Skip to main content

Speakeasy dishes up Italian food in vintage bus -- in secret -- in East Bay

Restaurant confidential:
"Locked behind a razor-wire fence, hidden deep within an East Bay industrial zone, lies a secret restaurant where patrons need a golden key.

Part diner, part speakeasy, Joe's 'Bustaurant' is an underground boite the Sicilian chef has operated inside a converted 1947 Metro bus for the last six years. You have to know somebody who knows somebody to get in.

Joe serves traditional Italian food under the cover of darkness, on Monday nights during winter, to elude busybodies, food snobs and health inspectors.

'This is the kind of place where you walk in, and everyone says hello,' said 41-year-old Joe, a musician who prepares about 35 meals a night. 'In here, that's what it feels like you should do.'

Joe couldn't operate legally if he wanted to -- there's no fire or health department around that would allow a chef to cook inside a bus on a gas range with people crammed around five tables. He's checked into it.

'The ceiling is too low, the exits are too narrow. The walls are too thin, ' Joe said. 'I'd have to rip it apart and turn it into something it's not. It would no longer be an antique bus.'

Regulations aside, he must be doing something right, because no one has complained, and the lines are getting longer and longer for a seat on the bus.

Joe has passed out about 40 golden keys to neighbors and friends, who each are allowed to bring somebody if they call first and make a reservation. His six-degrees-of-separation system netted actor Cheech Marin, who is the most famous person to dine at Joe's."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Jodie Lane Project Responds to City Council Testimony

The Jodie Lane Project : New York, NY -- February 12, 2004. The City Council Transportation Committee held a hearing today to investigate the causes of Jodie S. Lane’s tragic electrocution death on January 16th. The testimony revealed a startling lack of oversight on the part of the Public Services Commission, charged with overseeing Con Edison’s compliance with the National Electric Safety Code, last revised in 1913. With only 5 inspectors at their disposal, the Public Services Commission relies entirely on Con Edison to report safety problems. Because Con Edison only reports incidents resulting in injury or death, the PSC was aware of only 15 shock incidents in the last 5 years. Con Edison has acknowledged that it actually received 539 reports of shock incidents in the same period, effectively admitting to misleading the PSC by an order of magnitude. It is not only this discrepancy that is alarming, but also the fact that the Public Services Commission, charged with ensuring

New York Post Online Edition

news : "December 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Startling new Army statistics show that strife-torn Baghdad - considered the most dangerous city in the world - now has a lower murder rate than New York. The newest numbers, released by the Army's 1st Infantry Division, reveal that over the past three months, murders and other crimes in Baghdad are decreasing dramatically and that in the month of October, there were fewer murders per capita there than the Big Apple, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Bush administration and outside experts are touting these new figures as a sign that, eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, major progress is starting to be made in the oft-criticized effort by the United States and coalition partners to restore order and rebuild Iraq. 'If these numbers are accurate, they show that the systems we put in place four months ago to develop a police force based on the principles of a free and democratic society are starting to