A small shop straddling the Berkeley border turns out Oakland’s best pizzas. The crisp sourdough crust supports toppings of superior quality (a mushroom mix that includes foraged specimens; or merguez sausage; or sweet corno di toro peppers) that nevertheless fail to distort the basic mission of pizza, which is to satisfy the primal need for an unintimidating, hot slice. Owner Nick Yapor-Cox, a trans man who identifies as queer, has made his business a place of safety and support for a diverse clientele, especially LGBTQ customers. “I think the shop itself,” Yapor-Cox says, “as a physical location for community, is really how we champion queer causes.” The pizzas champion the cause of Northern California’s sourdough-crust and topping supremacy. [$]

Mac McConnell bakes in the South Bay, but the company he owns with Jaime Shapiro (the midwife of the name) feels naturalized in Oakland, especially on Sunday mornings, at the Temescal farmer’s market. The 100-percent whole wheat loaf (there’s a touch of rye in the levain) is mind-bending. The wheat is Glenn, a California-grown hard red spring heritage strain, milled at the bakery. It’s a lovely shade of toasted walnut that survives the long (16- to 18-hour) fermentation and baking. The finished loaf smells bright and winey, slightly smoky, and, due to some combination of lactic acid bacteria and freshly ground wheat, a little like fruitcake spices. [$]

In 2005, in her trademark shiny blue wig, Aussie native Alison Barakat opened a brick-and-mortar in a former dessert shop in Temescal; for years the daily sandwich line was formidable. In a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, Barakat’s sandwich expressed the diverse strains of Oakland’s food identity: the African-American legacy of buttermilk fried chicken, the hint of banh mi pickle in the jalapeno cabbage slaw, and the shadow of Panisse in the Acme torpedo roll. These days the lines are shorter, but Barakat’s sandwich remains an Oakland essential. [$]

Chef James Syhabout (full disclosure: I helped him write a book, Hawker Fare) came to Oakland as a baby, with his Lao refugee parents. He grew up working in his family’s Thai restaurant, and later apprenticed himself to fine dining. Syhabout’s dishes at Commis reflect Southeast Asia so subtly you might miss it: the warm levain bread, baked in a crock, for instance, which you tear apart with your hands the way you do a wad of sticky rice; or delicately glutinous little tapioca dumplings, called sakoo yat sai, but with fillings that show California seeping through (a mix of chicken, pecan, and ginger, say, garnished with a tiny nasturtium leaf). Syhabout’s cooking is both lush and restrained, a study in textures. Casual, socially progressive Oakland wasn’t the easiest place to attempt fine dining. Commis feels like a stockpile of native diligence, ambition, and talent. [$$$$]

Mark Liberman earned a national profile as chef of San Francisco’s AQ, an ambitious seasonal concept dining room that shuttered in 2017. In Oakland, Liberman has opened the kind of restaurant many veteran chefs yearn to slide into: a 45-seat place with neighborhood-bistro bones. Every dish feels joyful. Liberman squeezes a career’s worth of skill into a concise menu that changes weekly: slabs of focaccia mounded with lush tomato and mustard-flower salad, and fried soft-shell crabs with smoked nectarine barbecue sauce. [$$$]

When he passed away in 2017, Rod Dibble ended a 50-year run playing jazz standards at the u-shaped piano bar, but the Alley is still a dark and fusty grotto, a tunnel into a more unabashedly day-drinking age. The liquor is basic and nobody you know is likely to find you, here where stapled-on business cards cover the walls and vaulted ceilings like scales and the glow of red rope lights makes everyone look good. [$$]

Though settled in two proximate locations in Uptown, these Japanese fried chicken shop siblings (Aburaya Go for daytime hours, Aburaya at night) have big pop-up energy. Founder Adachi Hiroyuki is a bassist in punk bands (the Basements, for one), and his gnarly, sauce-glazed hunks of skinless and boneless fried chicken thrash like a two-minute hardcore track. Aburaya Go, on 15th Street, does a fried chicken sandwich on soft, yellow Texas toast that’s impossible to eat without leaving your hands, forearms, and the lower third of your face a smear of spicy Japanese barbecue sauce and coleslaw mayo. [$]

