The Cosmic Carrot’s gone now but hey, what a place it once was. Located on Adeline Street near Harmon, just off Ashby, it blossomed and thrived at the end of an era—those ephemeral fleeting years in Berkeley that escaped the pressures of the rushing mainstream. There was an almost surreal calmness there. I’m sure other places like it still exist somewhere but I don’t know where they are, or if I did know, I think I’d let you to discover them on your own.

At the time the Cosmic Carrot was open, I was sharing a house at 3005 Fulton Street with a friend, Lee, who worked at the Carrot grinding corn for tortillas. No one seemed concerned about time. You never felt rushed through a meal and always left feeling more centered and insulated from a world that was moving at a radically different pace. The restaurant’s phone was listed under the name, Bugs Bunny. In the waning days of the phone company still providing directory assistance, Lee enjoyed repeating, “Yes M’am. That ‘B’ as in bunny.”

Bruce, the Cosmic Carrot’s owner, started out with a sandwich cart on Bancroft Ave. at the UC Berkeley campus entrance. He did well enough there to open his dream restaurant early 1971. Soon he was catering exclusive gigs.  My friend, Terrie, was working there one night when they were catering a Grateful Dead party. She told me that someone asked to use the blender to make a drink. To the delight of a couple of other customers, some peyote at the bottom of the blender remained there for the next few drinks.

The Cosmic Carrot closed sometime in late 1973. I don’t know why. For a long time afterward, a 20-foot-long orange colored corkscrew sculpture remained in the empty lot next to the two-story building, a lively memorial to a location where mind and body could revert to a calmer place as afternoon sunlight filtered past bamboo shaded windows on the southwest edge of Berkeley.