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On Sunday, we were driving to Berkeley for brunch and steam train-riding, when all of a sudden our children both decided they needed to eat IMMEDIATELY. We just had a snack forty-five seconds ago, you say?
Do not care.
EAT.
So that’s how we found ourselves googling “best brunch in Oakland.” Oakland is a city in the East Bay that is – to my newbie-Northern-California-resident understanding, at least – sort of what Brooklyn was like in the late nineties: juuuuust starting to become super cool, but already verging on being too expensive to actually live in because of all those prescient folks who swooped in and bought property two seconds before adorable coffee shops and boutiques started opening up everywhere and instantly doubled the housing prices.
So apparently we’re not picking up a massive-yet-wildly-affordable Oakland loft anytime soon, but still: it’s always pretty cool, watching a neighborhood going through this kind of transition. I watched one happen from start to finish myself: when my family first moved to Hell’s Kitchen in 1983, it wasn’t the kind of place anyone in their right mind would have thought of as “a great spot to raise a family.” It was almost a movie-script version of a bad neighborhood: we’re talking prostitutes getting in screaming fights at three o’clock in the morning and heroin vials scattered on the streets. Some of the kids at my fancy Upper West Side elementary school weren’t allowed to come to playdates at my house, because their parents didn’t want them venturing into that rough of a neighborhood.
Needless to say, my parents made a hell of an investment when they bought that apartment thirty-some years ago, because nowadays a two-bedroom apartment in the area would run you well over a million dollars. Probably closer to two million. Want a rental? A studio is about 3K a month. This is because the housing market in NYC is madness, but also because over the past two decades it’s become one of (in my opinion, at least) the most interesting neighborhoods in the city: it’s all awesome dining spots and great bars and cool shops, but it’s also filled with people who say hi to each other on the street – kind of like the neighborhoods you apparently find in the rest of the world. Except it’s still Hell’s Kitchen. It’s still rent-controlled in many spots, and still inhabited largely by people who’ve been living there for decades. It’s still relaxed, still un-fussy, and definitely still cool.
You know what I think started all this change? The restaurants. I talk about my favorite restaurants – 44 & 10 Hell’s Kitchen and 44 & X – all the time because two of our closest family friends own them and we eat there contstantly, but also because I credit these places with helping to turn Hell’s Kitchen into what it is now. Years and years ago, Scott Hart and Bruce Horowytz opened up a bar called Xth Avenue Lounge way over on 10th Avenue, about two avenues further west than anyone who didn’t actually live there had any reason to venture. I bartended there for awhile, and as the months went on it got busier and busier. And then they opened a restaurant – 44 & 10 Hell’s Kitchen – just a block away. The restaurant sat smack in the middle of a long stretch of sidewalk that was home to nothing but a bunch of bodegas and an old guy who would scream at you if you were sitting at an outdoor table, but the customers came anyway. With them came more restaurants, and boutiques, and bars, and all of a sudden the area was a no-man’s-land no more.
People will go anywhere for a great meal.
Apparently the restaurant we went to on Sunday – Brown Sugar Kitchen – is doing for West Oakland what 44 & 10 did for Hell’s Kitchen: bringing in visitors from all over the Bay Area willing to brave hour-plus waits in what can only generously be called an “industrial” part of town just because the chicken and waffles are so damn good. (“Industrial” really is an understatement: we were planning to browse whatever shops were in the area and maybe grab a coffee while we waited, but what we discovered was that if we wanted to be doing any browsing we better be really interested in staring at things like iron remnants and cement.)
Waiting, with baked things and beer.
So we snagged one of the outdoor tables where you can get snacks and drinks from the counter while you wait for your seat inside, and we waited. And while we waited, we ordered a selection of age-appropriate beverages (from L to R we’ve got OJ, milk, an Americano, and a Pacifico), peanut butter cookies, and homemade pop tarts for our tiny food-vaccuums (“EAAATTTTTT”).
I was a little worried that we wouldn’t be hungry anymore but the time we sat down – and honestly, I wasn’t especially, but oh my goodness was that ever not a problem. Kendrick went for the chicken and waffles, which were perfect, and I mean that: perfect. Dark meat chicken and the lightest waffles on the planet, plus an only mildly sweet maple syrup that didn’t overpower the food at all. I had the cheddar cheese grits with poached eggs, which was a sort of disappointing-looking dish (completely white, save for a tiny sprinkling of parsley), but turned out to be one of those instances where a chef is confident enough about her dish’s flavors that she doesn’t feel the need to tart up its appearance.
The coolest part? The food was delicious (and filling), but didn’t give us that “ugggggghhh I just ate twenty pounds of butter” feeling that sometimes comes with grit-consumption. Apparently that’s chef Tanya Holland’s M.O.: to show diners that soul food doesn’t have to be all mega-portions of heavy, fatty foods. She absolutely succeeds.
The wait was super long. I was totally expecting to say it wasn’t worth it.
It was worth it.
