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The downtown Berkeley restaurant Gather, known for its farm-to-table ethos, just marked 15 years in business. When co-owner Eric Fenster spoke at the party last month celebrating this milestone, he mentioned b’nai mitzvah receptions among the lifecycle events that have been held at the restaurant. What he did not mention was that some of the teenage celebrants at those events went on to work there years later — just one example of how Gather has built a community.
When it opened, Gather gained notice for its innovation and bold thinking. The vegan charcuterie on the opening menu garnered national attention at a time when no one was offering such things. A notebook kept in the dining room listed every item of produce or protein in the kitchen and the farm where it was sourced. These ideas were praised by some and made fun of by others who thought they were taking the whole farm-to-table concept a bit too far.
At last month’s party, Fenster shared some of the restaurant’s accomplishments in nearly 5,000 days of service, including feeding more than 1.5 million guests, diverting tens of thousands of pounds of food from landfill, converting thousands of gallons of vegetable oil into biofuels and taking a leading role in ending the use of single-use plastics in Berkeley.
“As a measure of time, we’ve lasted 15 Earth orbits around the sun and 60 changes of season, from spring asparagus to summer tomatoes, autumn Brussels to winter citrus and kale,” said Fenster, who as a young man spent an influential year on staff at a Jewish environmental program.
Like any Bay Area restaurant still going strong right now, Gather has had to adapt to the times.
While it opened as a special occasion restaurant, it has transformed into a more casual kind of place. It’s still serving its elevated pizzas and burgers, as well as produce-forward dishes like a roasted delicata squash appetizer with whipped feta, pomegranate salsa and roasted pumpkin seeds, and a harvest bowl entrée with quinoa, roasted rainbow carrots, garbanzo beans and cabbage slaw in a lemon tahini sauce. It prides itself on offering dishes for the carnivores, the vegans, the gluten-free and everyone in between.
Fenster grew up in Rockland County, New York, in a mostly secular Jewish home.
“I wouldn’t say I was deeply connected to the spirit of Judaism growing up, but it was through the family and traditions and the food, like Passover at my grandparents,” that he felt the strongest connection.
As a biology major, Fenster studied endangered species at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and after a stint studying rare caterpillars and fireflies in the Costa Rican jungle, he moved on to the Colorado mountains to follow an extremely rare butterfly. After five days alone with plenty of time to think, he began wondering if tracking endangered species was his true life’s purpose.
Interrupting his thoughts, suddenly, came a cacophony of children hiking with a guide.
“Something clicked, that I should be doing environmental education and outdoor guiding work,” he recalled.
He remembered reading about the Teva Learning Center, a Jewish environmental program at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in upstate New York. He found his way to a pay phone in a remote town (it was 1998) and cold-called the center. Its then director, Adam Berman, answered and interviewed him on the spot. (Berman is the founder of Berkeley’s Urban Adamah; Fenster went on to consult with the Berkeley farm when it was building its retreat center.)
While Berman quickly ascertained that Fenster had the environmental chops for the job, he needed to know if he was good with children.
“Can you be silly?” Berman asked him, telling Fenster to “give me an animal sound.”
Fenster chose a gorilla. It must have been a pretty good imitation, because the next thing he knew, he was headed East to join the Teva staff.
“Working at Teva was the first time I truly felt a deeper connection to my roots,” he said. “Learning about earth-based Judaism was what did that for me.”
After moving to the Bay Area in 1999, Fenster’s first job was at Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard, founded by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame. From there, he and then-business partner Ari Derfel founded Back to Earth, a company that did wilderness trips and organic catering.
While the pair had lofty goals about greening the catering industry, neither had that much kitchen experience. In the beginning, they did everything themselves before quickly expanding to hire a chef and team members. When they began to dream of a restaurant, they approached people in their community for support. Although it was right after the economic collapse of 2008, Gather opened in 2009, with 110 community investors in a rare model for a restaurant.
Since Derfel moved to Canada in 2017, Fenster has continued to hold the vision of Gather alongside co-owner Jodi Munson, who has served as general manager since the early days.
After 15 years, he said, some people believe that a restaurant like Gather must be practically running itself. Not so.
“If you think that, you don’t know anything about restaurants,” he said. “There’s a level of determination and consistent pressure that you have to keep your eye on, as the second you are complacent, it shows. It easily and quickly becomes mediocre until you bring the passion back.”
Fenster is 48 now, living in Kensington with his wife and two boys.
He’d love to see Gather continue on as a leader in the environmental justice movement as well as a mainstay of downtown Berkeley. The restaurant is located at 2200 Oxford St. on the ground floor of the David Brower Center, which is home to a number of environmental nonprofits.
Fenster also feels Gather has a role to play for the next generation.
“One of my sons worked there when he was 11,” he said. “Seeing him host, run food, be a barista and then sharing a meal with him at the end of a shift, talking about the flavors of a dish, that’s been so special.”