- Grand Lake Kitchen owner May Seto told the New York Times that she’ll renovate one of her restaurants to make room for delivery drivers. Seto said that one of her restaurant’s locations (there’s one near Lake Merritt, another in Oakland’s Dimond district) serves as a delivery app hub, and that she’ll “rebuild the entryway” at the other spot to make more room for the food-ferrying gig workers. She also “might rearrange the front of the restaurant a little bit, and keep delivery in mind as if it’s here to stay, because it is.”
- Coverage of Homemade Cafe’s plan to reopen with a set of surcharges in lieu of tips prompted a vigorous discussion in Nosh’s comment section. Multiple participants claimed that the word “tips” is an initialism for “to insure prompt service,” then suggested that by eliminating tips, service would no longer be pleasant or prompt. I won’t touch that latter bit except to say that many of us are untipped at our jobs and would likely bristle at the implication that we don’t work that hard as a result. As for the origins of the word “tips,” according to a well-researched report from Snopes that I must tiresomely surface any time I see this misinformation, “Tip is an old word, and it has nothing to do with either acronyms or the act of attempting to influence quality of service,” and likely began as “tough guy jargon” intended to indicate “to give to or share with.” I’m sure that helpful information will end the debate once and for all.
- Brown Sugar Kitchen/Town Fare chef-owner Tanya Holland penned an op-ed for Newsweek in which she praises the long-problematic James Beard Foundation for launching new programs she says will create “a more equitable and sustainable industry.”
- Cafe Ohlone, the pre-colonial restaurant that closed last year, had originally hoped to reopen in San Lorenzo before settling on a spot inside UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology. [KQED]
- Popular pop-up turned Oakland brick-and-mortar Shawarmaji is now serving a shawarma and hummus-heavy weekend brunch. [East Bay Express]
- A Pittsburg ice cream truck was shut down over the weekend, after police say the vendors were actually dealing in illegal fireworks. [ABC 7]
