My Super Bowl
Berkeley Bowl, at its best and worst, is peak Bay Area
“Glenn created one of my favorite places on earth. If it weren’t for him, I would never have tasted a wiry-haired rambutan, scooped out the oozy green juice of a horned melon, shelled a fresh chickpea, or stuffed a banana leaf as big as my head. Glenn provided the Bay Area with the best and most varied produce around, hands down.” - Laura McLiveley, The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook
Berkeley Bowl West might be my favorite place in the Bay Area—maybe even the world.
Since college, I’ve never lived more than a mile away from it.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
But for all its upsides, Berkeley Bowl also encapsulates everything I loathe about the Bay Area.
Nowhere are the charms and blindspots of Berkeley more apparent than the congested aisles of Berkeley Bowl and Berkeley Bowl West.
Navigating these astounding stores—bustling even on weekdays—requires the quads of an Olympic skier, the patience of a saint, and the reflexes of a teenager who’s spent too much time playing Frogger. However, if you survive the gauntlet, you’ll understand the hype.
It’s the produce, people.
Berkeley Bowl is a botanical fever dream—an Eden of abundance, sourced from California and beyond, arranged like it was laid out just for you.
Every fruit and vegetable you know—and plenty you don’t—are here. Nearly every apple variety is accounted for, along with a dozen types of bananas—from squat, finger-sized ones to hulking, starchy plantains. Tropical delicacies abound, like pineapples, coconuts, papaya, guava, and passionfruit. There are finger limes, no bigger than a pinky, and pomelos the size of cannonballs. There’s even Durian, a spiky fruit so pungent it’s banned on public transit in much of Asia.
Then there are the esoteric vegetables: daikons as long as my arm, and sunchokes and celeriac straight out of a gnome’s garden. There are things you could easily just feed to your rabbit instead like dandelion greens, things that don’t sound very fun to eat like bitter melon, and things that look like the detritus left over after weeding your garden, like the curly qs of fiddlehead ferns. I find myself most consistently fascinated by the romanesco, a niche cultivar of broccoli that resembles what MC Escher would come up with if he were commissioned to design a vegetable. If you shop during the right few weeks each spring you may even find ramps, the wild ancestor of onions and leeks that must be foraged by hand.
Who can we think for this perpetual bounty?
Glenn Yasuda.
The Yasuda family’s legacy will be measured in produce.
They emigrated from Japan to Southern California and began farming mushrooms—a tradition they continued for two generations, even while imprisoned in a Wyoming internment camp during World War II. Glenn Yasuda grew up watching his father and grandfather cultivate produce. He chose to sell it.
In 1977, alongside his wife Dianne, he opened a grocery store inside of a former bowling alley on Shattuck Avenue and called it Berkeley Bowl. Sourcing astoundingly fresh produce was their pride and joy. Glenn Yasuda would start working at 2:30 AM, heading to the wholesale markets in San Francisco to scout out the best and freshest fruits and vegetables he could find. While other retailers would buy huge quantities of unripe produce from growers and distributors far away, Glenn Yasuda focused on buying directly from smaller, closer growers, so items arrived as fresh as possible.
This was a boon, not just to adventurous shoppers and cooks, but to farmers struggling to market niche varieties in the rapidly consolidating landscape of the American grocery industry. David Masumoto was one such farmer. He was struggling to find buyers for his organic Suncrest peaches and was seriously considering bulldozing his orchard outside of Fresno until he met Glenn Yasuda. Yasuda agreed to start buying them, trusting that his customers would be open to a more obscure peach variety as long as it was fresh. Masumoto credits Yasuda’s support as helping save his family farm.
The original Shattuck location was ideal at first because it was near the Yasuda’s home, but by 1999 their success meant they’d outgrown it. So moved to a much larger space on Oregon street. Berkeley Bowl’s popularity only grew from there.
In 2009, the Yasuda’s opened Berkeley Bowl West, on Heinz Avenue, a street once home to a ketchup factory. This new location had more space and lots more parking than their Oregon Street location, which some had taken to calling “Berkeley Brawl” because of how competitive the parking lot had become. This new location featured an underground parking garage with electric vehicle charing as well as a cafe serving food and their own brand of coffee.
I still remember the excitement in my childhood home in North Berkeley when Berkeley Bowl West opened. I had just finished my freshman year in college and my mom drove us to this shiny new store with its broad, gleaming aisles and promptly proclaimed that this was where we’d be doing all of our shopping for the foreseeable future. She was right. It was an undeniable upgrade to its claustrophobic cousin on Oregon Street.
