The benefits of growing up in a metropolis as diverse as the Bay Area are many: Nepalese cuisine, art house cinema, and a group of friends that looks like the cast of an after-school special. Indeed, my hometown friends run the gamut from a blazer-sporting conservative to a vegetarian feminist, and we all get along fantastically.
Of course, the disadvantage of having a vegetarian in your group of friends is that birthdays aren’t celebrated at that cozy Nepalese restaurant down the street, but at places like Berkeley’s Café Gratitude, an establishment that serves up suspicious doses of raw vegan food and New Age philosophy. It wasn’t my idea of a good birthday restaurant, or food, but I figured I’d be a bad Berkeleyite if I didn’t have wheatgrass once in a while.
When we arrived, we were greeted at the entrance by a young hostess and the smell of a clientele that does not believe in deodorant. “We have a table right over there for you,” the girl said, pointing. I didn’t see it at first; in my close-minded complacency, I had accepted the notion that a dinner party should be assigned its own table at a restaurant. Shedding our preconceptions, my friends and I slid in beside the friendly dreadlocked couple sharing our table beneath a painting of a yoni.
“Welcome,” they said.
Café Gratitude doesn’t have normal items on its menu, and thus doesn’t have normal names for them. Instead of spicy sunflower unfried beans, for example, you must order the I Am Honoring; the almond nut-milk milkshake is called the I Am Eternally Youthful. “What looks good?” asked the waitress when she came over, taking the words right out of my mouth. Thinking no one could mess it up, I ordered the lemonade.
My waitress looked confused. “The what?” she said.
“The lemonade, please.”
“Um, do you mean the I Am Refreshing?”
I glared at her. “I suppose so.”
“So, I’m sorry, what are you?”
I looked down, uncomfortable. “I Am Refreshing,” I said quietly.
“Wonderful,” she said. “Anything else?” I wanted the hummus, but really didn’t want to order it. “I Am Alive,” I finally gave in, realizing it may be the last time I uttered those words.
“You are alive and refreshing,” said the waitress when she placed my meal in front of me. It didn’t look like what I ordered, but it might have been; besides, no way was I reordering. Plugging my nose, I swallowed down my raw food just in time for birthday festivities that consisted of the wait staff running out with a flaxseed cake and a song pumped over the sound system: “We wish it was our birthday, so we could party too!”
They danced around our conservative friend, their arms flailing brazenly over their heads. We laughed as our friend sank wordlessly into his blazer amidst this sea of wild hair and tattoos, and for a moment I forgot that I had probably just drunk urine. For a second, we were all enjoying ourselves. Maybe this place wasn’t so bad; it was just kooky. As I watched the definitively Berkeleyan waiters gyrate around the birthday boy, I realized that there were worse things to be. Like ungrateful.