Week 104: R&D, Brewja, and home

Week 104 : Dec. 22nd-28th, 2024

For the holidays, I traveled back to the Bay Area to see my family and spend some time in Berkeley. It is always a mixed bag when staying at home, navigating the world both as a young adult with my own life and as my parent’s youngest daughter. I also get incredibly terrible allergies whenever I’m back in Berkeley, and this time was no different.

Allergy sniffles and reactive, puffy eyes aside, this trip was surprisingly social. Considering my parents have been quite the hermits since the pandemic, I was glad to see a bunch of people. I got to see a couple friends from high school, my birth mom and grandmother, my mom’s god daughter, and her partner and little sister. I also got to see all the changes around Berkeley and Oakland, which I was less glad about. It was weird to see the depressing state of the Bay, with probably 40% empty store fronts and boarded up windows in Berkeley’s previously lively neighborhoods. Downtown Berkeley definitely does not feel like the same place I once knew and loved, and with these changes, Berkeley continues to feel smaller, stranger, and less and less like home. The strangeness, however, was tolerable with the comfort of old friends and good food, which brings me to my Something New.

This week, in an effort to meet in the middle between our far flung homes of Berkeley and San Jose, my parents and I planned to meet my friend Ricky and his boyfriend at R&D Cafe in San Lorenzo.

R&D Cafe is a Vietnamese restaurant located in a nondescript strip mall, shoved between a liquor store and another hole in the wall restaurant. My parents love their pho and their garlic noodles, and the restaurant itself is pretty small. It can host only about six or seven parties at once.

I got #26A, the shrimp and pork wonton w/ egg noodle soup, and my dad got #59 grilled pork w/ garlic noodles. My mom got what turned out to be the group’s favorite dish, #41A the tomato, crab and shrimp paste vermicelli soup w/ tomato, tofu, crab paste, ground shrimp, steamed pork patty, & pork blood cubes. Ricky and his boyfriend John both got vermicelli noodle plates.

All of the food was really good and comforting, especially because of the cloudy weather and the threat of rain. I love seeing Ricky, who is one of my oldest friends, and his boyfriend, get treated like family and bond over books, new shows to watch, and teasing me.

After R&D Cafe, we had a tip from my birth mom to check out a new coffee shop called Brewja in the same parking lot. As a proud procurer of delicious treats and beverages, I got myself the peppermint horchata coffee. I thought it was going to be warm, so I was surprised when it was handed to me iced, but I actually liked it. Hot drinks make me sweaty anyways.

Bonus: check out the new “Glowfari” entryway at the Oakland Zoo and the terrifyingly old, creaky elevator in my friend Liam’s apartment building in Downtown Berkeley above Shattuck Market.

As 2024 comes to a close, I’m struggling to come up with a better resolution than to continue my SNEW into 2025. Maybe I’ll come up with something eventually, but you can’t get rid of me that easily,

See you next week.