Juhu Beach Club in Oakland, California is exactly how Preeti Mistry intended it be: fiercely local cuisine through a modern Indian lens. It is this wholly original vision—executed with bright colors and deep roots, that has set Mistry apart in a community that thrives on pushing the boundaries of flavor. Inspired by the new line of Crocs designed for the workplace, we spend a day with a culinary vanguard of new world cuisine. Sponsored

https://www.chefsfeed.com/videos/1269-california-by-way-of-india-with-chef-preeti-mistry-spark

One hundred miles, give or take, from farm to table, is the ideal maximum distance for produce to be considered local. But there are some companies that are greatly improving on that goal — instead of triple-digit mileage, they’re offering produce that’s grown within just a few miles. Even better, when there’s a short distance involved, delivery happens by bicycle or on foot, eliminating any reliance on fossil fuels.
Traditionally, this type of urban farming takes place in abandoned lots, backyards or parks. But two new East Bay companies are changing up that paradigm.
Read more about Berkeley’s Garden Village building.
​The larger of the two operations is Top Leaf Farms, a rooftop garden at 2201 Dwight Way in Berkeley. The building, which was built by the Oakland-based Nautilus Group, Inc., is called Garden Village and functions as student housing for UC Berkeley. It was completed in January 2016 and Top Leaf began installing its garden in August 2016. By October it was up and running, growing produce in 10,000 of its 12,000 square feet of space.
Top Leaf Farms is in contract for another rooftop garden at Telegraph and 51st Street in Oakland, where the garden will be grown across 30,000 square feet of roof space. The mixed-use building will include apartments, as well as a Whole Foods’ 365 store. In fact Top Leaf is already gardening in the vacant lot on which the building will be constructed; that garden will be dug up once construction begins. While Top Leaf Farms is in discussion to sell produce to the new 365 store headed to the building, nothing has been confirmed yet.

Top Leaf has just two full-time employees. Benjamin Fahrer is the co-owner, principal designer and farm manager, and he is a 20-year veteran of organic farming in such places as Ocean Song Farm and Wilderness Center in Sonoma, as well as Esalen in Big Sur.
No doubt he would still be farming in a more rural locale had he not fallen in love with his wife, whose career requires her to be in an urban environment — she is a physician at UCSF and performs in a band.
There’s been a bit of a learning curve when taking his farming skills to the roof of a building. For one, much less soil can be used because of weight restrictions.
“Agriculture is a contrived system where we impose a production system on nature to serve our needs to extract product,” Fahrer explained. “On a roof, it’s even more contrived in that it’s separated from the earth. On the ground, you’re working with nature, and here you’re working with concrete, steel and metal. Fabricated materials have a certain rigidity you can’t be flexible with.”

Whatever challenges a rooftop presents, though, are not apparent to a farming novice visiting the roof on Dwight. One can walk through numerous terraces and see neat rows of crops growing; it looks no different than a regular farm, except for the fact that you can also see the tops of nearby office buildings and past those, the Bay Bridge in the distance.
Right now Fahrer is growing numerous varieties of kale and lettuces, arugula, pea shoots, herbs, flowers and more. Fahrer said he’s already determined which variety of arugula grows best on the roof — they may call it “arufula,” or “aroofula.”
Top Leaf Farms
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​Top Leaf sells produce to the students in the building in limited quantities, but makes most of its income with its “RSA,” or restaurant-supported agriculture, as Fahrer likes to call it. It currently supplies six restaurants with produce and all are within a three-mile radius. These include all three of Charlie Hallowell’s restaurants (Pizzaiolo, Boot & Shoe Service and Penrose), Juhu Beach Club, Chez Panisse, Ramen Shop, Benchmark Pizzeria and Gather.
“Ideally the [building’s] residents would take the majority of food that’s grown above them,” Fahrer said. “But right now the restaurants provide a constant revenue stream.”
Top Leaf Farms has an advisory board that includes author and sustainability expert Raj Patel and former Oakland Food Policy Council director Esperanza Pallana, and is in contract to design a handful of other projects, but Fahrer said they are very particular about their clients. The company has had a few experiences where a developer asks for a rooftop garden with the latest green technology, but after entering into a discussion, “at a certain point we realize we don’t agree with the ethics of that development,” said Fahrer. “We’ve declined because of gentrification and the way in which they’re developing because they’re evicting people from their homes.”
The hope for the Temescal farm, which Fahrer expects will be finished in 2019, is for it to be “a worker-owned cooperative, where we can train and employ local people to become part owners, and create more of a livelihood from urban agriculture,” he said.

