A taste for the Inauguration

Motivated by seeing National Guard troops sleeping on marble floors to protect the U.S. Capitol, chef and restaurateur José Andrés called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and got the ball rolling so he and pandemic-closed Washington D. C. restaurateurs could immediately begin to feed those thousands of troops.

On Saturday, Andrés and Pelosi were out there serving the food in person and taking care of the people taking care of them.

In Oakland, one caterer was making and pushing her “breakfast boxes” for people to buy and eat while watching the Inauguration itself.

Another Oakland caterer, chef Robert Dorsey, working out of the Kaiser Center, included panko crusted crab cakes and gumbo with Dungeness crab, shrimp and hot links accompanied by cornbread and a banana raisin bread pudding with bourbon caramel sauce in his special Inauguration Dinner.

Dorsey said he and Kamala Harris had the same first grade teacher at Thousand Oaks School in Berkeley. (Some of this writer’s family members also attended that school.) But Dorsey was a little fuzzy about whether he and Harris were in the same class at the same time. While it was open, Dorsey was chef at the Blue Oak Café at the Oakland Museum.

It appears that preparing “inaugural dinners” was far from the minds of Sonoma restaurateurs, most of whom were simply hoping for a peaceful transition. Most are just trying to think of ways to create new and appealing to-go meals in order to keep their restaurants open and staff working.