When I leave my cottage in North Berkeley here is what I see when I walk south along Shattuck Avenue.
Before reaching the stores, there is a park called Live Oak Park.
Next to the park is Live Oak basketball court, where old women play basketball against young children (click on the photo for more detail):
This does not seem like a fair game.
The part of Shattuck Avenue in North Berkeley is called the Gourmet Ghetto because there are many good places to eat. The most famous restaurant is Chez Panisse
which is considered one of the top restaurants in the United States. A short walk away is a more affordable, but still very good, Thai restaurant called Cha-Am (reviews are here):
Almost across the street from Cha-Am is Crepevine,
which of course serves crepes. A few non-restaurants on north Shattuck also suffer from the same "clever name" disease as Crepevine. There is the foot store Solemates
One of the closest restaurants to the place where I am staying is Saul's Deli, which I found on my first day in Berkeley.
I was very surprised to see that the carbonated beverages sold at Saul's do not include Dr. Brown's!
I asked the cashier why they don't sell Dr. Brown's and he explained that the soda which they sell has better sugar than Dr. Brown's. Many people before me must have asked Saul's why they don't sell Dr. Brown's, because it is the second question on their FAQ page.
The most famous place to get food to go in North Berkeley is the Cheese Board, which is actually two stores: a bakery and a pizzeria.
Here is what it looks like at night, before they close: there is a line of people out the door waiting to get pizza (click on the photo for a better view).
There is a line out the door during the day too. They serve one kind of pizza each day and it will never be a pepperoni pizza: the toppings are always vegetarian. Personally I like the Cheese Board not so much for the pizza but for the cheese rolls in their bakery:
These are really delicious! If you show up too late in the day they are all gone (or they are a bit stale). Behind the cashier at the bakery is a Russian Civil War poster (from 1921) saying "Remember the Starving!''
This was on the wall when I visited the Cheese Board 13 years ago.
If you are sufficiently old then you get a discount on food at the bakery, with everything free once you reach 100 (click on the photo below):
I asked the cashier once if anyone over 100 had come in lately and she said not recently and perhaps I might be the next person to do so.
There are two supermarkets on north Shattuck: Safeway and Andronico's.
I was advised by several people that Andronico's is overpriced. Safeway is closer to where I live, although these two supermarkets are just a few minutes from each other by foot. Once when I was walking past Andronico's, a woman approached me and explained "I work for the environment so I am cash-poor. Could you give me $2 to help me get something at Andronico's?" I said "You should go to Safeway. Everything is cheaper there'' and continued walking. My landlord said you can go broke giving money to people on the street in Berkeley.
Since California is the center of wine production in the US, the wine selection at supermarkets is remarkably broad. The display area for wine at Safeway's take up an entire aisle:
and I imagine some of the brands sold here are not widely available beyond California. If you are not in California, have you seen any of the following wines?
(I mean there the middle bottle, Hey Mambo. Kendall-Jackson on the right is widely sold outside California.)
Click on the orange bottles above to read the diamond label, which calls these wines a Coppola production, as if it was one of his movies.
Now you know a new word where q isn't followed by u: promisqous. Click on the photo above to find out its definition.
The wine display at Andronico's is a lot more impressive than at Safeway:
Perhaps this illustrates what one of my landlords meant when she said that a friend described Andronico's not as a supermarket but as a food museum: they put so much effort into the way their goods are arranged that you almost don't want to touch them. (Someone else said that after you look at the wine prices you definitely don't want to touch them.) Elsewhere in Andronico's I found a long counter devoted entirely to olives:
I walked around the store a few times and when I passed this olive bar I never saw anyone taking olives from it.
Safeway has a sign at one of the entrances to the parking lot announcing a project to expand the store:
If you go to the website listed on this sign for the Planning Department and search for "Safeway" you find this page, which shows this project has been around for almost 4 years and there is still no visible progress.
Near the boundary between North Berkeley and downtown Berkeley is Oscar's, which hasn't changed since the 1960s or whenever it first opened.
At Oscar's I bought a hot dog and a strawberry shake (notice the Coca-Cola cup; this is no Pepsi place).
I was offered tomatoes as a topping on the hot dog, but that didn't make any sense, so I declined.
