A Culinary Tour of Oroville, California

Unexpected Delights in Small Town California

Mar 28, 2022

Shakey’s in Oroville, California. The last one in Northern California

A few weeks ago, when I wrote about Shakey’s and the rise of Dixieland Jazz Pizza, I missed this crucial detail, that the last Shakey’s in Northern California is in Oroville.

Reliving his memories with detail and warm enthusiasm, Dan Harvey, owner of Shakey’s Pizza in Oroville, stands in the very restaurant where he and his mother shared their first bite of pepperoni pizza. He points to an old booth that’s now nudged against a Super Mario Bros. arcade game. It’s the exact spot where they sat together back in the 1970s. Harvey recalls donning a pair of chocolate brown bell bottoms and a bright yellow shirt to his eighth grade graduation at the municipal auditorium in town.
Afterward, the two celebrated at Shakey’s, which Harvey said was a rare occasion since dinner was usually reserved for home-cooked meals around the kitchen table while his father worked hard hours at a local mill.
“That was my first bite of pizza, was Shakey’s. It was pretty cool. Just me and mom. We never went out to eat. Mom was a housewife, so you ate dinner at 5 o’clock every day,” he said. “But for graduation, on the way home, we stopped at Shakey’s and had a medium pepperoni pizza and a couple of sodas.”
Harvey gestures to the Pac-Man arcade game, sharing that when original owner Dave Kellogg hired him a day after his 18th birthday in 1981, he would play Pac-Man with his high school sweetheart before he had to clock in for his shift. Back then, if you worked at Shakey’s, you were a regular “who’s who,” according to Harvey. He purchased the business from Kellogg in November 2007 after Kellogg ran the place for 32 years.

Pac-Man and Shakey’s pizza? Let me grab my quarters and I’ll join you in the time machine.

Oroville, as regular readers know, is a town of 13,000 people in rural Northern California, most recently famous for the near catastrophic failure of its dam. It is also home of the greatest, and nearly oldest—founded in 1912—old-school Chinese-American restaurant in America, Tong Fong Low, a place worthy of a visit.

As far as I can tell, in the 40-plus years I’ve been going to Tong Fong Low, they’ve barely changed their basic menu—chop suey, chow mein and egg foo young. I find that very comforting. It also helps that their food is still very good, making this one restaurant that’s worth the trip to a small town.

Shakey’s and Tong Fong Low. . .and, just like that, I’m building my own culinary tour of Oroville!

Mission olive oil from 1913 Berkeley Olive Grove in Oroville

Our third stop, after Tong Fong Low and Shakey’s, will be the U.C. Berkeley Olive Grove.

In 1900, an olive oil from Oroville, California, received the Grand Gold Medal at the Paris Exposition.
In 1913, several Berkeley professors began investment on their own behalf in the heart of Butte County. By 1917, there were some fifteen professors involved and they formed the Berkeley Olive Association.
Later, the Oroville Mercury Register newspaper reported that the area had the largest ripe olive and olive oil capacity in the western hemisphere and the Berkeley Olive Grove had the largest planting of Mission olives in the world.

Started in 1913 as a retirement fund for a group of UC Berkeley professors, the grove passed through a number of hands and was in bank foreclosure, when, in 2003, it was bought by Olivia and Darro Grieco. Since then, the Griecos have brought the trees back into production and built a decent following as a producer of high quality olive oil under the 1913 Berkeley Olive Grove name.

The Griecos are pressing oil from mission olives, a uniquely American variety developed in California in the 18th century by (of course!) the Franciscan friars. Also in Oroville, but NOT on the tour, is the world headquarters of California Olive Ranch, the largest producer of olive oil in America, with a few thousand acres spread around the northern Sacramento Valley. California Olive Ranch primarily grows the Spanish arbosana and arbequina varieties, planted densely, ruthlessly pruned and mechanically harvested. Mission olive trees will last centuries, but require some space between trees and need to be harvested by hand. The California Olive Ranch produces a very good product at a good price point, but lacks the cockeyed romanticism I demand of my personal culinary tours.

One more note about the Berkeley grove. It sits in Coal Canyon at the foot of Table Mountain, a basalt mesa on the north side of the Feather River. This time of year, Table Mountain is home to both the most spectacular wildflower bloom in America and Phantom Falls, a 166-foot tall seasonal waterfall that spills from the mesa into Coal Canyon below.

Coal Canyon, with it’s peculiar micro-climate, is also home to our fourth stop, Chaffin Family Orchards, who deserves a visit for one reason, it’s home of what I believe is the most northerly commercial avocado orchard in world. The Chaffins have 30 acres planted in a rare, cold-tolerant, local variety called the Duke avocado. Avocados are subtropical, and most American avocado orchards are in Southern California, hundreds of miles south of Oroville, which, at 39.5° north, is well north of Sacramento.

Green, thin skinned, creamy and delicious, the Duke was developed at the turn of the last century in Oroville, and then promptly forgotten. If you’re into reading agricultural reports (and who isn’t?) here’s an article from the 1963 Yearbook of the California Avocado Society that tells the story of how the Duke was found and its odd characteristics. Although the Duke was able to survive winter temperatures as low as 21° Fahrenheit and bloom in the spring, it was too thin-skinned to survive commercial transportation. So, the only place you can get the Duke avocado is at the Chico farmer’s market in October, where I first encountered them many years ago.

There are a lot of individual avocado trees scattered around the Sacramento Valley, and home growers are always experimenting with cold-tolerant varieties, but only the Chaffins—who also grow mission olives, stone fruit and sustainable grass-fed beef—have a legitimate commercial avocado orchard in Northern California.

When I started writing this piece, the idea of a culinary tour of Oroville was a bit of a joke, but by the end, I realized that Oroville actually has some culinary merit. But, that’s California, right? That climate, that soil, those farmers producing those things you really want to eat, that’s what California is all about, culinary merit.

An Eccentric Culinary History

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