​Find the Full Article Here 
www.berkeleyside.com/tag/top-leaf-farms/

The unexpected twist in the new housing complex on Berkeley’s south side isn’t just the rooftop farm. It’s that the fields of edible greens rest above 18 freestanding structures, vertical pods, that hold 77 apartments in all.
Put those two elements in the middle of a fairly dense city, and they combine to make a point that’s easy to forget: Our society’s need for pedestrian-friendly housing doesn’t need to be satisfied in cookie-cutter ways.
This welcome fact runs counter to what we see in growing cities across the Bay Area, the state, even the nation as a whole — anywhere new housing is packaged in squat, costumed boxes along busy streets. The planning theory is great. The execution too often is generic at best.
Not so at the corner of Dwight Way and Fulton Street on the edge of downtown Berkeley, where the boxy collage of Garden Village is like nothing that you’ve seen.
The design is by Stanley Saitowitz, one of the region’s few architects whose work is always interesting— even his less-successful buildings don’t feel formulaic, because there’s an underlying concept that’s tied to aesthetics and the setting. In this case, the blocks south of UC Berkeley, where students inhabit everything from chopped-up single-family homes to small apartment buildings and high-rise dorms.

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The “village” consists of 18 buildings of three to five stories, with each floor holding a separate apartment. The pod-like stacks are connected by steel bridges with open grillage below your feet. Where the bridges serve as walkways — outdoor corridors — the square buildings are 5 feet apart. Where there’s a ground-level landscape and fresh air up above, the width is as much as 15 feet, with protruding window frames to add a bit of privacy.
The specific numbers are less important than the overall impression — a grid brought to life in 3-D.
From the street the look can be forbidding, though Saitowitz clads every other pod in a dark red cement board. He calls it “my homage to Berkeley brown-shingle homes,” which also adds a contrast to the white pods in between. But the open-air corridors and multistory sight lines make the interior of the grid surprisingly cozy, with a collegial feel that’s much more inviting than your standard apartment block.
This is no mean feat given that the 77 apartments together contain 236 beds. And the word “collegial” is appropriate, because UC Berkeley signed a master lease with the developer and operates it as part of the student housing system.
Cozy turns captivating as you ascend.
Follow the bridges from one level to the next and it’s as if you’re inside a honeycomb. The higher you get, the more there is to see and do.
Two of the interior pods stop at three levels and are topped by communal terraces that get use throughout the day when studies and weather allow. One more level up, you encounter the startling contrast of panoramic views — and a dissected farm where you can touch the ground or snip off a sprig of parsley.
This time of year, between harvests, some pods show nothing but dirt. Others are softened by abundant mounds of green parsley and purple kale. One roof is dotted with red radishes waiting to be picked.

In all, one-third of an acre of “land” is available for farming. The Rooftop Farm was designed and built by Benjamin Fahrer of Top Leaf Farms,  a licensed  contractor and for-profit urban farming company that operates the production atop Garden Village and whose clients include such restaurants as Pizzaiolo in Oakland and Gather in Berkeley.

Saitowitz doesn’t take credit for the ongoing harvest, which is part of an overall sustainable design strategy that was part of the community benefits package. But it’s exhilarating — and because of the multitiered layout, it’s a part of the ongoing scene much more so than if it were out of sight and out of mind.
The atomized order of Garden Village might be too stern for some tastes. I’d like it better if the grid was a bit less relentless, and if it included the inset balconies and corner indentations that added variety in the early designs but were taken out for budget reasons.
Ultimately, though, what counts is that Garden Village shows the potential for experimentation as suburbs and cities add housing to their central districts. The layout traces back to California’s love of outdoor living even as it folds in such still-experimental elements as stacked modular construction and rooftop farming.
Done right, infill development can transcend the current norm of standardized product. It can add a nudge of surprise to familiar terrain — as the corner of Fulton and Dwight shows well.
John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.comTwitter: @johnkingsfchron
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