I have a car in Berkeley, but it is not my own. A friend of mine moved from Berkeley to Connecticut in early January and asked to borrow my car in Connecticut while I was not there. I agreed to that if I could borrow her car while I am in Berkeley. She agreed to that if she could have her car back when she was visiting Berkeley (she comes back once a month). That was okay with me, since I basically only use the car in Berkeley to go food shopping. The first time the friend came back to Berkeley she asked to meet me with the car near the corner of Shattuck and Hearst Avenue "by the burger place''. I drove down to that corner, turned onto Hearst, and drove along Hearst for several minutes looking for a burger place. Eventually I reached a dead end. It turns out that the burger place my friend had in mind was Oscar's, located all the way back at the corner of Shattuck and Hearst, but I was thinking of Oscar's as a hot dog place and not a burger place because of what I ate there, so I had driven right past it without thinking.
There are stores other than restaurants on North Shattuck. Here is Elephant Pharmacy:
What a strange name for a pharmacy. According to the FAQ page for the store, it is called Elephant because those animals are large, intelligent, and caring. Caring? These elephant pharmacists don't know about the old history of elephants and humans. This store, like many others in Berkeley, subscribes to a progressive/hippie ethos. Maybe they have some "special drugs" growing in the back? I'll never know, because the store actually closed two years ago. If you click on the photo you'll see the white sign above the windows is advertising the 16,000 square feet of retail space. Signs indicate that this will soon become a branch of the Walgreen's pharmacy chain.
How did the roof get put there? On another day there is a roof across all three parking spaces:
The purposes of these roofs is to allow twice as many cars to park. Here is one car above another:
Across the garage we also see one car parked above another car.
Before reaching the stores, there is a park called Live Oak Park.
Next to the park is Live Oak basketball court, where old women play basketball against young children (click on the photo for more detail):
This does not seem like a fair game.
The part of Shattuck Avenue in North Berkeley is called the Gourmet Ghetto because there are many good places to eat. The most famous restaurant is Chez Panisse
which is considered one of the top restaurants in the United States. A short walk away is a more affordable, but still very good, Thai restaurant called Cha-Am (reviews are here):
Almost across the street from Cha-Am is Crepevine,
which of course serves crepes. A few non-restaurants on north Shattuck also suffer from the same "clever name" disease as Crepevine. There is the foot store Solemates
and Sew-Clean Cleaners:
Oh, that name is just seeeew funny. And not only do they clean clothes, but they sell jewelry too! Click on the photo and look at what's in the window.
One of the closest restaurants to the place where I am staying is Saul's Deli, which I found on my first day in Berkeley.
I was very surprised to see that the carbonated beverages sold at Saul's do not include Dr. Brown's!
I asked the cashier why they don't sell Dr. Brown's and he explained that the soda which they sell has better sugar than Dr. Brown's. Many people before me must have asked Saul's why they don't sell Dr. Brown's, because it is the second question on their FAQ page.
The most famous place to get food to go in North Berkeley is the Cheese Board, which is actually two stores: a bakery and a pizzeria.
Here is what it looks like at night, before they close: there is a line of people out the door waiting to get pizza (click on the photo for a better view).
There is a line out the door during the day too. They serve one kind of pizza each day and it will never be a pepperoni pizza: the toppings are always vegetarian. Personally I like the Cheese Board not so much for the pizza but for the cheese rolls in their bakery:
These are really delicious! If you show up too late in the day they are all gone (or they are a bit stale). Behind the cashier at the bakery is a Russian Civil War poster (from 1921) saying "Remember the Starving!''
This was on the wall when I visited the Cheese Board 13 years ago.
If you are sufficiently old then you get a discount on food at the bakery, with everything free once you reach 100 (click on the photo below):
I asked the cashier once if anyone over 100 had come in lately and she said not recently and perhaps I might be the next person to do so.
There are two supermarkets on north Shattuck: Safeway and Andronico's.
I was advised by several people that Andronico's is overpriced. Safeway is closer to where I live, although these two supermarkets are just a few minutes from each other by foot. Once when I was walking past Andronico's, a woman approached me and explained "I work for the environment so I am cash-poor. Could you give me $2 to help me get something at Andronico's?" I said "You should go to Safeway. Everything is cheaper there'' and continued walking. My landlord said you can go broke giving money to people on the street in Berkeley.
Since California is the center of wine production in the US, the wine selection at supermarkets is remarkably broad. The display area for wine at Safeway's take up an entire aisle:
and I imagine some of the brands sold here are not widely available beyond California. If you are not in California, have you seen any of the following wines?
(I mean there the middle bottle, Hey Mambo. Kendall-Jackson on the right is widely sold outside California.)
