Eating up Telegraph - overview

About us:

Who we are: two gals with too many dogs living a few blocks off Telegraph, toward the Oakland end.

The writer of these reviews will always be me. The second eater in the project will hereby be known as "Partner in Chow," or PIC for short.

About the project:

Telegraph Avenue is about a 4-mile stretch that runs from Oakland to Berkeley (and back again), and it's filled with a variety of restaurants ranging from ethnic street food to expensive and hip nouveau-whatever cuisine - the former being the predominant theme.

Telegraph is also home to a variety of interesting sights, sounds, smells and crowds... which is to say that your average crackhead isn't out of place in certain stretches of Telegraph. Come to think of it, your average crackhead isn't out of place in any stretch of Telegraph. Ah, urban plight - without you, elitist residents wouldn't have reason to flee to the hills.

Anyway: living near this thoroughfare, we noticed the plethora of interesting Mom 'n Pops on the Oakland side (as well as the... interesting... crowd often populating the sidewalk). One day in a "where should we go for dinner?" an idea was born - why not explore this as-yet undiscovered stretch of culinary diversity? Sure, we'd been to Dona Tomas and Lanesplitter, but what about Cafe Eritrea d' Afrique and the entire block of Korean restaurants?

Thus, an idea was born: eat our way from one end of Telegraph to the other in the spirit of discovering, through food, a reflection of the various neighborhoods that this Avenue bisects. We were originally going to eat up one side of the street and down the other, but we then decided that:

1) That was a dumb idea, because...
2) Since the ethnic restaurants are often in clusters, we can better compare them by doing blocks at a time.

Every project needs rules. These are ours:

Rules:

1) We must go block-by-block and not skip ahead. If we do falter and fall into Dona Tomas or some such, that meal doesn't count towards the project.

2) Fast Food is both unnecessary for the purposes of this project, and gross - and is therefore to be avoided.

3) If the place doesn't serve dinner, we can skip it for the time being and circle back if we deem it necessary.

4) We'll rate these on a 1-5 scale, using sporks. Sporks of course being more interesting than stars, and entirely underutilized in general.

5) We don't need many rules, so let's not make this more complicated than it needs to be. We're embarking on an eating project - how hard can it be?

So, that's the deal.

We don't know how long it'll take us to eat up Telegraph, but we're certain that we're in for many culinary adventures.

We did come up with a motto:

Eat up, eat well.

And read on!