It started with a tomato, honestly.
In the summer of 2022, Mira Okafor bought a flat of Sungold tomatoes from the Saturday market and ate them standing over the sink. They weren't a recipe. They didn't need to be. That's the night Verdura got its name. On a napkin at a bar in Rockridge, with a half-erased mood board and a list of farms.
Before Oakland, Mira spent seven years moving through some of the country's most thoughtful kitchens. Six years upstairs at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, where she ran the wood-fire station. A year at Bar Tartine refining her pickling and preservation work. Twelve months at Migrant Kitchen in Brooklyn, cooking for a tasting room she still calls "the best year I ever had at a stove."
We didn't open Verdura to make a statement. We opened it because there's a real difference between a carrot pulled Friday and a carrot pulled three weeks ago. And we wanted that difference to be the whole show.
Verdura's dining room is small. 38 seats inside, eight at the bar, and a back patio that opens May through October. The wood-fire oven was hand-built by a third-generation mason from Sacramento. The tables are reclaimed Douglas fir from a barn in Petaluma. The plates are made by a potter in Point Reyes.
We change the menu every Sunday at 4pm. Sometimes a dish lasts a week. Sometimes three days. The carrot agnolotti that came back this spring took two seasons to get right.
