Indoor dining is on hold in the North Bay for the foreseeable future, dealing a major setback for restaurants and bars that were hoping to salvage summer during the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, there are ways to support the local food industry, and last month, a Santa Rosa teacher launched an endeavor to highlight North Bay businesses and restaurants owned and operated by people of color, giving residents a guide to where they can support Black lives in the community while eating well.

Kelly Cramer, who works as a teacher at Roseland University Prep in Santa Rosa, made the ever-expanding online spreadsheet of Black, Immigrant and People of Color Owned Restaurants and Businesses in Sonoma County after looking for one like it on internet search engines.

“I just thought that it deserved to exist,” Cramer said at the time. “After much thought, I decided to also include all people of color and immigrant-run businesses because, although Black businesses need to be amplified now and always, I simply just wanted to keep this resource all in one place so people can continue to utilize it for the future, long after it’s trendy.”

Black-owned North Bay restaurants on the list include more than 250 restaurants and businesses. For North Bay food lovers in need of some real comfort, four spots stand out in Sonoma, Marin and Napa counties.

Buster’s Southern Barbecue has been serving up authentic Louisiana-inspired cooking in Calistoga since 1965 and has become a staple of the community. The restaurant serves up top quality tri-tip, pork and beef ribs and more with choices of mild or spicy BBQ sauce and their sandwiches, served on garlic toast, are a popular lunch for locals. Outside dining and take-out is available. busterssouthernbbq.com.

Bariadelli Caribbean Gourmet Pizza is located in northwest Santa Rosa, and specializes in authentic Caribbean cuisine, catering, take-and-bake gourmet pizzas and food-truck services. Now open for online orders, Bariadelli brings bold flavors to its menu, with items like Jerk Chicken Pizza and a Caribbean Supreme that features rice and beans, creole chicken, jumbo shrimp and fried plantains. bariadelli.com.

Marin County residents can also find Black-owned restaurants and chefs in their backyard, with locations such as Caribbean Spices Restaurant in San Rafael. Since 2009, Caribbean Spices makes Haitian and Creole cuisine, and the restaurant has been offering outdoor dining in addition to catering options with specialty dishes like oxtail and creole snapper. carribeanspicesdba.net.

Also based in San Rafael, Forrest Fire BBQ is the culinary soul of owner and pitmaster Forrest Murray Jr. Murray learned to cook from his family, and he puts that familial love into his food. Forrest Fire BBQ is a mobile operation, and Murray caters throughout the Bay Area with a menu that includes St Louis–style pork ribs, sirloin beef ball tip steaks and pulled meat sandwiches with all the sides and sauces. Forrest Fire BBQ also pops up at Marinwood Market on certain weekends, with ribs, hot dogs, corn on a stick and more on hand. forrestfirebbq.com.

“A disproportionate percentage of Black and POC-owned businesses have closed during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Cramer says. “Supporting these places is just ultimately good for everyone. Plus, so much good food and wine is on this list! A ton of places I can’t wait to try.”

Find the full list at bit.ly/SOCOPOC.

Alexandria Brown isn’t a foodie, but she wrote this year’s most compelling North Bay book on food. In fact, Lost Restaurants of Napa Valley and Their Recipes, released in April by The History Press, was written while its author lived in a kitchenless apartment. In it, Brown—a historian—uses restaurants-past as a lens through which to tell stories of the immigrant and people-of-color communities that shaped the esteemed culinary region. 

At first, Brown—who has master’s degrees in library science and U.S. history—wasn’t eager about her press’s proposal to write about restaurants. But she did a bit of research and soon got excited about the project. 

“I found all of these people of color, immigrants and women who were doing really interesting things with food but whose stories had never been told or had been white-washed,” says Brown, who is a Black woman raised in Napa.

While focused on Napa, Lost Restaurants is also a book that traces how “exotic” and “foreign” foods become “American” classics. 

Several of the book’s chapters focus on a specific cuisine. “Chili Queens and Tamale Men” tells the stories of Mexican-American cuisine in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

The chapter “Chow Chop Suey” explores three 20th-century Chinese restaurants that specialized in the wildly popular dish of the time. Brown’s book couldn’t tell the stories of Chinese food and local restaurants without also telling the story of Chinese immigration to Napa, xenophobia, racism and pervasive “model minority” myths. 

