An Immigrant-Focused Kitchen Incubator Opens a Restaurant in Oakland

Oakland’s newest restaurant features a rotating lineup of mostly immigrant and refugee chefs of color. It has a cafe program whose mission is to make specialty coffee more fun and accessible to marginalized communities. And it’s one of the only places in the Bay Area where an adventurous eater can snag vegan Nigerian and Palestinian Cuban fusion dishes on the regular.

Open Test Kitchen, or OTK, also isn’t exactly a traditional restaurant. Rather, it’s an expansion on the nonprofit Oakland Bloom’s long-standing Open Test Kitchen incubator program, which has trained dozens of immigrant, refugee and working-class chefs of color over the past 10 years. Starting with a relaunch party on Saturday, Sept. 7, at the nonprofit’s 8th Street kitchen space in Oakland, the incubator will enter a new phase — as a full-fledged restaurant staffed by participants in the training program.

Of course, 528 8th St. was recently home to another prominent social justice–oriented restaurant, Understory, a worker-owned spot that operated in partnership with Oakland Bloom’s incubator program and even won a James Beard Award in 2022 for its radical, worker-friendly business model. In May, however, Understory announced that it was closing, and launched a fundraiser to work toward eventually rebuilding the business at a new location.

Diana Wu, Oakland Bloom’s executive director, says that when the nonprofit opened up the 8th Street kitchen space in 2020, Understory was “our first iteration of really thinking about alternative food business models.” During those first few years, Oakland Bloom’s Open Test Kitchen incubator program and Understory operated in parallel: Understory’s worker-owners helped train the kitchen incubator’s aspiring chefs, and then those trainees would take turns holding pop-ups at the restaurant, usually on Saturday nights.

Wu didn’t elaborate on the reason for Understory’s sudden departure, but said it made sense to her that a collective-owned restaurant with a strong identity would want to move into a space that is “wholly their own.” For Oakland Bloom, however, the transition provided an opportunity to rethink its training program’s relationship to the more public-facing restaurant dining room. What would it look like if the Open Test Kitchen program itself operated the restaurant, not just on Saturdays but throughout the week? “I think that’s what is exciting for me, just seeing how Open Test Kitchen is an umbrella under which different chefs can take off and experiment and really showcase their work,” Wu says.

And so, after taking the summer off to think it through, Oakland Bloom will relaunch the new restaurant version of Open Test Kitchen this Saturday.

Which isn’t to say that OTK will be a direct replacement for Understory. Rather than a single restaurant concept with one unified menu, the Open Test Kitchen restaurant is still more of a cobbled-together patchwork of distinct food businesses — so, depending on what time or which day of the week a customer comes, they may find a completely different cuisine on the menu. Sitalbanat Muktari, one of the Open Test Kitchen chefs, likened it to a smaller-scale version of the food hall that San Francisco’s La Cocina kitchen incubator ran in the Tenderloin until last fall.

“It’s like a mini public market, but because the place isn’t large enough, you’re not going to find all the chefs there at the same time,” Muktari says. “Hopefully in the future, we can get a bigger space.”

For the month of September, Muktari’s Northern Nigerian vegan food business, That Hausa Vegan, will serve brunch on Sundays and dinner on Thursdays and Fridays, during which time customers will find things like grilled oyster mushroom suya and savory Nigerian hand pies on the menu. Other nights, Palestinian Cuban pop-up Asúkar will serve fusion dishes like kufta tostone sliders. And the coffee pop-up Café con Cariño will operate a daily cafe, collaborating with other Open Test Kitchen chefs to offer multicultural lunch options — vegan Cuban dishes and Oaxacan tamales to start out. Meanwhile, Saturday nights will be reserved for special events and rotating pop-ups featuring some of the incubator’s other vendors.

Saturday’s launch party will spotlight several of those cuisines, with That Hausa Vegan, Asúkar and Café con Cariño providing the food and drink. Even more importantly, though, the Oakland Bloom incubator’s chefs hope to reestablish the restaurant as a real community hub. One of the chefs in the incubator program will perform a ceremonial blessing and limpia on the space. There will also be dancing, a DJ, a poetry reading and a community market.

“All of a sudden, this place that people really love [closed], and it’s like, okay, we’re all going through this transition. There’s also just a lot happening in the world, and our communities are really hurting,” says Café con Cariño co-founder Claudia Luz Suarez, who is also Oakland Bloom’s program director.

“We wanted to create an opening event that was rooted in really coming together and being intentional about what it means to step into a new era,” Suarez says.

Open Test Kitchen’s launch party will be on Saturday, Sept. 7, 11 a.m.–4 p.m. at 528 8th St. in Oakland. Moving forward, the restaurant will be open for cafe hours Wednesday through Friday 8 a.m.–2 p.m., for dinner Wednesday–Saturday from 5–9 p.m., and Saturday–Sunday for weekend brunch 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Check the Oakland Bloom and Open Test Kitchen social media pages for updates on the restaurant’s weekly schedule.