Good Taste celebrates the Bay Area food world. This week, we share the return of the Kitchen Table event series and co-founder Paolo Bicchieri’s upcoming political food writing workshop. Subscribe to our newsletters, including Good Taste, for more delicious food & drink news delivered to your inbox.
Paolo Bicchieri, his wife Lucie Pereira, and their friend Kevin Dublin are getting ready for the comeback of their Kitchen Table in San Francisco. It’s an event series that mingles poets and food writers with independent foodmakers.
“Our tagline is ‘food, writing, and food writing,’” says Bicchieri, who daylights as Eater’s audience editor in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. “The energy is very upbeat [and has] a casual ambience, with a good amount of conversation regarding the changing nature of the Bay Area. We’ve had the San Francisco poet laureate [Tongo Eisen-Martin] talking about gentrification and how restaurants do and don’t play into that. And then we have award-winning journalists who are talking about how writing is an important form of archiving the changing political landscape of San Francisco.”
Bicchieri is also planning a six-week political food writing workshop for all skill levels that begins on October 20.
“It’s really trying to get folks who are interested in political change for issues they care about,” says Bicchieri. “A good amount of each class will be set aside just for writing time and Q&A. Because I think a lot of people just have questions of how to get started and how to pitch. Each week, we’ll have themes like media literacy or generative AI and how that’s impacting writing, and we’ll have guest lecturers.”
Kitchen Table events and Bicchieri’s upcoming workshop will all take place at the newly opened York Street Collective residency at Corner Store (1100 Valencia, SF), Anand Upender’s non-alcoholic bar, tea house, and community gathering space that debuted on August 28. Kitchen Table will have events there the first Thursday of each month, beginning on September 4 and continuing through the end of the year, when YSC’s residency at the Corner Store space concludes. The writing workshop will run for six weeks, starting at 6:30pm on October 20. The course fee will be $200, which includes coffee and food; the majority of the proceeds will go to helping families in Gaza. Bicchieri notes that a sliding scale is available; follow the Kitchen Table Instagram page for upcoming signup details.
Though rooted in local community building, Bicchieri notes that Kitchen Table events are also globally minded.
“Given the ever worsening state of what’s going on in Gaza, we’ve connected through a barista in the East Bay with someone who lives in Gaza. They’re a poet and they’re a chef and it felt like a really great opportunity to raise money for this person. So now we are also raising funds for families who live in Gaza.
“I would encourage anyone of any stripes at Kitchen Table,” Bicchieri continues. “We want to be a space that receives all kinds of people and then we can have those kinds of hard conversations and show up for each other.”
Tamara also publishes the California Eating and Food Book Club newsletters.