Brown likens her book to Padma Lakshmi’s new Hulu series, Taste the Nation.

“I feel like we’re doing similar things and our audiences are similar,” she says. “We’re both looking at history, food, race and immigration. We’re mixing these topics together in one big pot and doing it in a way that’s approachable but educational at the same time.” 

It’s worth noting that Lakshmi’s show began as a research project on immigration. According to The Atlantic, food was later chosen as a way to become more acquainted with the communities Lakshmi was investigating. Similarly, the intimacy and universality of eating are often what make Brown’s book—including its tough truths about racial inequity—palatable.

Brown says older locals will delight in the book and may remember going out as children to some of the mid-century restaurants spotlighted, such as the drive-in Taylor’s Refresher. The cover of Lost Restaurants, with its signature ’50s diner-esque font and vintage photographs, evokes this nostalgia. 

One photo on the back cover is meant to bait some readers who may expect a different book. 

“Reagan announced his gubernatorial campaign at the posh Aetna Springs in Pope Valley,” Brown says. “I really like the idea of grumpy conservatives looking and thinking, ‘Ooh, Reagan! Yes!’ Then they’ll open the book and find out that it’s all about immigrants and Black and Indigenous people of color.” 

What Constitutes a Restaurant?

Restaurants, as we think of them today (or as we thought of them throughout our lifetimes until a global pandemic exploded this March), are a fairly recent concept. 

As readers will learn, the French word restaurant initially described a rich meat broth that would restore one’s health. Later, it came to refer to the places that sold such broth.

In 19th-century Napa and other Western towns, restaurants weren’t places you went out to eat at for a fun time. 

“You ate where you could get food because you weren’t cooking because you were a transient man with no house and no wife or a woman who was working in a hotel,” Brown says.

With this in mind, Brown’s definition of “restaurant” was broad—covering any place that prepared and sold food to the public. That allowed her to talk about bars, resorts, hotels and wholesale vendors.

“We had a lot of home tamale makers,” Brown says. “Latinx women who were Californiana descendants who would make tamales and sell them to bars and markets.” 

Most of Brown’s research began with old newspapers and their advertisements, sometimes as spare as a note saying, “So-and-so is now selling tamales at this local grocer!” Many local newspapers are digitized through the Napa County Library, but Brown’s research also included a trip to the Huntington Library to look at some original Napa newspapers from the 1850s. 

From these leads, she could often learn more about restaurateurs by digging into census data and genealogy research to piece together fuller stories of her subjects’ lives. 

However, she sometimes met dead-ends.

“Old newspapers tend to be fast and loose with facts,” Brown notes.

She was fascinated to learn that two men of Japanese ancestry briefly owned a restaurant on East First Street—near where Oxbow Market is today—in the early 1900s. Their names, listed in two old ads, were spelled differently each time. Brown even looked in the Japanese internment database, but could find no record of them. Since their story is unknown, it doesn’t appear in Lost Restaurants. 

Brown wishes she knew more about these men.

“We don’t talk about Black people in Napa, but we really don’t talk about Japanese people pre-internment here,” she says. 

Though records of most early Napa restaurants aren’t difficult to find, little has been written about them. Unless someone was really famous, people didn’t write in-depth stories about restaurants of the time.

The Recipes

Brown’s book contains 18 recipes, though not all are user-friendly. Readers should keep in mind that, in many cases, people cooked over fire and their recipes didn’t offer cook times or temperatures.

“There’s a wedding cake recipe that has absolutely no cooking instructions in it and I wouldn’t probably recommend attempting it,” Brown says. 

There are two chop suey recipes presented—one from 1902 and another from 1931.

“Every recipe would be like, ‘This is the official recipe for chop suey—this is exactly how they make it in China,’” Brown says, “and it would be completely different than the next recipe that made the same claim.”

Like many recipes of the time, readers are told what ingredients to combine (mostly animal offal), but not how much of them. 

That said, Brown tasted the parmesan polenta recipe from Caterina Nichelini, the late founder of the still-existent Nichelini Family Winery (established 1895), and it stands the test of time. 

Brown still hasn’t prepared any of the recipes herself, but would love to hear from adventurous readers who do. She can be reached through her website at bookjockeyalex.com

Watch the author read from Lost Recipes of Napa Valley and talk more with Chelsea Kurnick about her book here on YouTube at https://bit.ly/3fvwptP.