Cafe Ohlone will reopen at UC Berkeley's Hearst Museum in November.
When Cafe Ohlone shut its doors last summer, its owners promised they would be back before long. Now, a year later, the world's only Ohlone restaurant is gearing up for a triumphant return: Owners Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino announced earlier this month that the restaurant will reopen in Berkeley this November.
The new, larger incarnation of the restaurant will be located in the outdoor courtyard of UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology. It will continue to serve the pre-colonial dishes the original Cafe Ohlone was known for—the kind you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in the Bay Area, like venison meatballs, chia seed bread and cold, luxuriously silky acorn soup. What will be new, however, is the introduction of dishes that evoke more recent periods in Ohlone history. And, perhaps most significantly, Medina and Trevino hope the courtyard restaurant will usher in a new era of cooperation with an institution that has, historically, inflicted great pain on the Ohlone people—including thousands of ancestral remains and sacred objects that the Hearst Museum has not yet returned to the Ohlone people.
“We have a very complex and not necessarily positive history, up until recently, with the Hearst,” Medina says. “They want to do the right thing, but they need to know how to do the right thing.”
