It’d been a while since I’d driven up 23rd Street in Richmond. Like East Oakland, it’s a string of taco trucks, Laundromats, remittance centers, carnicerias, and auto body shops, scrappy entrepreneurs of businesses that can seem held together by little more than Bondo and the daily needs of people in the neighborhood. Crusty old Andy’s Donut Stop, you still serving raised old fashioneds at 3 a.m. for guys about to hit the early shift or headed home from the swing shift? Still ladling out footy-smelling bowls of caldo de res, Pepito’s Deli? The guy cooking chickens over mesquite, sill setting up in an empty lot, grill anchored to the uneven ground with cinder blocks?
.Drive-By Trio on Richmond’s 23rd Street
