One of the great worker-owned cooperatives in American food culture, the Cheese Board has been selling cheese and baking bread on Shattuck Avenue since 1967. It helped introduce the sourdough baguette to the United States and trained enough bakers and chefs to have a measurable effect on Bay Area food.
The cheese shop and bakery are at 1504 Shattuck. A few doors down, the pizzeria at 1512 serves a single vegetarian pizza daily — whatever the collective feels like making — to a queue that regularly extends down the block. There are no substitutions, no meat, no calling ahead to find out the day's option: you turn up, you wait, and you get what they're making. It works. The pizza is excellent.
Live jazz plays outside at lunchtime most days, and the sidewalk fills with students, faculty, and neighbourhood regulars sitting in the sun. It is an accurate picture of Berkeley at its best.