Michael Drummond/Senior Staff

More than 40,000 Bay Area residents took to Shattuck Avenue on Sunday in celebration of Berkeley’s second Sunday Streets event.

From 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Shattuck Avenue closed to cars and welcomed pedestrians and cyclists instead. Between Haste and Rose streets, participants could engage in a variety of activities, including live art and salsa dancing, as well as watch various performance groups.

“It’s about getting people to experience their urban environment in a totally different way and appreciate Berkeley in a new way,” said Sunday Streets Berkeley director Emunah Hauser.

The event is organized by Livable Berkeley, a coalition which strives to make Berkeley a more sustainable place, and a few partner organizations. According to Hauser, more than 150 organizations and activity leaders, including several UC Berkeley clubs and organizations, participated in Sunday Streets.

Sunday Streets drew people not only from Berkeley but from surrounding cities as well.

“It’s a really special feeling to have so much of a main street shut down,” said Oakland resident Tina Marie. “People look at each other differently. You’re taking people in.”

Because the street was closed off, several bus lines scheduled detours and added temporary stops near University Avenue and Oxford Street.

For Berkeley resident Michael Marchant, the absence of cars created a safer environment for his children.

“We look forward to any of these events where they block off streets to cars,” he said. “It makes it easier as a parent if you don’t have to worry about traffic.”

Hauser said this year’s Sunday Streets had a larger focus on transportation outreach than last year’s. Bay Area Bike Share allowed people to test bikes, and goBerkeley, a pilot program aiming to improve transportation in the city, asked for feedback from residents about public amenities.

To focus on physical activity and active transportation, Livable Berkeley does not invite street vendors to set up booths. Instead, many stores along Shattuck set up tables themselves, providing free samples or selling smaller store items.

Belli Osteria, a restaurant which does not normally open on Sundays, set up a pasta-making demonstration. Its co-owner Damien Morrison said Sunday Streets increased the restaurant’s exposure.

While some businesses had lines out the door, others saw a decrease in customers.

“There are plenty of distractions, so probably not as many people want to hang out in the comic book store,” said Mike Courtright, an employee at Fantastic Comics. While Courtright saw some new faces in the store, he saw fewer of his regular customers.

Sunday Streets, however, does not come without cost for the event’s organizers. Hauser estimates the event cost about $65,000 this year.

Although fundraising and private sponsorship cover a large part of this cost, Berkeley City Council pledged in January to provide Sunday Streets about $59,000 to split between 2013 and 2014.

Councilmember Kriss Worthington predicts the council will continue funding the event for subsequent years. Still, he feels the city’s contribution is a little high.

“It’s unfortunate that the other longtime community events don’t get more funding,” Worthington said. “This event gets as much as 20 other city events, so there’s a degree of unfairness.”

But for Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, Sunday Streets is “money well spent.”

“Everything shouldn’t be business,” Capitelli said. “Sometimes we should just celebrate as a community, and that’s important.”

Contact Tahmina Achekzai at tachekzai@dailycal.org.

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Josh Escobar/Staff

Various delicious restaurants in Downtown Berkeley say the pasta or soba they serve is “homemade.” This distinction, though well received, made the writers at the Daily Cal wonder: What value do homemade noodles have besides their novelty?

To address this question, we took to the kitchens of Ippuku, Trattoria Corso and Belli Osteria.

But before heading to the kitchen, it’s important to understand what pasta and soba are. Soba is a Japanese noodle made from buckwheat flour, wheat flour and water. Italian pasta is made with wheat flour, water and eggs. For some pastas, such as tagliatelle, the water in the egg yolk is enough to bind them together. Other pastas, such as spaghetti, require only wheat flour and water. The ease of combining these basic ingredients allows the pasta to be manufactured on a large scale at a low cost.

Unlike manufactured varieties, however, the noodles at these restaurants are made by hand in small batches. By doing so, the chefs can decide how the noodles pair with the other ingredients in a dish.

“Each pasta shape has its own advantages depending on the sauce,” said Scott Eastman, co-chef of Trattoria Corso. “A handmade shape like strascinati goes perfectly with sausage and peppers. Tagliatelle, which is flattened by an extruder, pairs well with duck ragu because the noodles can sweep up chunks of meat. Pastas like penne or rigatoni are ridged and tubular, so they require hand tools like a chitarra. … The shape determines how the pasta picks up the sauce.”

