Merry Christmas! The Oakland version of Loring Cafe will be a hit – whenever it opens!
This blogger took another tour of what will be the celebrated Oakland place-to-go-and-sleep-over-books-and-a-good-meal at the center of what I will call “Cool Place Gulch” on Grand and Broadway because between Vo’s, Farley’s Cafe, Luka’s PN, Pican, and Ozumo, there’s a lot of cool places to go all within the doors of each other.
Loring Cafe will be that too-crowded centerpiece of Cool Place Gulch when it opens. The brainchild of Minneapolis, Minnesota’s Jason McLean (who would rather eat pasta than the praise I was going to heap on him in my video), Loring Oakland is the West Coast version of a style of cafe and restaurant by the same name he opened in the home of The Vikings in 1986. In style, it’s “movie set” arrangement of lights, seats, and use of materials like wood, steel, metal, brick, in the form of columns and rolling walls, reminds me of Cafe Van Kleef over on Telegraph.
But the one thing Loring Cafe has that Peter Van Kleef’s place lacks is a giant kitchen. Loring’s will make a “new kind of take” on American Cuisine, which is now, they say, more than meat and potatos.
But all of that is great – when it opens. The problem is that the Oakland Building Inspector keeps, according to the Loring folks, “coming up with new issues” with each visit. That’s held up the opening for two months, now.
But the main problem has been with the new EBMUD regulations calling for proper filtering of waste water.
As it turns out, EBMUD is so under-capacity in its ability to handle and filter waste water from all kind of places and establishments, it’s now asking cities in its area to place the work of water filtering on the business, before the water hits the sewers and into EBMUD’s system. That’s not a huge problem to work out, but from what I am gathering the City of Oakland didn’t make the Loring folks aware of it until recently, thus the delay.
Stay tuned.