The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) upstairs café peers down on a gallery two floors below. This café is at once part of the museum and in its own liminal space. We walk into museums wondering how we’ll engage with the artwork. Talking about the exhibit over a meal afterwards is its own separate reward. Some visitors will invert this approach after they eat at Nora Haron’s Kopi Bar and Bakery.
Sans umbrella, I made my way to Kopi in the middle of a rainstorm. My timing was off that day. With her café newly relocated to BAMPFA from the original Walnut Creek location, Haron sat down with me to talk about the move and her career. While we were talking, members of the kitchen staff approached our table and gently tapped her on the shoulder. Haron took note of the serious looks on their faces. She was still in the process of training her sous chefs. After only a few days of cooking for the public, they still needed her guidance.
Each time the chef returned from the kitchen, she brought me one of her dishes to try. Haron’s food is especially restorative when one is shivering in damp clothes. Between sips of soto ayam and bites of beef rendang chili, Haron sketched out her long and varied East Bay cooking career. Before stints at Farley’s and Blue Bottle, she owned and operated three locations of Créma Coffee Bar. But she first served her now signature Indonesian Singaporean dishes at Drip Line in West Oakland. “That’s how my food became popular,” she said.
Nasi goreng (chicken fried rice), the gado gado salad, laksa and kaya toast were all popular items there. When she introduced a brunch menu at Drip Line, Haron said, “People were lining up out the door.” Even though the café was popular, her landlord slowly came to the conclusion that the profit margins weren’t enough to sustain the business. She also understood that it was time to move on after someone shot a hole in the door of her car parked nearby. Then the pandemic shut everyone’s doors.
Without a restaurant kitchen, Haron, like many other pandemic-era chefs, started a pop-up. IndoMex married Indonesian dishes with Mexican tacos and burritos. “I was making a rendang version of a quesabirria sauce,” she said. “We would do laksa albondigas.” The pop-up did really well. “I remember just working my butt off for IndoMex. And that’s how I survived during the pandemic.”
The success of IndoMex caught the attention of the owners of Killiney Kopitiam, a Singaporean restaurant based in Palo Alto. They were trying to expand the franchise but, during the shutdown, they couldn’t bring experienced chefs from Singapore to train the cooks. Haron was hired to review the menu and taste everything. She understood that “it takes a person who has already eaten this food to know how to do this, right?”
Haron taught the employees a crucial technique in Asian cooking. “When you blend the paste—what we call rempah—it’s usually onions, garlic, ginger, coriander and chilies. In Indonesian food, we want the oil to separate when we stir fry it.” In French cuisine, when a sauce breaks like this, it’s a bad thing. But for Haron, after the sauce splits, she drains the oil “so you won’t taste that rawness in broths and soups,” she said.
With Haron as their culinary manager, Killiney Kopitiam’s sales and reputation improved. The owners partnered with the chef to open a location in Walnut Creek. The space they leased was huge, and the rent, $28,650 a month, reflected the cost of operating it on a busy downtown street. They built out SanDai, a sit-down restaurant, and the first iteration of Kopi Bar café right next to each other.
For the first year, the business did well. Towards the end of the second year, reservations started to decline. At the same time, Haron noticed an alarming trend. “Opa! closed. The Indian restaurant next door closed. The restaurant across the street closed. The wine bar behind me closed,” she recalled.
To keep the business going, Haron tried a number of options but couldn’t make any of them work in Walnut Creek. After regrouping and zeroing in on her culinary strengths, she decided to hire a realtor, who subsequently brought her to BAMPFA. She was initially dubious about the space. “I was like, but it’s a museum. It’s not street level. I need to be on the street level,” she recalled. But after her first visit, she fell in love with it.
Haron went downstairs to the gallery in which Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California had recently opened. She looked at the quilts and said, “I want my café to be part of the museum experience. How can I do that?”
In her pitch to BAMPFA, Haron knew she had the food nailed down but wondered how to make Kopi stand out among the competitors. “I wanted to be a partner,” she said. “I didn’t want to just be a coffee shop operator.” While she was preparing her business plan, she made a sketch of a cookie that resembled one of the quilts. “Every time the museum has a new exhibit, I want to do a culinary representation of it,” she said. BAMPFA was “gung ho” and supportive of her ideas. “In my first meeting with the leadership group, it was all women,” Haron recalled. “And I was like, yes, let’s do this.”
After I got home and into a dry outfit, I texted Haron to thank her for taking the time to meet with me during a busy opening week. But I also told her how much I appreciated the food she’d made. Sitting in the calm museum café, I could catch glimpses of the quilts on display downstairs. Sipping the turmeric coriander chicken broth in Haron’s soto ayam wasn’t just warming; it was restorative. Haron texted me back, “Food is Medicine.”
Kopi Bar and Bakery at BAMPFA, 2155 Center St., Berkeley; Wednesday through Sunday, 11am–5pm. bampfa.org/page/kopi-bar-and-bakery-bampfa.
