The Temple Club

Geoffrey Deetz spent years running Spettro in Oakland and working through pop-up formats before opening The Temple Club on International Boulevard in 2017 — a timeline that shows in the kitchen's confidence. The menu sits at around 15 dishes and leans into the kind of Vietnamese cooking that doesn't usually travel far outside Vietnamese households: everyday preparations built around house-made sauces rather than the abbreviated, Americanized shortlist that most of the Bay Area's Vietnamese restaurants default to. The two-level space keeps the kitchen visible from the dining room, which suits the straightforward register of the cooking. Noise levels stay moderate, the format is casual, and the price point holds well under $30 per person — starters in the $8–$12 range, entrées closer to $12–$15. That positioning, on a stretch of East Oakland's San Antonio neighborhood shared with Taqueria Sinaloa and the EastSide Arts Alliance, is deliberate: this is a neighborhood restaurant in the functional sense, not the promotional one. The San Francisco Chronicle gave The Temple Club an "All Consuming" feature, which for a low-key East Oakland address carries weight — that section of the Chronicle's food coverage is reserved for restaurants the paper considers worth sustained attention, not just a passing mention. The house-made sauces are the through-line across the menu, and the rotating approach to dishes means the kitchen isn't locked into a static greatest-hits format. For anyone tracking where Vietnamese cooking in the Bay Area is moving beyond its most familiar expressions, International Boulevard has been a more productive address than many better-publicized corridors.

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