Berkeley Food & Counter Culture Tour

Berkeley gets overshadowed by its bigger neighbors, but a lot of what people love about American food and a fair chunk of modern political life started right here. We’ll walk you through it on foot, with five food stops along the way.

We start in the Gourmet Ghetto. In a few short blocks in the late 60s and early 70s, Alfred Peet started hand-roasting beans and basically invented specialty coffee in this country. A few doors down, the Cheese Board Collective opened as a tiny cheese shop and ended up popularizing the French baguette in the US. And around the corner, a 27-year-old Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse and decided the menu would change based on whatever was fresh that week. None of these people were trying to start a movement. They just happened to be on the same block.

The food stops on the tour change a little depending on what’s open, but expect a slice from the Cheese Board (one pizza a day, always vegetarian, no substitutions, and yes it’s that good), potato puffs from Gregoire that have a cult following for a reason, and a few other neighborhood favorites we’ll keep as a surprise.

From there we cut onto the UC Berkeley campus, the first school in the UC system. You’ll walk through the largest grove of Blue Gum Eucalyptus trees in the world (planted by the university as a windbreak, now a fire hazard nobody can agree what to do about). We’ll look at the Valley Life Sciences Building, which was the biggest concrete structure west of the Mississippi when it went up in 1930, and the Campanile, the second-tallest clock tower of its kind anywhere.

We’ll also stop at the Mario Savio Steps. In 1964, a 22-year-old Savio took his shoes off, climbed on top of a cop car so he wouldn’t scratch the paint, and gave a speech that lit the fuse on the Free Speech Movement. A few months later he gave another one on these steps, in front of 4,000 people, and got arrested along with 800 others. The steps got renamed for him in 1997.

Heading down Telegraph, we’ll stop into Rasputin’s, the original Berkeley record store. The owner has a long and pretty entertaining feud with Amoeba Records, including a story about a suitcase of cash that may or may not be true. We’ll grab one more sweet bite at Cupcakin’, and then end at People’s Park, where in May of 1969 a peaceful protest over a vacant lot turned into Bloody Thursday. Reagan called in 2,700 National Guard troops. One bystander was killed, another was permanently blinded, and 128 people ended up in the hospital.