There’s a certain kind of person who moves somewhere new and immediately starts paying attention — not to the obvious stuff, not the top-ten lists or the Yelp stars, but to the neighborhoods, the side streets, the places that don’t wave and say look at me. Kahja Elliott is that person.
Kahja grew up in the Bronx, spent twelve years in Atlanta, and landed in Oakland about a decade ago. What followed was beautifully organic: she started wandering, eating, and sharing what she found on her personal social media. People started to associate her with it. It got more formal. And then, in 2022, Kay in the Bay — a full food media brand with a podcast, a Substack, events, and partnerships — was born. In this conversation, we talked about Oakland’s food scene, the spots you might be sleeping on, and what it actually means to tell someone else’s story well.
🎧 Click on the above audio link to listen to our podcast interview on Substack, or find and listen to “The Gomes Guide Travel Podcast” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
On Growing Up With Food That Takes You Around the World
Before Oakland, Kahja had already lived a remarkably food-rich life. The Bronx gave her Caribbean and Puerto Rican food as foundational building blocks — plus the very specific after-school ritual of Jamaican beef patties stuffed with mozzarella and run through a pizza oven. Atlanta introduced her to the rich culture of Southern American food. And then the Bay Area added the entire Asian diaspora to her palate — Filipino, Thai, Burmese, Laotian, Malaysian, Singaporean.
“I feel so lucky that I have lived in three specific regions that have almost taken me around the world with food.”
By the time she got to Oakland, she was already fluent in many culinary languages. What the East Bay did was give her a place where all of them could coexist — and that turned out to be the whole point.
On Oakland’s Food Scene: Keep It Broad
When people reach out to Kahja before visiting Oakland asking for the best Black-owned spot, or the best LGBTQ-focused restaurant, or the best Latin-owned anything, she gives them a piece of advice that I think is genuinely useful: keep it broad.
“If you dial into one avenue, you are almost certain to miss another really good avenue.”
Oakland made Condé Nast Traveler’s #1 best food city in the U.S. for two years running, and the spotlight has landed on some restaurants more than others. But what Kahja loves about the scene is its eclecticism — the range from late-night and funky to white-tablecloth fine dining, all within the same city. She describes it as a miniature form of travel, which, coming from someone who grew up watching food and travel programming on PBS just to see the world from her couch, feels exactly right.
The Spots She’s Actually Excited About
When I asked Kahja about underrated Oakland gems, Kahja went straight to The Cook and Her Farmer at Swan’s Market in Old Oakland. She’d been there the day before we recorded. She described it as the restaurant that isn’t going to flag you down — it just sits there, quietly excellent, waiting for you to find it. Harissa chicken with crispy potatoes, house-made ketchup in scratch bottles on the tables, oysters, hibiscus spritzers, fresh-baked cookies. The kind of place you want on a slow afternoon.
In Berkeley, she’s devoted to Rose La Moon, a Thai restaurant focused on street food with a menu built around things you genuinely won’t find everywhere — including Hat Yai fried chicken (a style specific to a region in Southern Thailand), crispy crab omelet, and taro and coconut desserts. She greets the staff in Thai when she walks in. They greet her back. That’s the kind of regular she is.
Also in Berkeley: KAOKAO Grill for char siu pork and chicken rice bowls that she says are worth the trip even on the pork alone.
And back in Oakland for pizza: June’s Pizza in West Oakland, which won her over as a New Yorker (no small feat). Neapolitan-style, massive pie, sold by the slice late night, finished with a snowfall of grana padano. She pairs it with their green herbaceous sauce and a little container of roasted garlic purée. I was ready to leave mid-interview and go get a slice.
On PBS, Rick Steves, and Traveling From the Couch
Long before Kahja was wandering Oakland neighborhoods in search of great food, she was doing a different kind of exploring — from her couch in the Bronx, glued to PBS. Food and travel programming were her window to the world, a way to go places before she had the means to travel.
“I grew up loving PBS and the food programming, the food and travel programs that would come on there, because it was like traveling from the couch, right from the house.”
She still does it. She mentioned sitting down on a random day and letting Rick Steves take her to some European country, completely unbothered. And honestly, same. But what’s beautiful is how that early love of food-as-travel directly shaped Kay in the Bay — the idea that you don’t have to get on a plane to experience a whole new culture. You just have to be curious enough to walk into somewhere unfamiliar and pay attention to what’s on the plate.
Oakland, she said, is the perfect city for exactly that kind of couch-free exploration. One day Southern food, the next Nepalese, the next a great deli sandwich. A miniature form of travel, right in your own backyard.
On What She’s Building Next
Kay in the Bay is expanding into consultative work — helping food businesses and organizations package and tell their own stories. Because here’s the thing she’s noticed: a lot of food businesses know they have something worth sharing, but they’re too busy actually running the business to figure out how to get it out into the world. And the stories that do make it out often end up filtered through the creator’s perspective, not the subject’s.
“You can feel a bit flattened by the way those stories customarily get told, because it’s almost always through the position or the eyes or opinions of the creator. It’s your story layered up underneath someone else’s way of presenting.”
Her answer is to get out of the way. Sometimes she’s not even on camera. The story is the point. She’s currently working on a project connecting people doing agricultural work in the Lowcountry of South Carolina with Bay Area audiences. She said it with the quiet confidence of someone who knows exactly what she’s doing.
The Rapid-Fire Essentials
Her favorite coffee shop: Caffeinated Coffee Co. in Berkeley, with a great outdoor patio if you want to work outside.
Espresso martini of her life: Café Colucci in Oakland.
Wine bar that converted a self-described red wine hater: Snail Bar in Oakland, where they poured her a German red blend so beautiful it looked like light sangria in the glass.
Favorite farmer’s market: Ferry Plaza in San Francisco on Saturdays, with West Oakland Farmer’s Market at the Prescott Market as a very close second.
Favorite food city outside the Bay: Charleston, South Carolina — specifically King Barbecue, which serves Southern cuisine layered with New York Chinese food culture in a way that made her feel like both parts of her culinary history were at the table at once.
For sweets:
Gregory’s Gourmet Desserts, a small underground bakery in Oakland near the lake doing proper Southern desserts — peach cobbler, banana pudding, German chocolate cake, pecan pie. She recommends The Fat Boy, which is banana pudding on the bottom and peach cobbler on top.
Casa de Chocolates, a Mexican-inspired chocolatier now in both Berkeley and Oakland, with flavors rooted in Indigenous and Mexican culture. The frozen hot chocolate with handmade whipped cream and chocolate shavings is apparently life-changing.
Meet Kahja Elliott
An avid lover of food culture with over a decade spent exploring the region’s culinary landscape, Kahja Elliott created Kay In The Bay as a storytelling platform rooted in community, curiosity, and connection. What began as personal exploration has evolved into a multi-vertical brand bridging food, culture, and conversation.
Kay In The Bay spans digital storytelling, brand partnerships, curated dining experiences, food travel, freelance writing, and The As Told By Podcast, an in-person interview series with some of the most compelling voices in the food world. From award-winning chefs and celebrated restaurateurs to food media leaders, emerging and iconic brands, local legends, and organizations shaping our communities, each conversation centers the human stories behind the work.
At its core, Kay in the Bay explores how food connects us: to place, to identity, and to one another, understanding food is more than a product. It’s culture, memory, and shared experience.
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