Home Away from Home

Zachary's - 1 star
Solano Ave., Berkeley, California
College Avenue, Oakland, California

I've lived in Berkeley (or the Oakland hills, which are basically the same thing) for nine out of the last eighteen years - 1990-97 (except for a year in Paris), in grad school, 1999-2001 while working at McKinsey and Ariba, and 2005-06 while my wife was on sabbatical at UC Berkeley - and I've visited many times over the last several years while visiting my company's headquarters in the Bay Area. As I and many other people have noted, Berkeley has perhaps the best food of any place in the world, from the produce selection at Berkeley Bowl and Monterey Market, through the cheese selection at the Cheese Board and the coffee at Peet's, to the landmark of California cuisine, Chez Panisse (which, unfortunately, was not so good the last two times I went).

But the pizza, I've finally decided, is only pretty good. The most popular place is undoubtedly Zachary's, a pseudo-Chicago-style place with stuffed pizzas. Zachary's was my favorite in the early 1990s, and the way I remember it it was always packed and the pizza was always great, from the crust to the spicy tomato sauce. In the mid-nineties, though, I shifted allegiance to Cheese Board Pizza, perhaps the epitome of California-style ("fru-fru," in the words of one of my co-workers) pizza. Cheese Board only makes one type of pizza per day - say, red onions, corn, mozzarella, feta, cilantro, and lemon juice - and people line up down the block for it. Finally, when I moved back in 2005 I decided that the Cheese Board was decidedly hit-or-miss, and my favorite became Gioia, a New York-style place (although not as good as some of the New York pizzerias) with a very thin, slightly blackened crust and a comparatively traditional set of toppings.

As both of my loyal readers know, though, I make my restaurants selections based on sentimental value, so this week I went to Zachary's and got a large, stuffed spinach and mushroom to take to dinner at my friends Jenni and Robert's house. The restaurants was only about two-thirds full, the crust seemed pedestrian, and the tomato sauce seemed to have lost its bite. It was still good, but the sad part was I couldn't remember what all the fuss was about.

But it was still nice to be in Berkeley, where it was almost warm outside in the evening, and you could smell the jasmine flowers (at least, that's what they smell like) that I will always associate with California. And it was nice to go the office, skip a meeting to shoot baskets with friends, catch up with people I haven't seen in months, meet new people at the office happy hour, and generally feel like I had a normal job in a normal office. It's hard to be away from home - where, my wife's text message said, my daughter has started jumping - but California is my home away from home.