InBerkeley

If you’re wandering around the Berkeley Marina or cycling along the Bay, the weather-beaten Seabreeze is a welcome sight. The food isn’t anything special, but it’s good: clam chowder, an oyster burger, fried calamari, and all the usual sandwiches and hamburgers are on offer. You eat either at the counter or at red picnic tables. There’s also a modest market if you want to put together a picnic for Cesar Chavez Park.

It has a nice, rough-hewn character that isn’t that common in Berkeley.

Food, restaurants

It’s one of those things you generally don’t get too excited about, but a good wine vinegar can really make a big difference in a salad dressing or when cooking. While I can appreciate good wine vinegar, I’m usually annoyed by the rip-off prices you see in the supermarkets, which usually treat wine vinegar as a “gourmet” product, and price it accordingly. As opposed to plain old distilled white vinegar, which you can buy by the gallon at Costco for very little money, wine vinegars can run anywhere from a couple of dollars to more than $20 for a pint.

And so it was with great satisfaction one day that I discovered the house-made wine vinegars available at the Oak Barrel on San Pablo Avenue.  Best known as a supplier of wine, beer and vinegar making equipment, the folks at Oak Barrel Winecraft also make their own label red and white wine vinegars.

No fancy lables, no fancy bottles, you can get their vinegars in 750-mL cork-stoppered wine bottles as well as 4-liter jugs.  4 liters of either red or white wine vinegar will run you less than $5.  And it’s very good amber-colored white wine vinegar and ruby red wine vinegar, higher in acidity than most of the supermarket stuff.  After trying the vinegars in the 750-mL bottles, I now buy the 4-liter jugs and use them to refill the 750-mL bottles I keep in the kitchen. If you’re adventurous, you can stuff some herbs, garlic or whatever into the bottles to make your own flavored vinegars, too.

Given them a try.  Oak Barrel Winecraft is located at 1443 San Pablo Avenue, on the east side about two blocks north of Cedar; (510) 849-0400.

Food, General, West Berkeley Food

As reported in the Nichi Bei Times (left) via the Berkeley Daily Planet, the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission has voted to designate Japanese-American artist Chiura Obata’s former studio on Telegraph Avenue a landmark.

Though the Commission didn’t feel that the structure itself was worthy of notice, the building’s cultural significance rendered it worthy of landmark status.

Obata, who died in 1975,  had a successful career as a painter and was a faculty member in the Art Department at UC Berkeley from 1932 to 1953.

Read the full landmarking story here.

Architecture, Arts Architecture, Arts

Fourth of July 2007 in Berkeley's Claremont neighborhood: it's the real thing.

When the calendar declares it is time to carve pumpkins or flame-grill burgers, my reaction tends to be an urge to do anything but.

However, being British, it’s difficult not to notice all the hoopla surrounding the Fourth of July.

So, if you want to experience a rather charming Berkeley celebration of this big American day, I suggest you discreetly gatecrash the Fourth of July neighborhood parade that takes place in the Parkside Drive/Plaza Drive area of the city’s Claremont neighborhood.

There’s likely to be a procession — with live music — followed by the Pledge of Allegiance and rousing songs, such as “Yankee Doodle” and the “Star Spangled Banner”.

This year will be the 48th consecutive parade in the neighborhood — and that’s worth honoring if nothing else.

[Photo: Tracey Taylor.]

Events, Property Claremont, Events, Neighborhoods

Chris Edley, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, made an interesting proposal in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times:

It is time for an 11th University of California campus: a cyber-campus devoted to awarding online degrees to UC-eligible students.

No budgetary alchemy will allow us to educate the state’s future university students in the same way we do now but with less money. The budget cuts caused by the state economic crisis are real and huge, leaving two choices. Educators can do less with less, or we can explore new ways of providing value to California and the nation by doing more — albeit differently — with less.

UC XI would have selective admissions; tuition somewhere between community college and the on-campus UC price, part-time and “anytime” options and lectures by the best faculty from the entire UC system. Our online students might miss the keg parties, but they would have the same world-class faculty, UC graduate student instructors and adjunct faculty.

We have the social networking technologies to support student interactions with instructors and each other. Science laboratories could be provided on weekends, at night or during summers, and not exclusively on UC campuses. The faculty can develop powerful academic controls to guarantee UC-caliber instruction and learning.

There’s an enormous premium charged at the moment for being educated in person, particularly if the buildings are covered in ivy. I don’t share the belief of some exuberant techies that all higher education will move online. But some of university education could move in the way Edley suggests. At the moment, the innovation in this area does not seem to be happening in California, still less in Berkeley. Way not become the innovators again?

Education, University