Yay Area Yum

In my Yay Area’s house, there are many mansions. I mean, cafés. More precisely, hipster cafés with wifi and “art” on the walls. Their proliferation is horrifying and relieving, in a measure more or less equal, depending on how addicted to caffeine you are, and how sensitive to mediated aesthetics.

After years of being driven from one San Francisco web-bordello after another by the irony of mullets, a low tolerance for tight jeans, and a foaming-agave-sweetened-soy-chai-latte-induced rage problem, I have only one hipster café left that I can take without violent misanthropy: Oakland’s Mama Buzz.

The wifi is unreliable, but the staff doesn’t care if I go and reboot it myself. This is the kind of place overrun with 22-year-olds … but being stranded in an Oakland transitional neighborhood, there’s also a healthy proportion of aging hipsters like me, neighborhood revolutionaries, arts organizers, pretentious academics, and houseDads getting a caffeine fix. Plus, the art on the walls is dreadful, but it’s also full of life, curiosity, and confidence, so it makes you feel good.

The menu is fresh and vegetarian and includes breakfast, salads, soups, sandwiches, and one Mediterranean plate, whatever that means. Smoking is allowed in the patio, and beer and wine are served. The gallery has openings on first-Friday’s “Art Murmur” and the space hosts music and readings every weekend. Pretty much everything you want in a café, except that it’s not in Paris in 1924.

And finally, I can always find a table there. On second thought: don’t go to Mama Buzz. Stay away. Especially if you’re 22.