Another desirable quality of homemade noodles is that they can be served fresh. In the case of soba, homemade noodles tend to be more nutritious than those made in factories for two reasons. First, buckwheat loses its nutritional value as it dries. Second, soba chefs can make soba with a higher proportion of buckwheat than machines can.

“For soba made by a machine, the proportions (of flour to water) are always the same,” said Koichi Ishii, the master soba chef at Ippuku. “Yet, every batch of buckwheat flour is never the same. The amount of moisture it has and water you add are always different. They are affected by humidity, heat and even the seasons.”

The more buckwheat a serving of soba has, the more nutritious it is. This is because buckwheat, which helps lower blood pressure and break down alcohol, is full of water-soluble proteins and essential amino acids. In fact, buckwheat is so nutritious that it’s customary to drink the last of your dipping sauce with soba-yu, the boiling water, which is full of water-soluble proteins.

While making noodles by hand allows a chef to craft traditional, preindustrial forms, it also allows that chef to customize and experiment.

“I can make a more decadent pasta by adding high-grade saffron or using eggs from my back yard,” Eastman said. “Sometimes we torch the flour for orecchiette al grano arso. That method came from the way flour was harvested: After the rich farmers burnt the fields in Puglia for cultivation, the poor were allowed to take leftover grain.”

When asked whether he liked making pasta by hand, Eastman replied: “It may seem like it isn’t fun, but after a while, you find a rhythm to the labor of love.”

At Belli Osteria, the chefs are always playing with the color, the composition and the textures of pasta. There may, for example, be as many as four different kinds of flour in a single ravioli.
“We take a lot of pride in making fresh pasta,” said Paul Oprescu, head chef and co-owner of Belli Osteria. “But it’s very time-consuming.”

Again, we put the question to Oprescu: Why is fresh, homemade pasta so desirable?

“Fresh pasta just tastes better than dried (pasta),” Oprescu said with his usual pizzazz. “There’s even a difference between pasta that we make with an extruder than that which we roll by hand. Hand-rolled dough is nicer because it is softer, more elastic, has more of a bite. … I would think that any self-respecting chef would do all that they can to make everything in-house.”

Indeed, many chefs are going back to basics. Although noodles made by hand cost more than the manufactured alternative, for about the price of a movie ticket and a bag of popcorn, you can get a great dinner at a locally owned restaurant, where “quality” is not a dodgy term that accounts only for some ingredients instead of all of them and the food doesn’t come from a bag but is made to order. Restaurants such as Ippuku, Trattoria Corso and Belli Osteria offer fresh noodles, professional service and a stylish setting in which to enjoy them. And it’s not just about making money. It’s about being passionate, because doing so is part of what it means to be homemade in Berkeley.

Contact Josh Escobar at jescobar@dailycal.org.

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Josh Escobar/Staff

Belli Osteria is a restaurant near the southeast corner of Shattuck and University avenues that specializes in ravioli. The ravioli is made daily by hand, and each ravioli is unique for each type of sauce and filling. The menu changes weekly, as the chefs are always coming up with new ideas and eager to realize classic Italian dishes. The passion for making quality and delicious pasta, which is held by all of the restaurant’s chefs, came from Paul Opresco, who both owns and cooks at Belli. His restaurant aims to offer in Downtown Berkeley the skill, the craft and the love of ravioli that he came across in Italy.

Two years ago, Oprescu, a Montessori schoolteacher turned chef, went to Italy to travel and to study food. He stayed in Bologna for a stage (guest work) at Drogheria, one of the famous ravioli houses in Bologna, a city recognized for its fresh pastas and raviolis. Oprescu noted that in Bologna, ravioli is not drenched in sauce or overwhelmed with pungent flavors like garlic, onion or tomato. “Instead,” Oprescu says, “value is put on the balance of various elements and local ingredients.”

Many elements compose ravioli: color, bite, taste, thickness, sauce, filling, freshness and consistency of the pasta. The source of the ingredients is just as important as the balance among them in any given recipe, given that in Italy, what seems like one simple ingredient in one city is another city’s specialty.

