EAST BAY INSOMNIAC

CAFFE MEDITERRANEUM

2475 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley • 549-1128

SERVING:

• coffee
• tea
• pastries

OPEN UNTIL: 12AM

PARKING: street

THE EBI REVIEW: Once upon a time, the East Bay’s oldest cafe was ‘bohemian’ and radical. Now it’s not. According to rumours, Ginsberg wrote part of “Howl” here. Testimony and history would indicate that Caffe Med was a pretty happening place. Robert Anton Wilson name-dropped it in Schrodinger’s Cat:

Two Berkeley acid-heads, known on Telegraph Avenue as The Cat and The Dog, dreamed up a more intense disinformation matrix in 1980. “What would happen, ” The Cat asked one day in the Cafe Mediterraneum, “if we bought a truck and painted on the side of it INTERNATIONAL COCAINE IMPORTERS INC., and drove it around the streets?” “In Berkeley,” The Dog said, “the cops would just laugh. They’d be sure it was another put-on by the Hog Farm or the Merry Pranksters or somebody. But in San Francisco they wouldn’t take a chance. The first cop would stop the truck and search it.” “Nah,” said an unsuccessful poet named Robert W. Anton. “They’re more hip than that in San Francisco. But in L.A…” The debate spread from the Med to Moe’s, from Moe’s to Sather Gate, leapt the Bay…” (–Robert Anton Wilson aka Robert W. Anton, 1979)

Caffe Mediterraneum has been somewhat empty (physically and figuratively) the times when I’ve been in there. In fact, on the night we took that exterior photo, the only thing happening was a couple of hobos yelling at us about the “impoliteness of flash photography.”

The first Yelp reviewer said it pretty well: “Unfortunately Berkeley has long stopped being the cradle of rebellion, so mostly all these guys accomplish is scaring off freshmen UCB students to the other side of the street.” Sadder still, while you might be inclined to chat up the clientele, you’ll be disappointed. If you can get past the unshowered aroma, you’ll find damaged hippies and aging boomers without much to say–which makes it similar to a student-populated cafe, though decidedly more mellow. Sometimes I wish I’d been born earlier.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Coffee, THIRSTY. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.