The exterior of Pizza Ponte is located on a bustling block with other restaurants in the Temescal neighborhood in Oakland, Calif., seen on Feb. 24, 2025.

When it first started in 2009, Oakland’s Taste of Temescal was a small neighborhood food crawl, with ticket sales benefiting local schools and nonprofits like the Women’s Cancer Resource Center of Berkeley. Seventeen years later, the event, which showcases some of the city’s most highly acclaimed restaurants, has expanded to include nearly 50 different businesses, with a trolley ferrying ticket holders down Telegraph Avenue. 

But perhaps the biggest change is that the event no longer benefits local schools. Instead, proceeds from the $60 tickets now go to the Telegraph Temescal District Association, the nonprofit business improvement district that runs the event — a fact of which multiple local businesses say they were not aware until recently.

Article continues below this ad

Tory Wentworth, the owner of popular ice cream shop Curbside Creamery, has participated in Taste of Temescal for over a decade. But when he noticed that something was different about the event that took place on April 29 this year, he took to Instagram to share.

“We won't be participating in Taste of Temescal going forward. In fact, I regret participating this year, and I want to explain why,” the nine-slide post from Curbside began, which now has over 3,000 likes.

Wentworth told SFGATE that while businesses like Curbside lose money on the samples they hand out to ticket holders at the event, he was always happy to participate, since the money went toward a charitable cause he believed in. 

When Taste of Temescal returned in 2025 after a hiatus, he said in the Instagram post Wednesday, he noticed that no volunteers came by the creamery’s booth to help like they had in previous years. When he used the signup form to ask for a volunteer’s help this year, and emailed to complain about passes being oversold, he said no one responded. 

Article continues below this ad

“That’s when I got a sinking feeling, realizing that I had been trusting that this was the event I thought I........

© SFGate