UC Berkeley’s New Gateway Café Serves Cava-Style Mediterranean Bowls Ahead of Chain’s Bay Area Arrival

Students, faculty, and East Bay visitors looking for fast-casual Mediterranean dining in Berkeley now have a fresh option at Gateway Café, located inside the newly opened Gateway Building housing UC Berkeley's College of Computing, Data Science, and Society along Hearst Avenue. In a campus culinary review published this week, reporters from The Daily Californian visited Gateway Café and found that its assembly-line menu structure, house-made dips, and spiced protein offerings are directly comparable to the popular national restaurant chain Cava. Priced at approximately $17 per entree, the café's customizable grain and greens bowls have quickly drawn steady lunchtime crowds on the north side of campus.

Operated under the university's campus dining program, Gateway Café serves build-your-own Mediterranean bowls alongside ready-to-order pita wraps packed with roasted vegetables, herbed grains, pickled onions, feta, and lemon-tahini dressings. For thousands of UC Berkeley undergraduates from Southern California and the East Coast who grew up frequenting Cava locations, the Hearst Avenue café fills a long-standing culinary gap in the East Bay. Campus hospitality officials noted that situating a fresh Mediterranean kitchen inside the data science and computing building keeps students and researchers energized between lectures and laboratory sessions.

Meanwhile, fans of the national Cava brand will soon have official locations within driving or transit reach in the Bay Area. Corporate real estate filings confirm that Cava plans to open its first Bay Area restaurant in San Jose at 3055 Olin Avenue, Suite 1035, inside the Santana Row retail district next year. In addition to the confirmed Santana Row storefront, Cava representatives have confirmed plans to open two additional restaurants closer to San Francisco, although exact street addresses and target opening dates for those northern sites have not yet been formally announced.

Commercial retail analysts and municipal chamber of commerce committees across Berkeley, Walnut Creek, and San Ramon noted that fast-casual Mediterranean concepts represent one of the fastest-growing restaurant segments in California. University dining advisory boards emphasized that expanding healthy, customizable plant-forward and halal-friendly meal options on campus aligns with student wellness goals and reduces off-campus food delivery traffic along Hearst Avenue and Euclid Avenue.

Students, university staff, and neighborhood residents can view daily menu rotations, nutritional allergen guides, and meal-plan payment options for Gateway Café online at dining.berkeley.edu. Diners visiting the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society building on weekdays can order bowls and wraps at the ground-floor counter between 8:00 AM and 4:00 PM. General questions regarding UC Berkeley retail dining locations or catering services may be directed to the Cal Dining administrative office at (510) 642-4135.