Back in the Bay after college, I was delighted to find my North Oakland apartment was just a short bike ride from Berkeley Bowl West. For my first eight years living in the Bay Area as a 20-something, I did not own a car and did all of my grocery shopping by bike at Berkeley Bowl West. Overtime, I developed an intuitive sense of how much food I could comfortably cram into my cavernous Chrome backpack. A few times, my eyes were bigger than my backpack, and I wobbled home with produce swinging from my handlebars.
During my early twenties, I was working as a line cook, which meant my weekend was Wednesday-Thursday. I developed a ritual of sleeping in until around 2 or 2:30pm on Wednesdays, before biking to Spoon for Korean food and Berkeley Bowl for a grocery shop. I’d blitz through the store before biking home to begin slow-cooking meat and shredding cabbage for slaw for a weekly dinner party with my housemates. Energetic and eager to show off, I’d make elaborate meals that used every pot and pan in the house. As Kevin, Tonio, and I sipped French and Italian wine, Tonio periodically treating us to a bottle as old as we were, I’d find myself grinning with satisfaction at the delicious life we were all leading together. Even the mountain of dishes I knew we had ahead of us couldn’t deflate my spirits on nights like that.
After I quit restaurant work I stopped shopping mid afternoon on Wednesdays and was astounded to realize how crowded my beloved Bowl was during “normal people” hours. When Alexis and I moved in together in 2019 I was delighted to realize that our apartment on Russell Street was walking distance from Berkeley Bowl West. Now I could even get groceries on foot, provided I was willing to do a farmer’s carry home with whatever I’d picked out.
While they didn’t set out to do this in the 70s, Glenn and Diane Yasuda ended up creating a truly rare thing: a destination grocery store. Its proximity to I-80 means people from all over the Bay Area commute to Berkeley Bowl West just to shop. Tourists visiting the Bay Area make a point of stopping at the Bowl. It’s fame transcended cult status and is now mainstream. The LA Times called it “one of the nation’s most renowned retailers of exotic fruits and vegetables,” Michael Pollan called it “heaven for omnivores,” and it was featured on Samin Nosrat’s’ Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat on Netflix. People have even done their engagement photoshoots there.
Glenn Yasuda died in February of 2020, at age 85. His son, Gen, took over the family business. Glenn was fondly remembered by his family, employees, and customers alike. One of his longtime employees reflected that: “He knows more about produce than all of us combined. He probably forgot more produce than we all know.”
The Yasudas didn’t have much time to mourn, however, as a new challenge hit their stores almost immediately. When COVID-19 announced itself to the US in March of 2020, some of the most surreal scenes of this public health crisis took place in the panicked aisles of our nation’s grocery stores. Indeed, it was at Berkeley Bowl where I realized how serious this was going to be.
One of my best friends from college was visiting, and I had agreed to make pozole for dinner. So, I needed to stop by the Bowl for some last-minute ingredients. When I walked in, the sight took my breath away. It was more crowded than I’d ever seen it, surpassing even pre-Thanksgiving and Super Bowl rushes. Checkout lines coiled deep into the aisles, swallowing entire sections of shelves. Frantic people with improvised masks flooded the overwhelmed cashiers like a tidal wave. The air pulsed with collective anxiety, like an airport over the holidays or the Apple Store before Christmas.
As I moved through the store, grabbing onions, cilantro, and pork, I overheard snippets of conversation straight out of an apocalyptic movie:
“I can’t believe the government hasn’t called it a pandemic yet…”
“Trump just shut down travel from Europe. Not sure if it’ll help, but it’s a start.”
“They canceled the NBA! Can you believe that?”
“I saw on Twitter that Tom Hanks has it now. I hope he makes it…”
“I heard the Midwest will run out of food in a few days. We might be fine because of our proximity to farms, but who knows…”
I was in the refrigerated Asian specialty aisle, eyeing varieties of tofu, when I heard that last one. So I grabbed a couple of jars of kimchi, reasoning that preserved cabbage could help me spice up pantry staples, get some extra micronutrients, and maybe even ward off scurvy if things took a turn for the worse. The checkout line had backed up most of the way down the aisle so I made this impulse kimchi the last thing I put in my cart and took my place the never-ending line.
That was the last time I shopped at Berkeley Bowl for close to two years. We turtled up in our tiny in-law unit on Russell Street and subsisted on the Imperfect Foods boxes we had delivered. I supplemented these with bike runs to The Spanish Table for expensive yet delightful Iberian delicacies. At lunchtime we’d get pandemic updates from Seth Myers’s “A Closer Look” accompanied by patatas bravas and artisanal chorizo. It was an odd stretch of time in my life. While some parts of living in the Bay Area still don’t feel the same post-COVID, things felt the most back to normal for me when I finally returned to shopping at Berkeley Bowl West.
