Start from 36 curated places around Berkeley, CA, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Chez Panisse
Alice Waters's 1971 restaurant in a Gourmet Ghetto Craftsman home — the birthplace of California cuisine, with a fixed daily menu downstairs and an à la carte café above. The most historically important table in the country's farm-to-table movement.
Cheese Board Collective
A worker-owned cooperative in the Gourmet Ghetto serving one vegetarian pizza a day plus a famous cheese-and-bakery counter, with live jazz and a line out the door. A only-in-Berkeley institution.
Trails & outdoors
Tilden Regional Park
The sprawling hill park above town, with paved Nimitz Way along the ridge for big Bay views and a web of dirt trails through meadow and forest. The East Bay's backyard wilderness.
Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve
A steep climb up Stonewall-Panoramic from the canyon to a ridge with sweeping views over the campus, the Bay and the Golden Gate. A short but serious leg-burner with an outsized payoff.
Things to do
BAMPFA
The university's art museum and Pacific Film Archive in a striking stainless-steel downtown building, pairing ambitious contemporary art shows with one of the country's great repertory cinemas. Culture by day, classic film by night.
Lawrence Hall of Science
A hilltop hands-on science museum above campus with interactive exhibits, a planetarium and a sweeping Bay view from the terrace by the giant whale sculpture. The top family stop in town.
Landmarks & sights
Sather Tower
The 1914 Campanile at the heart of UC Berkeley — a 307-foot Italian-Gothic bell tower you can ride up for a panorama from the Bay to the hills, with carillon recitals daily. The campus's defining landmark.
Sproul Plaza
The university's main plaza and the birthplace of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, still the campus's soapbox stage of buskers, activists and student life, entered through the landmark Sather Gate. The living center of Cal.