When it comes to food in Italy, every city has a specialty. Siena is known for its saltless bread. The mountain town of Carrara is known for its lard, cured by rubbing it down with spices and sealing it for months in a marble tomb. Pionella, the city Pope Pius II patronized, specializes in cheeses cultured with mold from the soil. Genova has pesto, Napoli pizza. “Take the salami and hams in Bologna, for instance,” says Paul Oprescu, head chef of Belli Osteria in Downtown Shattuck. “The complexity and know-how that go into making them is far beyond most of what we have here in the United States.”

Oprescu and his business partner, Damien Morrison, started with the idea of making fresh pasta. Oprescu and Morrison had become friends by playing soccer together. Morrison practiced as an attorney in San Francisco until a downturn in his legal practice gave him the drive to pursue pasta-making professionally. The farmers markets provided a great venue to sell homemade pasta, but the competition there was fierce. Oprescu was making his pasta by hand while the other vendors applied machinery. After nine months of trial and error, Oprescu and Damien return to their initial plan of opening a restaurant in the East Bay. Opening one in Downtown Shattuck, given its pricing and popularity, seemed unlikely.

Oprescu based his restaurant off the Italian model of an Osteria. “Osteria” essentially means “neighborhood restaurant,” and they are known for their quick and casual service, homemade food and, Oprescu notes, “good wine.” When it comes to quality food in Italy, young people eat at their parents’ houses every day of the week until they start families of their own. Lunches are eaten lightly because at the end of day, one can expect a good, hearty homemade dinner.

When Italians do eat out at a restaurant instead of a pizza place, a cafe or a bakery, they order multiple courses, take their time and lounge. Dinner may be an activity that takes up the whole evening. Oprescu hopes to promote this sort of experience, enjoyed by people all over the world, through his homemade ravoli restaurant, Belli Osteria. Like many other new local and organic restaurants in Berkeley, Belli Ostetria wants to be affordable and high in quality. It’s a struggle, but it’s worth it. Oprescu believes that getting local, organic ingredients and paying his staff members well are essential to being a part of the neighborhood.

Oprescu is also excited to be in Downtown Berkeley. The restaurant gets noticed by locals and passers-by. Liviu Opresco, Paul Opresco’s brother, helped design the vibrant interior of Belli. Handmade carpentry, matchstick red walls and original artwork make for a welcoming and refined atmosphere.

At Belli Osteria, one finds in the ravioli the same degree of experimentation and craftsmanship that local breweries are regularly celebrated for. In various dishes, the chefs aim to produce key culinary signatures such as sweet, savory, salty, juicy, better, tangy or spicy — but in important new ways. For instance, they source most of their produce, meats and seafood not from distant lands but from California. They walk around Berkeley Bowl and the local farmers markets for inspiration. Between lunch and dinner, they attempt new things, prep dishes and try one another’s creations.

“When it comes to making the menu,” Opresco says, “we do not have a top-down approach. Instead, ours is very open.”

Additionally, the kitchen at Belli Osteria approaches Italian quality unconventionally. The staff maintains the same standards for quality but don’t fret about mixing distinct “ethnic” palates. A single ravioli dish, such as the pasta with wild boar braised in cacao and wine, might have original Italian ingredients, Spanish spices and French preparation methods and be savory like soul food. Although traditional “ethnic” palates inform their choices, the young and energetic chefs do not feel bound to them. Instead, they try achieving the tastes, the textures and the harmonies that are desirable. Another original dish is the black ravioli with crab and scallop filling. The black comes from squid ink, which makes the pasta briny and soft.

Chefs at Belli also love making Italian classics. Given its simplicity, sheep’s milk, a little olive oil, salt and pepper, cacio e pepe was a dish for Roman soldiers. The gnocchi is served with tomatoe sauce, fresh basil and parmigiano.

If you are fortunate enough to have been in Italy, then the smells and tastes of the food at Belli Osteria will take you back there. They are truly gratifying. Oprescu and the other chefs are not just chefs; they are artists.

Belli Osteria is located at 2016 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704.

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