Berkeley, California, takes its name from an Irish philosopher who never set foot here—fitting for a city that’s never reconciled its grand self-image with reality. Take the University of California, Berkeley, which refers to itself as “Cal” because it was the state’s first public university. The fact that this accomplishment was 156 years ago, or that starting a university was much easier during the Andrew Johnson administration doesn’t appear to concern people here.
The mascot of the University of California Berkeley is the Golden Bear, a subspecies of the grizzly bear, scientifically known as Ursus arctos californicus, so regal and handsome that no one bothers to tell you it was tragically hunted to extinction a century ago. The last living golden bear was shot in Tulare County in 1922. That hasn’t stopped the school from slapping it on jerseys and the state from featuring it on our flag. Imagine if Stanford kept their redwood mascot after chopping down “El Palo Alto,” the thousand-year-old tree their city is named for. I honestly hesitate to mention this—lest it give any chainsaw-wielding tech executives ideas.
I’ve lived 18 of my 34 years in Berkeley, and have come to see it as a contradiction: a city where residents define their politics by protests they may or may not have attended 50 years ago—while quietly supporting zoning laws that keep newcomers out.
Berkeley is a city brimming with fascinating characters who embody the city’s quirks and contradictions.
Berkeley men are wiry weekend warriors eager to corner you and pontificate on their latest passion: cycling, rock climbing, woodworking, or a slower form of birdwatching they swear they invented.
Berkeley women tend to fall into two categories.
There’s the spandex-clad yoga devotee, radiating bliss post-class or rushing to her next session—chakras, asanas, crystals at the ready. If you’re unsure what to say to her, just mention that Berkeley might increase—or decrease—the fluoride in the water. She’ll take it from there.
Then there’s the “woman of leisure.” This Berkeley woman is pure flowiness, draped in an improbable number of scarves, caftans, and sweaters—at least 50% merino wool or cashmere by volume. She may look soft, but she will run you over with no remorse in her Prius or Tesla, only after giving you the kind of passive aggressive death stare that makes you briefly believe every single downside of urban life is entirely your fault.
When I’m at Berkeley Bowl, perusing the endless aisles of delicacies from around the state, country, and world, I consistently find some of these Berkeley women looking at me and my fellow shoppers with a kind of mild outrage, like they’re disgusted at the idea that other people had the nerve to live in the same nice city as them, much less grocery shop at the same time. Sometimes, mid-grocery run at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, I wonder what these women do for work—until I remember I’m here too, ducking out midweek as a freelancer. Then I shut up before the hypocrisy of Berkeley infects me any further than it already has.
I understand—if not quite empathize with—the dismayed looks that Berkeley women give me whenever I wander into the butcher section of Berkeley Bowl. It’s the same feeling I get driving on Bay Area freeways—a palpable sense that this wildly expensive yet absurdly livable place is now groaning under the weight of everyone trying to exist here at once.
If you need meat on a weekend, before a holiday, or after yoga class, you’ll consider vegetarianism just to skip this line. I’ve never seen a butcher’s line move so slowly. On days like this, it feels like the last time they finished serving a full queue was during the Cretaceous period. To understand the delay, I’ll sometimes eavesdrop on a man ten numbers ahead of me, who is grilling the beleaguered butcher with follow up questions, demanding an in-depth lecture on the anatomy of a cow, sounding more like someone who is training to be a cow’s physical therapist than someone interested in cooking one.
On days like like this I recommend you toss out your deli number and console yourself with the astoundingly good beer selection next door. The beer aisle reaffirms why people come to this store despite the hassle. You’ll briefly considering a trendy-looking IPA with a neon narwhal on the label and a sour beer advertised as being brewed with real scorpions, and then settle on a six pack of Drake’s 1500, a remarkably drinkable pale ale as long as you ignore the fact it’s named after an English pirate and slave trader.
Every trip, blissful or hellish, ends the same way.
Once your basket is laden with more organic produce and pantry staples than you thought possible you face the final trial: checkout lines stretching across entire aisles. Leaving this store, much like shopping in it, is not for the faint of heart or impatient. It also brings you in closest contact to some of the best and worst people in Berkeley.
