Description: Right next door to the legendary Chez Panisse, on a hillside in Berkeley,
César occupies the site of a former dry cleaners. Its owners, three Chez Panisse alumni, have created a Mediterranean oasis where platefuls of tapas, zinging with flavor, stream from the kitchen to accompany the libations pouring forth from the bar. César's menu, which is seasonal, features a dozen or more classic tapas, with many vegetarian entrées, as well as sandwiches, salads, soups, and more. Their bar features a world-class wine and spirits list that is over twenty pages long. For example, there are currently nearly three dozen kinds of grappa and other distilled spirits from Italy. The cookbook states that there are 900 different kinds of wine and spirits at the bar.
I visited with a chef friend who was teaching a class at Sur La Table—he's not exceptionally hard to please, but we both sought the best. César did not disappoint. Seven plates of tapas included spicy cauliflower salad with caper vinaigrette, quail with roasted grapes and bacon (to die for), piquillo peppers with basil and queso blanco, fried potatoes with herbs and sea salt ("potato crack," as we called them), Spanish cheeses, roasted baby artichokes with lemon and garlic, and some kick-butt olives doled out from a treasure chest of olives that glistened in their lemony-good marinade. We also tasted three desserts: medjool date ice cream (with toasted almonds), torrijas con mermelada sevilla (like little French toasts with orange-rind marmalade), and the best of the lot: bread pudding with blood orange-caramel sauce. They kindly sweetened our iced tea with their house blend of lemon-mint syrup, rendering it the best iced tea I've ever tasted.
With the exception of the quail ($12—and they don't charge extra if you lick the porcelain off the plates), dishes hovered in the $4-$8 range.
We refrained from wine or spirits, as I was driving and he was teaching, but surely there's a mojito with my name on it in the future.
The room itself faces west, and the front wall is a series of doors which open from ceiling to floor, adding that European touch of the sidewalk café. In its remodeling process, three people hand-set 78,000 tiles--blue and green and gold, like the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean Sea--onto the walls and bar. The music playing is eclectic; when we were there, it was the ballad singers of Benghal—everything has a worldbeat flavor at César.
The kitchen serves the same menu (with no raise in prices for dinner) from noon until 11pm on weekdays and noon until 11:30pm on Fridays and Saturdays. The bar is open daily from noon until midnight. They do not take reservations unless you want to reserve the large communal table in the center of the room.
Are you in Berkeley? Would you rather be in Spain? Go to César. Close