A Legendary Chef Bids Farewell With One Final Dinner in Oakland
For more than a decade, Sarah Kirnon presided over one of the Bay Area’s most widely celebrated restaurants. Until it closed in 2022, Miss Ollie’s, Kirnon’s Afro-Caribbean spot in Old Oakland, served up some of the tastiest braised oxtails, Bajan pepper sauce and skillet-fried chicken in the Bay. The restaurant also served as an important gathering place for Oakland’s Black, brown and queer communities.
And now, Kirnon is going home.
“I’m focused on going back to my roots to Barbados next year,” she tells KQED, explaining that she’s decided to move back to her home village on the island.
In recent weeks, Kirnon has embarked on something of a farewell tour, hosting a number of pop-ups, including a month-long residency at Gold Palm in Uptown Oakland. Her final farewell dinner — at least for now — will be hosted at Burdell on Sunday, Nov. 1. The event is part of the fine-dining soul food restaurant’s ongoing “Grandma Series,” which has previously featured guest chefs such as Intu-On Kornnawong (formerly of Jo’s Modern Thai), Ham El-Waylly (Strange Delight in New York) and James Syhabout (Commis).
The series provides a platform for chefs to share dishes rooted in family recipes. It’s a fitting theme to celebrate Kirnon’s legacy, as her own grandmother was the original “Miss Ollie.”
The menu for the pop-up ($114) features six family-style courses, plus additional sides and a dessert. One of the first courses is a roasted boniato with smoked herring Creole sauce. Kirnon says she wanted to highlight the sweet potato that is commonly eaten in the Caribbean because of its unparalleled fluffy texture.
Other dishes on the menu will be familiar to longtime fans of Kirnon’s work — most notably her famous skillet-fried chicken with Bajan seasoning.
“Bajan [seasoning] is from Barbados. It’s like epis or sofrito,” Kirnon says of the seasoning paste, which she makes by adding vinegar, garlic and cloves to a mixture of chopped herbs.
Another dish will feature cassava dumplings, which she describes as the most difficult dish to nail down so the dumplings don’t wind up with an “overchewiness.” For the final savory course, Kirnon will serve oxtails braised in spice-infused casareep (cassava root juice reduced to a molasses-like consistency). “I believe the Amerindian tribes in Guyana would use [casareep] to preserve meat dishes,” she says.
The Burdell dinner is the final Bay Area event Kirnon has planned before her big move, though she says she may occasionally come back and visit. It’s the perfect, full-circle way to go out: Kirnon designed the menu based on the Sunday dinners she grew up eating during her childhood in Barbados.
“As someone who was raised in a very matriarchal home, it’s inspired by the women that came before me,” she says. “Not just directly my grandmother, but my great-grandmother, my great-aunt, my aunt and my mother — them all being grandmothers as well.”
Sarah Kirnon’s Grandma Series dinner at Burdell (4640 Telegraph Ave., Oakland) is on Sunday, Nov. 1, with a limited number of reservations available at publication time. The dinner is priced $114 per person (including gratuity).