip into lawlessness.

Those statements—and the people who removed the art—seemed racist, supporters of the artwork said.

“I think this art has brought out the racism in our community and I encourage you to pass this resolution,” former councilmember Janice Cader-Thompson said during the meeting’s public-comment period. 

Ultimately, the city council approved the artwork until Aug. 6 with an option to extend until Sept. 15. 

The council did not address the underlying legal issues raised by the June 20 video of the police’s response to the man removing the artwork. But, if he returns to tear down the now-permitted artwork, the police will be obligated to charge him.

Does city-permitted artwork pack the same political punch as unpermitted artwork? Protesters who spoke at the meeting seemed to think the city’s approval signifies a small step in support of the movement, although the city, as with most others in the North Bay, has been slow to embrace the movement’s larger calls for systemic police reform, reallocating funding away from law enforcement or abolishing police departments altogether. 

For their part, protesters continue to use unpermitted artwork as a tool.

During a march on Saturday, July 4, protesters installed artwork all over the station’s sign and front doors.

“Abolish the police,” one poster taped over a sign in front of the station read.

Although the police did not attempt to stop the installation, the artwork had been removed by Tuesday afternoon.

Nearly a month earlier, on June 12, the Petaluma Police Department took to Facebook with a post featuring artwork in support of police.

“We would like to thank the chaplains, volunteers and community members who showed their support this morning by placing colorful signs on our building… Please know your posters have been moved inside for us to enjoy for weeks to come,” the Facebook post, which was tagged #thinblueline, stated. 

Additional reporting by Peter Byrne.