Caffe Chiave

Caffe Chiave

Caffe Chiave is a cute and homey Italian cafe overlooking San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. It’s the kind of place you go to when you’re hungry and leave feeling satisfied. 

The interior design, like the menu, has clearly been influenced by Italian style and culture. Its design utilizes warm-colored wood and dark red trim, a color scheme that reminds the visitor that this is an Italian cafe. The speakers play instrumental music that goes with the Italian-inspired theme.

The cafe is not particularly large, nor is it jam-packed. It holds about twenty small tables that are spaced apart enough to give each table some distance and privacy. This creates a cozy and comfortable feel. With the nice Italian music to help drown out conversations between other guests, it’s a very nice place to have an intimate conversation with friends or colleagues over food or coffee.

Caffe Chiave serves the public as both a coffee shop and a restaurant. The baristas sell coffee (including house drip and cold brew), espresso drinks (like lattes, mochas, macchiatos, and americanos), and tea (including matcha and chai). They also sell an assortment of sweets and pastries, including blueberry muffins and slices of their specialty cakes, which pair nicely with the coffee or tea. 

When you enter, you order and pay at a long wooden counter that bends slightly to conform to the shape of the room. It transforms into a glass case showcasing beautiful cakes, pies, and other artistically crafted sweets, and then a counter where you can obtain condiments and water. In the mornings, there is also a selection of $4 pastries (morning buns, sweet breads, croissants, and muffins) atop the counter. This adds to the homey, laid-back ambiance. 

In its capacities as a restaurant, its menu offers some typical breakfast options, soups, salads, paninis, sandwiches, and pasta dishes, all for reasonable prices. For breakfast, you can have egg dishes, avocado toast, bagels, breakfast burritos, or sandwiches. They also have a soup of the day, several salads, six different types of paninis (including grilled cheese, turkey and bacon, and Italian meatballs), five different sandwiches (including BLTA, Italian sub, and vegetarian), and three pasta dishes: spaghetti and meatballs, fettuccini Alfredo, and rigatoni chicken pesto.

Behind that counter I mentioned earlier, you can see them make your order right then and there, right after you order. From your seat, you can hear and smell the food sizzling as it is carefully prepared, and you can watch as they carefully mix and pour the espresso beverages. If you order your coffee to drink in the cafe, you will get something in an artistic, clear glass that looks like you paid more for it than you actually did. In my experience, it will be carefully prepared to be pretty and tasty. There is an exquisite balance between coffee, milk, and sweetness in every cup of espresso beverages. 

It’s a great place to stop in the morning for a cup of coffee and a pastry. The coffee is top quality, and the pastries are baked expertly. The blueberry muffins, for example, are delightfully fluffy and sweet, with noticeable but subtle buttery and lemony notes that combine to set them apart from your typical pastry recipes. 

They also bake incredible cakes, pies, and other more elaborate dessert pastries at any hour of the day. For example, they serve slices of a layered carrot cake that almost appear too beautiful to be consumed. Like the muffin, it wasn’t made with a simple, easy recipe by an amateur. Instead, it was extremely moist with noticeable bits of carrot and a bit of crunch from the toasted nuts sprinkled over the sweet but tangy cream cheese frosting. 

When it comes to the lunch menu, you’ve got to try the pasta! The spaghetti and meatballs made me feel nostalgic because they were so warm and homey, satisfying and comforting. I loved the big meatballs smothered in marinara sauce and parmesan cheese on top of a bed of sauce-covered spaghetti noodles.  Like the pastries, the pasta dish didn’t stop at the basics; the recipe was clearly complex and made by an expert. The sauce had a bright tomato flavor, and it was thick and chunky, spiced with a delightful blend of Italian flavors. The meatballs clearly were made of well-seasoned meat with a touch of cheese. It was all served with crunchy, buttery garlic toast, which was a wonderful addition. It tasted comforting and homemade, and yet the chefs took it to the next level!

This cafe serves high-quality Italian and Italian-American recipes in a relaxed and attractive environment. There is no rush here, and the service is good; you can enjoy your meal or cup of coffee for as long as you want. The place even has free wifi, so you can work there for a while; the password and username are printed at the bottom of the receipt. 

I will come back because it’s a positive experience every time! The sweets are to die for, the main courses are fabulous, and the coffee is superb. On top of that, the cafe is private, homey, and cute. At the back of my mind, I’m already planning my next visit.