Open Test Kitchen — Kitchen and Community Hub
Named after Oakland Bloom’s flagship program, Open Test Kitchen (OTK) is now also a restaurant, market and community space. Through the brick-and-mortar space, we aim to create pathways to ownership for BIPOC, working-class, and immigrant/refugee chefs through just and equitable food systems rooted in cultural expression and economic empowerment.
OTK cultivates a dynamic, collaborative space where chefs can experiment, innovate, and develop their businesses in community with one another. It will serve as a hub for cultural exchange, creativity, mutual aid and community activation.
Visit OTK Eats
Come visit us!
Open Test Kitchen (OTK Eats) is located at:
528 8th St., Oakland, CA (between Clay and Washington St.)
We are open:
- Wednesdays: 9AM – 2PM
- Thursdays: 9AM – 2PM
- Fridays: 9AM – 2PM
- + Events
Check out Instagram @oaklandbloom and @otk_eats for updates and events!
We are also available for event rentals ! Email us at info@oaklandbloom.org to inquire more.
Open Test Kitchen (OTK) Incubator
Oakland Bloom’s flagship program, Open Test Kitchen supports emerging chef-entrepreneurs through access to affordable kitchen space and commercial opportunities for supplemental earned income as chefs develop their businesses (catering, events, teaching gigs, chef demos, pop-ups, etc.).
OTK is specifically designed to make launching a food business more accessible and also supports chefs to connect to different markets, audiences, and resources.
Program Goals + Services for OTK:
- Connections to consultants and experts
- Income generating opportunitiess out of our restaurant / kitchen space launched under the same name
- Hands-on experience across various commercial opportunities (restaurants, pop-ups, farmer’s markets, cooking demos, etc.)
- Referrals to direct services (mental health, interpretation, legal, etc.)
Collective Organizing and Ownership
Re-imagining Food Business Development
The COVID-19 pandemic has created new realities that are forcing fundamental change. While the pandemic has surfaced deep inequities in the food service industry that have historically and further put poor and working class communities of color at risk, it has also created an opening for new solutions to emerge.
In this context, one of Oakland Bloom’s main goals as an organization is to reimagine and reshape what a healthy and just food service industry could look like. We aim to work towards advancing equity, accessibility, and worker rights through the development of cooperatively owned food businesses that embody community principles and values, and operate in ways that hold space for BIPOC and traditionally marginalized communities. This took shape first through our collective restaurant project Understory (2020-2024) for which we were awarded a 2022 James Beard Emerging Leadership Award, and Oakland Bloom’s current work to build a Chef Collective network to co-steward and own our kitchen on 8th St in Oakland, which launched in September 2024 as Open Test Kitchen: restaurant, market and community space.
Program Goals + Services toward Collective Ownership:
- Ongoing back-end support services in: finance, infrastructure development, lease management, legal entity structures, HR, bookkeeping, operations, and more
- Community building and healing work among members for a strong foundation of principles, relationship, accountability and conflict management
- Strategic planning and work sessions for cooperative development that include defining key cooperative principles, operating agreement, etc.
- Cooperative funding opportunities + fundraising support
- Training opportunities for Oakland Bloom chef participants in the Open Test Kitchen program.
Anti-Displacement Organizing in Oakland Chinatown
This collaboration in Chinatown not only provides opportunities to showcase Oakland Bloom’s immigrant/refugee chefs, but also supports a grassroots campaign against the targeted discrimination and displacement that long-time local businesses are facing in Oakland Chinatown. An important goal is to lift working-class immigrant businesses and end targeting/ displacement of Chinatown Oakland businesses by the County Health Department, support community-based safety initiatives and invite community support to the neighborhood.
Working together with local merchants and organizations, Oakland Bloom has supported media strategies to strengthen place-making within the community and create opportunities for immigrant and refugee chefs. Since 2023, has co-hosted an annual Lantern Festival to bring merchants, emerging chef-entrepreneurs, healers and performers for an evening of celebration and healing in the neighborhood.
Past Initiatives
COVID-19 Response (2020-2022)
Pay it Forward
In order to provide economic opportunities for Oakland Bloom chefs during the pandemic when other traditional opportunities were more limited, we developed our Pay It Forward program, which connected chefs to opportunities to cook homestyle meals that went towards neighborhood mutual aid/distribution efforts to feed over 7500 meals to our unsheltered neighbors in West and North Oakland.
COVID-19 Response (2020-2021)
Farmers to Families Food Box
We partnered with Gill Tract Farms to directly connect Oakland Bloom chefs to community-based relief efforts for supplies and food security through our Farmers to Family Food Box program — a free weekly CSA produce box delivered directly to our base of refugee chefs and their families.
** NONE of this would have been possible without the help from our amazing and generous volunteer drivers. THANK YOU!
Night Market Series
From 2017-2018, Oakland Bloom hosted small pilot underground night markets in downtown Oakland that were incredibly well-received and sold out with 150 seatings each night and over 2000 attendees over the course of the series.
Oakland Bloom looks to experiment with what a full and authentic night market could look like with the hopes of ultimately creating Oakland’s first hawker center (or food hall) that could act as a training ground and permanent kitchen for up-and-coming chefs from poor and working class communities to develop and hone their food businesses.