Case in point, one busy Saturday afternoon, I slid into what I thought would be the shortest line and instantly regretted it. A Berkeley lady of leisure swooped in from the left, cutting me without a shred of remorse. I looked at her, visibly perturbed, and then checked behind me to see that I was the end of the line. There were no other witnesses to her crime.
I’m normally very conflict-averse. I once bought a foul smelling type of Old Spice deodorant at Berkeley Bowl West just because I didn’t have the nerve to ask a Berkeley lady to scoot aside and let me grab the one I really wanted. But on this day I was feeling feisty. But as I mustered the courage to politely call the line-cutter out, she spoke first: “Have you seen the fake sun today?”
I pride myself on being able to talk to most people about nearly any topic under the sun, but I had never before heard someone question the veracity of the sun.
I stalled: “Yes, it is warm for February.” I hoped this would steer the conversation back on course— Californians love nothing more than observing how our mild climate thumbs its nose at the idea of seasons.
She continued, “The government destroyed the sun and replaced it with a fake one so they can control the weather and spy on us.”
“Oh…I see,” was all I could muster in response. I began to sense this wasn’t going to be a conversation in any conventional sense of the word. She proved me right instantly.
“And the birds. Don’t get me started on birds.”
“Has the government taken over birds now, too?”
“Oh yeah, they’re all government drones. Have you ever seen a dead bird?”
This was when I realized she’d never been to San Francisco or New York City. She didn’t give me time to answer the bird question, pivoting yet again.
“It’s all a sham, and it’s why they created cancer only to cure cancer so they can sell cancer and buy cancer and pretty soon we are all going to be cancer!”
I wasn’t sure which of these falsehoods to try to refute first, more fascinated with how she’d somehow turned our mutual hatred of the pharmaceutical industry into a point of debate rather than agreement.
The cashier, a friendly Ethiopian lady I’d seen many times before, was less phased than me, ignoring this unhinged monologue to ask me: “did you find everything okay?”
I nodded and gave her my credit card.
After checking out, I slid towards the exit, but my line-cutting companion was waiting for me and had one last thing to say before I got away.
“Enjoy your fake life!” her tone desperate, bordering on pleading.
I considered a quip. All I could muster was: “You, too!”
Lately, I’ve realized that my reaction to shopping at Berkeley Bowl is a reliable barometer of my overall well-being.
If I’m rushed or exhausted, I seethe—trapped behind slow, oblivious shoppers seemingly bewildered by the concept of a grocery store. It’s days and trips like this that made me develop my personal Berkeley Bowl commandments:
Have a list. Have a plan. Efficiency is survival.
Bring your own produce bags—not to save the planet, but to avoid wrestling with those impossible-to-open compostable ones.
Use a basket, not a cart—unless you enjoy getting stuck in traffic jams worse than 580.
Avoid the meat counter during peak hours and for the love of God, never go before a holiday.
Friday night may be the most peaceful time to go. Avoid evenings and weekends entirely if you can. Under no circumstances should you go on a Sunday evening.
Berkeley Bowl also doubles as an economic barometer. When inflation, COVID, and bird flu took turns disrupting the food system, I felt it first and most acutely in my Bowl receipts. This is the kind of store where buying eight things and glancing at four now sets you back $100. While their produce prices have remained very reasonable, I’ve recently considered drastically reducing my meat consumption to reduce the sticker shock of checkout.
On days when I’m calm and rested, I roam in awe—grateful for this magnificent store. Even when the aisles are clogged with people whose spatial awareness rivals that of houseplants, I can’t help but marvel at the eclectically beautiful variety of fruits, vegetables, and humanity.
As Laura McLively recounts in The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook:
“Despite two locations and more customers than they can handle, Berkeley Bowl has retained its quirky independence. Generation after generation continue to shop at “The Bowl,” as it’s affectionately known by regulars, even while luxury markets pop up all around it. On this September afternoon, a man with graying dreadlocks and a home-sewn shopping bag comes through the sliding doors alongside a family chatting in Spanish, a woman in a hijab, and a grandmother dressed in her Sunday best. They’re all headed for that bin of perfect tomatoes, but chances are they’ll leave with some other unexpected edible treasures. Such is the magic of Berkeley Bowl.”
Berkeley Bowl isn’t heaven or hell. Like Berkeley itself, its maddening and magnificent, abundant and expensive, unnecessarily chaotic and indisputably wonderful. It will test your patience and reward your perseverance. It’s a place where your grocery run might be hijacked by a line-cutting conspiracy theorist—but also where you’ll find the best peaches you’ve ever tasted. One thing is certain: if Dante Alighieri had shopped here, he would have written about it, too, assuming he ever made it out of the butcher line.