Click on the orange bottles above to read the diamond label, which calls these wines a Coppola production, as if it was one of his movies.
Now you know a new word where q isn't followed by u: promisqous. Click on the photo above to find out its definition.
The wine display at Andronico's is a lot more impressive than at Safeway:
Perhaps this illustrates what one of my landlords meant when she said that a friend described Andronico's not as a supermarket but as a food museum: they put so much effort into the way their goods are arranged that you almost don't want to touch them. (Someone else said that after you look at the wine prices you definitely don't want to touch them.) Elsewhere in Andronico's I found a long counter devoted entirely to olives:
I walked around the store a few times and when I passed this olive bar I never saw anyone taking olives from it.
Safeway has a sign at one of the entrances to the parking lot announcing a project to expand the store:
If you go to the website listed on this sign for the Planning Department and search for "Safeway" you find this page, which shows this project has been around for almost 4 years and there is still no visible progress.
Near the boundary between North Berkeley and downtown Berkeley is Oscar's, which hasn't changed since the 1960s or whenever it first opened.
At Oscar's I bought a hot dog and a strawberry shake (notice the Coca-Cola cup; this is no Pepsi place).
I was offered tomatoes as a topping on the hot dog, but that didn't make any sense, so I declined.
I have a car in Berkeley, but it is not my own. A friend of mine moved from Berkeley to Connecticut in early January and asked to borrow my car in Connecticut while I was not there. I agreed to that if I could borrow her car while I am in Berkeley. She agreed to that if she could have her car back when she was visiting Berkeley (she comes back once a month). That was okay with me, since I basically only use the car in Berkeley to go food shopping. The first time the friend came back to Berkeley she asked to meet me with the car near the corner of Shattuck and Hearst Avenue "by the burger place''. I drove down to that corner, turned onto Hearst, and drove along Hearst for several minutes looking for a burger place. Eventually I reached a dead end. It turns out that the burger place my friend had in mind was Oscar's, located all the way back at the corner of Shattuck and Hearst, but I was thinking of Oscar's as a hot dog place and not a burger place because of what I ate there, so I had driven right past it without thinking.
There are stores other than restaurants on North Shattuck. Here is Elephant Pharmacy:
What a strange name for a pharmacy. According to the FAQ page for the store, it is called Elephant because those animals are large, intelligent, and caring. Caring? These elephant pharmacists don't know about the old history of elephants and humans. This store, like many others in Berkeley, subscribes to a progressive/hippie ethos. Maybe they have some "special drugs" growing in the back? I'll never know, because the store actually closed two years ago. If you click on the photo you'll see the white sign above the windows is advertising the 16,000 square feet of retail space. Signs indicate that this will soon become a branch of the Walgreen's pharmacy chain.
When your car needs to have its smog test, the testing station in the photo below will let you retest for free if you fail the first time (click on the photo to read the sign):
The people working there don't need a leaf blower when they can use a tire inflater hose to blow their leaves over to someone else's property (click on the photo to see what is happening):
More information about the businesses along the northern part of Shattuck Avenue can be found here. The organization which promotes this area is called the North Shattuck Association, or NSA for short. I am surprised that organization would use such an abbreviation.
The apartments along Shattuck Ave. have parking garages on the ground floor. An amazing piece of technology in one of these garages is a device that lets one car park directly above another one. In the photo below things look normal.
If you pass this garage on another day, you find a roof above the gray car:
How did the roof get put there? On another day there is a roof across all three parking spaces:
The purposes of these roofs is to allow twice as many cars to park. Here is one car above another:
Across the garage we also see one car parked above another car.
How does the top car get put above the bottom car? After passing the garage for about a month I figured out how this system must work: the top platform can lie directly on the bottom platform so they are a common floor for one car. When two cars need to park, the top platform can be raised from the ground with a car already on it in order to to permit another car to park below it. The way I realized this is that each platform has a number in a small white square at the front (you can see the numbers if you click on the photos). When two platforms are visible, one above another, the number on the platform that used to be on the ground is now the number of the platform in the air.
I would love to see this parking mechanism at work, but so far every time I walk past this garage there are no cars entering or exiting. I am still puzzled by one matter: how do the car drivers negotiate who parks where? It seems like a logistical nightmare unless one apartment owns both lower and upper levels. But that seems unlikely since we can see that the left side of the garage has a lower and upper level which each accommodate two cars. Does some family own four cars??
When you drive in Berkeley, make sure to let pedestrians have the right of way. If you don't and you get caught, it will be an expensive fine:
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