GrassRoutes Eats

Start your Bay Area foodie weekend on the right foot at the Claremont Hotel, 6:30 – 8:30 tonight for the opening night of the first annual Berkeley Wine Festival. The steep $85 ticket price gets you unlimited access to some of the best wineries in Napa and Sonoma, from the vantage point of this whitewashed hillside palace. As you watch the sun set over Angel Island and the Golden Gate, take mental notes of how the crab pairs with the chardonnay…

Saturday head to Awaken Cafe in downtown Oakland for a special Waffle Day! Especially if its sunny, this sunny cafe is the ideal place to munch on a sidewalk seat or inside near the local art that perpetually hangs on the walls. The coffee is incredible, check out these fun pix from co-owner Cortt:

Finally, on Sunday head up to the town of Napa, a short 25-minute drive from Oakland most days, for the Napa Mustard Festival. There are events planned each year starting in January, as the golden wild mustard starts to bloom, through the end of March as the spring starts ushering in new shades to the county. This Sunday is the second day of the Napa Riverwalk Marketplace, from 11a -5p in the historic riverfront area of downtown Napa. Keepy your eye out for tasty local treats, and creative arts like Jewelry from Oakland’s fabulous Mangosteen silversmith necklaces. It’ll be a smash hit, and you can grab a beer at Bounty Hunter after you take in the eye candy…

Finding a family-fun Italian-American restaurant that brings the goods each and every time is like finding a perfect pair of jeans, or getting into a great college – at least that’s how excited I am when I discover a new one.

In Sonoma this weekend I was told this was a must for family gatherings like the Sunday brunch I enjoyed. The menu is written on boards above the counter, but there’s far more available than deli food as the casual self-serve ordering style would suggest.

All the crucial items are made from scratch: ciabatta and foccacia breads, chocolate-dipped biscotti, lasagna and raviolli, roasted turkey and stimulating coffee drinks. Order a sandwich with such traditional sensations as mortadella or sliced leek frittata, and choose their homemade mozzarella as your cheese like I did. There’s local Russian River beers, wines from the surrounding acres and imported Italian bottles, plus plenty of tammer bevvies.

They let me have some mortadella and some of their house roasted turkey on my mozzarella sandwich – they added a pie of undressed coleslaw and served it on their freshly-baked foccacia bread

We also tried the Tuscan salami combination with a seedy mustard and very wet potato salad, the Damnation white beer from Russian River Brewing Company was an ideal pairing

A half-order of the lasagna is enough with an order of one of the tempting salads, like anchovy-heavy ceasar and tomato and mozzarella duo with aged balsamic

Plenty of homey, painted decor

Order here! Then you’ll be served everything else at the table…

Dutsi, my research assistant poodle and I checked out the scene, then he waited patiently outside until we were finished

Now is a perfect time to head to Sonoma County, California, as the wild yellow mustards make all the fields glow… this is Arnold Road, just a few minutes down the road from the restaurant

Looking up at the menu board, the desserts looked tempting even after we were full!

Isn’t Sonoma just beautiful!? Even with the vines bare…

Look how different the old vine zines look (some in the area are reaching 60 years in age) compared to the cabernet grapes above

If you go:

Cafe Citti is in Kenwood, on Arnold Road.