April 11, 2007
When TASTE opened two doors north of Chez Panisse on Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue in March 2006, it quickly became one of the East Bay’s most popular wine bars – hailed as “a wine lover’s paradise” by Diablo Magazine, “state of the art wine tasting” by the San Francisco Chronicle and “a foodie’s ultimate dream: climate-controlled, hand-picked wine selections available at the push of a button” by the Contra Costa Times.
By that fall, however, founder Deepak Aggarwal realized he had a problem: he had run out of brothers to manage the family’s growing collection of East Bay eateries. Since 2001, Aggarwal had created four successful restaurants, each time turning the operation over to one of four brothers after they opened. When he added a fifth establishment, in September, Aggarwal was in serious need of outside help. So he turned to his friend, Olivier Said, co-founder of the KITCHEN ON FIRE culinary school upstairs in the Epicurious Garden, to become TASTE’s new managing partner.
Download a PDF for the full story
