The tourists go to San Francisco, Napa and Sonoma. Some even venture into Berkeley. No one comes to poor old Oakland, but they should. We have a beautiful city with the best climate of any major U.S. city (from a Rand McNally survey), and despite the crime statistics, most sections of the city are perfectly safe.

I’ve lived here for 20 years now. Here are 5 cool places I go to and if you’re ever here, you should too.

Nan Yang: The best Burmese restaurant in Northern California, maybe in the whole state. I first discovered this gem when I moved here. It was then located in a little storefront in Oakland’s Chinatown. I quickly became an addict, in particular for the ginger salad, eight treasure bean curd, and (believe it or not), the chicken noodle soup, made not with matzah balls but coconut milk and ginger. Nan Yang is now located in the fashionable Rock Ridge District, not far from U.C. Berkeley, but the food is as good as ever, and founder Philip Chu still presides over the kitchen. (No web site)

Oliveto Cafe and Restaurant: For years it’s been considered one of the top Italian places in the Bay Area, with homemade pastas and salumi. Even though longtime chef Paul Bertolli left a few years ago, his replacement, CIA grad Paul Canales, hasn’t missed a beat. Oliveto’s upstairs dining room, with its views of bustling College Avenue, is where I always meet visiting winemakers when we’re having lunch and tasting. The waiters set us up with big crystal glasses, we take a table in the corner, and no matter what we’re drinking, Oliveto’s food seems to adapt to it. Or the other way around.

Paul Marcus Wines: Just downstairs from Oliveto, in the Market Hall (a collection of little food stores), is this smallish but interesting wine shop, which has been there at least since I can remember. Seldom does a week go by than I don’t stop by for something. They offer a range of small producers from France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Spain, California and other countries, and the staff is knowledgeable and happy to chat. They don’t have a tasting bar, but are starting to have special wine and food pairing events.

Bay Wolf: Well, I don’t exactly hang out at Bay Wolf. It’s too expensive. But I do like to eat there once or twice a year and I have for the last 20 years. Other restaurants come and go; Bay Wolf remains. Founded 30 years ago by chef Michael Wild, Bay Wolf was part of the East Bay culinary scene that also gave rise to Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. Wolf’s idol was Elizabeth David, and the kitchen still sticks to the ideals of seasonally fresh, local ingredients and simple preparation. Bay Wolf also has an amazing wine list, and on any given night, you might run into a famous winemaker.

Vine: One of the neatest phenomena about Oakland is the proliferation of wine bars that’s sprouted up in the last year or so. Who woulda thunk, wine bars in Oakland!! Yet they’re all over the place, and apparently doing well. My favorite is right in my neighborhood. Vine is the town’s hottest wine bar. They use those nitrogen machines to offer dozens of mainly small (500 cases or less) production wines by the glass, or you can buy a “tasting ticket” for $20 minimum. The space is a refurbished old building, with brick walls and loft-high ceilings, and owner Chris Williams is expanding upstairs and outside for summer grilling and barbecuing. The crowd is young, hip and very Oaktownish. They have live music.

It’s been smoky here in Oakland the last few days. Smoke from the big wildfire in Napa has been riding the breezes right down here into the Bay Area, giving a sooty, gray pall to the sky and causing eyes to tear. The fire started last Saturday in the Vaca hills east of Napa city and quickly grew to 1,000 acres. It headed east, toward Solano County, and threatened the city of Fairfield (pop. 105,000). By Sunday night you could see flames all along the ridgeline. On Monday, the fire had grown to 3,500 acres, then 4,000 acres this morning. But firefighters now say they have it under control, and the thousands that were forced to evacuate their homes can return. Damage was light, this time: only 1 house and a barn.

Wildfires are a fact of life here in California. My cousin in the Malibu hills has had to run for her life at least twice over the years. I was all packed up and ready to evacuate my own home during the big Oakland Hills Firestorm, in 1991. At the time, it was the worst urban-wildland fire in American history. (If I recall correctly, the Southern California fires of a few years ago eclipsed it.) About 4,000 homes were burnt to their foundations. For a while, Berkeley was in the fire’s path, while on another flank the inferno was headed straight toward downtown Oakland. I wrote a newspaper story on the fire back then and a batallion chief for Oakland Fire Dept. told me if the wind hadn’t changed direction Oakland and Berkeley both would have been gone. As it was, about 27 people died, including a cop and a fire department batallion chief. I had several relatives who lost their homes, including a cousin’s wife who had to escape in her bare feet down the mountain that was choked with poison oak and thorny blackberry bushes.

Yesterday, by coincidence, I was in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, where the 1991 Firestorm Memorial wall is located under a freeway overpass. It consists of thousands of handmade glazed tiles. Each was designed by whoever wanted to make one, and then the tiles were crafted by local volunteer artisans. There’s a tile from Bill Clinton expressing his grief. There are many devoted to lost pets; they say things like “Misty, RIP, 2 years old” with a child’s drawing of a kitty cat. Chokes me up every time.

All this has nothing to do with wine, or does it? Everything has something to do with everything else. Today there are still about 800 wildfires burning in California, most of them ignited over the weekend when we had some really weird weather: very hot, but with lightning storms and even some local downpours. It had people talking about global warming and climate change. If California is heating up, there will be more fires, and most of the better grapegrowing areas just happen to be in the most dangerous fire zones: hilly rural areas where wildfires raged long before grapes were planted, and will again when they’re gone.

DROUGHT DECLARATION LIKELY TO HIT GRAPEGROWERS HARD
June 5 – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made official what everyone already knew: California is in a drought. In declaring the first statewide drought in nearly 2 decades, the Governator has warned all Californians, including grapegrowers, to prepare for sharp cutbacks in water use. There’s even talk of mandatory rationing. For grapegrowers, the implications of the drought, especially if it continues, are enormous. “Some [grape] farmers will have to make a decision about how to keep vineyards alive,” especially in the Central Valley, says Karen Ross, president of the California Association of Grape Growers. In coastal grapegrowing areas such as Sonoma, Mendocino and Napa, where rivers like the Russian and Napa provide the source of much irrigation water, growers are facing not only lower river levels from the drought, but recent environmental decisions to balance the needs of fish. “This is creating really difficult issues,” Ross warns. Andy Beckstoffer, a major grapegrower in the North Coast, acknowledges increased water restrictions in the future. “We all know it’s coming, the amount of water you can pull out of private wells.” He adds, chillingly, that growers who used all their water to combat April’s massive frost “are going to be in big trouble” later this summer.

IT’S ALMOST OFFICIAL – COASTAL CALIFORNIA IS GETTING COLDER, NOT HOTTER

I’ve been thinking that for the last 3-1/2 years, since the cool 2005 vintage. 2006 and 2007 were also cool to chilly. Then, this past April, California had its worst grape freeze in more than 30 years. I asked my friend Steve Paulson, the weatherman on our local Fox affiliate TV station here in Oakland, if California is getting colder, and he replied, “You’re treading on controversial ground but valid nevertheless.” And now, today, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the National Weather Service says San Francisco has recorded a monthly average high temperature that was below normal for the last 14 months in a row! I don’t know what it all means, but if the coast is cooling off, that could be good news for grapes. Stay tuned.