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June Taylor’s clementine marmalade is complex and layered, like a Philip Glass piece, a Gabriel García Márquez novel or a long phone conversation with your mother. The sensations of sweet and tangy hit the tongue almost simultaneously and have nearly dissolved away before the sour notes kick in, along with a registering of the texture: syrupy, not gloppy or jelly-like. Finally, there’s the perfect, meaty bit of rind, neither too tough nor too wispy, with a firm but yielding bite and hint of bitterness.
Taylor is a preserves whisperer, coaxing nuance and depth of flavor from fruit, like a good sports coach might work with an athlete. In July, she announced she was planning to retire after 30 years and closing her West Berkeley shop, June Taylor Company. Since news of the closing went public, customers have made a run on its jams, butters, marmalades and syrups (one person placed a $1,500 order).
Takara Sake’s virtual tasting sessions are held over Zoom, but attendees get five bottles to sample at home during the one-hour class. Photo: Anna Mindess
In the good old days, sigh, when my husband and I would go out to Japanese restaurants, like Kamado Sushi, Kiku Sushi or Sushi California in Berkeley, we would always order a bottle of cold sake to drink with our meal. We would ask the servers for suggestions (“not too dry, not too sweet”), and they would bring something that we usually liked, but, somehow, we never made a note of its name. (At Kamado, the sake is served in an elegant glass decanter with a pocket for ice, so we didn’t even see the bottle). I always told myself that,
There’s no denying 2020 was a very difficult year, filled with fear and loneliness, anxiety and stress. But amid the gloom there were bright spots. There were enough of them, in fact, for us to launch a popup newsletter, Best of Times in the Worst of Times, that came out weekly from March to May, highlighting uplifting and good things happening in Berkeley.
The community rallied in a crisis. Residents chalked messages of encouragement on sidewalks, put teddy bears and rainbows in their windows, volunteered at food banks, organized neighborhood support groups and live music and singalongs in the streets to cheer each other up. Individuals and local businesses, as well as restaurants, joined forces to offer mutual aid to those most at risk of contracting COVID-19. Responding to market need and quarantine restrictions, many businesses pivoted and started offering pandemic-friendly goods and services.