Cafe Ohlone serves up Indigenous cuisine

In September of 2017 Vincent Medina, Chochenyo Ohlone, and Louis Trevino, Rumsen Ohlone, started the organization mak-‘amham as a way to make their traditional foods as well as other aspects of their traditional culture more accessible for their families. A year later they opened Cafe Ohlone as an extension of mak-‘amham, to teach the inner East Bay, Calif. public about Ohlone food and culture. Hosted on the back patio of University Press Books, which sat across the street from the University of California, Berkeley, Cafe Ohlone held weekly dinners open to the public.

During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cafe Ohlone made the decision to cease hosting in-person dinners at University Press Books, and with the closing of the bookstore, they made the transition to providing monthly meal boxes. The meal boxes, or Sunday Suppers, as Vincent and Louis call them, are a full course dinner of traditional Ohlone foods and dishes. The physical boxes themselves are made each month by woodwork artist Justin Lebon out of reclaimed wood donated by Bay Area Redwood.

“We want the public, through eating our foods, to better understand our culture and what it means to live on Ohlone land. To understand that this place, the East Bay, and Carmel Valley where my partner Louis his family’s from, to understand that this place has always been an Ohlone place. To understand that we’ve never left this area that we never will, that our culture is beautiful, that our culture is living.”, said Vincent Medina.

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