Chef Sarah Kirnon grew up partly in the U.K., partly with family in Barbados. Her cooking at this casual-service anchor of Swan’s Market in Old Oakland reads like a story told in her own quiet, powerful voice: memories of the Caribbean food she carried with her to California and reassembled here altered, yet true in essence. Many (including me) come here for skillet fried chicken (Kirnon is said to have learned the recipe from her Bajan grandmother, Miss Ollie), but nearly every dish — from jerk shrimp to split pea soup with yam and cassava — shines with ample grace. [$$]

Leo Oblea and Victor Guzman park their bright, lucha-branded truck near Jack London Square for lunch, Tuesdays through Fridays. Oblea’s fat strands of Jalisco-style beef birria — rich, chewy, and plumped with juice — deliver a stiff punch. It comes in crispy tacos (tacos dorados), or as a long, slipper-like griddled torta, with Oaxaca cheese and pickled onions, and served with a cup of deep-tasting consomme bearing a gorgeous slick of rendered fat. [$]

Jaynelle St. Jean’s Raspberry in Chocolate Crust is genius pie. The pastry straddles the line between shortcrust and a corner brownie’s crisp edges, and the filling, a red slush of tart, seeded berries, is almost shockingly luscious. The shop is minimal. You can have your pie and coffee at the table out front, in the odd little car-fringed plaza (really more of a bulbed-out gutter), gazing onto the tattoo shop or across at the chaos of stomped seafood boxes heaped at the curb before Rockin’ Crawfish. Better yet, carry your slice to nearby Pine Knoll Park at Lake Merritt. [$]

It would be blessing enough if owner Nite Yun only cooked delicious Cambodian food. At her tiny ad hoc restaurant in Fruitvale Public Market, Yun represents a local culture underrepresented in mainstream Bay Area food: the Central Valley community of refugees fleeing the Vietnam War. Yun, who grew up in Stockton, counters the narrative that immigrant food with the roots kept intact is somehow inaccessible beyond its core constituency. Inside Yun’s ambient songscape of 1960s Cambodian rock, dishes like amok (custardy coconut-milk catfish steamed in banana leaf) and kuy teav Phnom Penh (rice noodle soup with pork and brisket) feel at home in the company of defining East Bay dishes, a pantheon that includes street tacos and the warm goat cheese salad at Chez Panisse. [$$]

Reem Assil’s tribute to Arab street bakeries opened in 2017 amid a storm of controversy over a mural of Palestinian activist Rasmea Odeh. There’s no debate about the food, which is hefty, vivid, and delicious. Chewy, just-baked pita steals the focus from the hummus it’s meant to be a sop for, while spicy green shatta sauce delivers a world of shimmer to a tasty falafel wrap that feels rooted in California thanks to the presence of avocado (an add-on). Meanwhile, lahm bi ajeen — crisp flatbread topped with spiced ground beef and yogurt — is worthy fuel for activism. [$$]

Racist zoning of the past meant the East Oakland Latinx neighborhood Fruitvale would be the only place taco trucks could legally operate. Regulations have eased, but Fruitvale is still the center of Oakland taco life. This brick and mortar taqueria with a fanciful URL for a name makes the best ones in the city. Pay upfront, slide into line, and after the wait you’ll get a consultation with one of the taqueros who work the order windows like bank tellers. Suadero (beef brisket) simmers in a vast braiser, mingling with beef tongues and cheeks. They slice it to order, drop it onto a double layer of tortillas, and blanket it with onion and cilantro. The always-crowded dining room (a covered patio, actually) is an essential Fruitvale space. [$]