Best Finnish Restaurant Berkeley Near Me

4worldlovers: Cafe Ohlone’s latest iteration, ‘oṭṭoy: A Collaboration Between Café Ohlone and the Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley, is located outside the Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the UC Berkeley campus, at Bancroft on College Avenue. Please note: The address in Google is incorrect—there is no street address. If you use a map app, search for Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

Here is our vision of a “love song to Ohlone culture”…with many thanks to the wonderful folks at Terremoto, who made our vision a reality:

A gated entry to the open-air terrace opens into a lush, outdoor, curated culinary and educational experience in the form of three, unique areas that flow into one another.

A portal of light and shadows leads into the new Cafe Ohlone — Area One

The first area upon entry pays respect to our original Cafe Ohlone space at University Press Books, where diners entered into the bookstore without seeing the Cafe in the back, adding a layer of mystery and wonder to the experience as, like with a portal, guests were transported into a world reimagined. This first area offers suggestions of what will follow throughout the dining experience. After entering the gated entrance way off of Bancroft Avenue, diners will enter a scrim-covered, open-air shadow box framed by redwood. This shadow box will be illuminated by the light of the sun during the day and lit softly at night, displaying dramatic silhouettes of native plants dancing in the wind, altering shape and movement with the changing light. The plants will showcase our traditional East Bay landscape and traditional Ohlone foods, as well as subtly introduce Cafe Ohlone’s new, functional native plant gardens, generously curated in partnership with our friends at Oaktown Nursery. Diners will have their first view of one of the burlapped native gardens after walking along a transitional path from this first area; the gardens throughout Cafe Ohlone are full of aromatic and much-respected plants that will be made into teas and added to the plates of our meals. In this first space, diners will be checked in and directed to their seats.

Our voices are a part of the landscape — Cafe Ohlone’s singing trees

The sounds diners will hear upon entering Cafe Ohlone, amplifying as they reach the second and third areas, will come from native trees singing in Chochenyo language. In our old-time beliefs, still held close by our Ohlone people today, there was a time before humans existed when plants could speak. This dreamy belief inspired Cafe Ohlone’s singing trees: seven native trees will each have the voice of a living Chochenyo speaker from our Chochenyo language program. It will be so beautiful in action: an elder’s voice will begin to sing by themself — a familiar oldie, a ballad heard in our grandparents’ homes growing up; their beautiful, wise voice will be joined, one voice after another, with voices of different generations, until all are singing in unison, in harmony. Suddenly, all the trees will appear to be singing at once, saturating Cafe Ohlone with song in our enduring language. Then, each voice will drop off, one after another, until only a child is singing in the language — representing the next generation of Ohlone culture and those still to come. When the trees complete their song, the voices will shift to jokes and conversation in language — birdsongs of geese, flickers, blue jays, and red-winged blackbirds will serenade diners when the Chochenyo voices take a break. We acknowledge Meyer Sound for generously donating a wonderful sound system to us; recording for the singing trees is set to take place in January of 2022.