The Man, The Movies, The Rolodex

For almost a dozen years, 34 Black women gathered monthly around a big dining room table in an orange house on Orange Street in Oakland, CA — meeting, cooking, dancing, strategizing — grappling with the issues of eviction, erasure, gentrification, inadequate health care, and the sex trafficking of Black women and girls overwhelming their community.

Music from our stories, music of people who passed in the year just ended, music we want you to know about.

Deep thanks to all of you who support the work of The Kitchen Sisters. Without your collaboration and contributions, our stories, internship, and mentoring program would not be possible.

On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 2000 The Kitchen Sisters, along with food writer Peggy Knickerbocker, visited the home of Cecilia Chiang, the legendary Chinese-American restaurateur, chef and founder of The Mandarin Restaurant in San Francisco for a bit of an oral history. Cecilia Chiang introduced regional Chinese cooking to America in the 1960s, revolutionizing what most Americans thought Chinese cooking was. Elegant and savvy, her restaurant drew in celebrities like Mae West and Pavarotti, rock stars like John Lennon, Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, and other food enthusiasts. She inspired James Beard, Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Julia Child, and generations of chefs and restaurateurs.