If Eon is about precision, then Berkeley's three-month-old Guerilla Cafe is about getting the vibe right. Artist Keba Konte, Afro Buddha designer Rachel Konte, and ceramicist Andrea Ali transformed a moldering sprouts-and-tofu institution — Smokey Joe's Vegetarian Cafe — into the coolest spot in the East Bay to ingest caffeine.
The aesthetic is '70s Afro-activist chic, a hit of Black Panther retro with the carefully roughed-up edges of an Urban Outfitters. It's slick, but also smart: The logo is a hulking gorilla in Huey Newton shades and Che beret. Ali's multicolor circular tiles clad the counter like giant Skittles, and an awesome Keba Konte construction from the series called A Second Line for Nola is a 3-D collage of empty-lot bric-a-brac. Guerilla Cafe drops the age quotient in the Gourmet Ghetto by, like, thirty years.
And yet it feels right at home in pricey, real-estate-flush North Berkeley. With organic coffee from Oakland's Blue Bottle and a small menu of sophisticated counter foods, it skews more gourmet than ghetto. Despite cool table flags that pay tribute to cultural and activist heroes such as Muhammad Ali and Nina Simone, Guerilla is as much a tribute to Berkeley's Cafe Fanny as it is to civil-rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer.
But hey, I love what they do. The cafe Africano is rich and concentrated, a luscious macchiato served up in a thick little juice tumbler. There's no drip coffee here, only French press, made with Blue Bottle's Three Africans blend. It's good, if you like the fine, grainy sensation of French press coffee. And it's available only in a single large size. You need a few friends to help you polish it off.
The daily waffle is the heart of Guerilla's menu. One day it was spiced yam, a thick, tender disc with yam flecks and the cinnamon-cloves aura of sweet potato pie. Another day it was mild-tasting buckwheat. Just killer, both of them.
Andrea Ali says Guerilla tries to source as many organic ingredients as it can afford, and as many as it can get from farmers of color. Guerilla's eggs — from Art Davis, a longtime fixture at the Berkeley Farmers' Market — are both. Sit at the counter and you can watch the cook poach them in the old-fashioned egg steamer — its lids pop up when the eggs are done. Poached eggs Mediterranean come with a pile of levain toast and an arrangement of sliced cucumber and sweet, plummy gold tomatoes, feta, and kalamata olives.
At lunch there's a different vegetarian panini every day, served with a slick, leafy side salad. One day it was stuffed with grilled eggplant, sweet peppers roasted on-site, and creamy goat cheese — a Cal-Med classic that tasted just right. At $7.25, it's not something a lot of students regularly have the cash for, but it's big and filling, and composed of such pristine ingredients it's far from overpriced. Think of it as the price of an education. With Evelyn "Champagne" King and vintage Stevie Wonder pulsing through the place, you can learn up about '70s disco funk. Study your table sign, and you can open your mind to John Coltrane or Assata Shakur.
And as with any institution of higher learning, you can buy the T-shirt.
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