Opening a sports bar in north San Jose near Brokaw Road and 880 seemed like a good idea to Steve Driggs because there really wasn’t much like it in the area. Indeed, after only two months, sports fans in the area have already claimed Driggsy’s as their neighborhood hangout. The bar occupies the former Carlos Goldstein’s Mexican restaurant, but Driggs and his wife changed the layout a bit by knocking out the interior walls. Now it’s a wide-open space with several tables, a bar, a couple dart boards and about eight different TVs broadcasting sports.
Restaurants News - page 54
The Willow Glen place is the brainchild of Craig Guynes, whose knack for all things seafood stems from a childhood in the Chesapeake Bay, “spending hours cracking blue crab and watching the Redskins lose,” he recounted with a smile. For years, to satisfy his personal cravings, he had been shipping the blue crab to California. Blue crab, of course, is on the menu, along with Dungeness, snow, king and stone, all at market price.
Not a lot of dishes have an organization dedicated to preserving their historical authenticity. Pizza does, or at least Neapolitan pizza—the original modern version of pizza that came out of Naples, Italy, in the 1800s. The organization, Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, hands out certifications to restaurants all over the world that meet their very specific guidelines as to what constitutes a genuine Neapolitan pizza. Here in the Bay Area, only a handful of restaurants are so certified. One of them, Terrone Pizzeria, a casual upscale joint, was opened a few weeks ago in Palo Alto by three friends, all of whom were born in Southern Italy.
One of several new restaurants and bars to arrive on South First Street in downtown San Jose, Nemea Greek Taverna distinguishes itself with both location and cuisine. The restaurant sits at the corner of E. San Fernando and South First streets, where E&O Trading Company used to operate.
There are a lot of sit-down, $20-a-head Korean restaurants in the valley, but not so many places on the quick, inexpensive end of the spectrum. The owners of K Zzang decided to take this less-traveled casual route, though their motivation was largely due to the restaurant’s location: downtown San Jose.
Finding a new type of cuisine is equivalent to finding a new adult playground. There is rapture involved in the pursuit of nondescript hole-in-the-wall places with uncharted taste profiles. This exploratory spree pays off when one discovers a dish whose flavors hit the tongue like fireworks.
More beer fans are discovering the delights of the Single Hop Series from Hermitage Brewing Company, established in San Jose in 2009. The Single Hop Series is a line of IPA offerings that seeks to inform beer drinkers about hops, one of the essential ingredients in beer that produce many of its aromas and flavors.
Veggielution’s annual spring celebration, Avant Garden, returns on Friday with local chefs creating dishes from produce harvested on the urban farm, craft brews and, new for this year, San Jose Made vendors.
More folks seem to be taking up homebrewing as a hobby based on feedback from local homebrew stores. The next step for some is exploring the possibility of joining a homebrew club. The American Homebrewers Association has a database of more than 1,000 registered homebrew clubs, including San Jose’s Almaden Brewers, Affinity Home Brewing Club, the Grain Trust and the longstanding Worts of Wisdom Homebrewers and Silicon Valley Sudzers, as well as Santa Clara’s the HeadQuarters and Santa Clara Valley Brewers.
A restaurant in downtown Los Altos that is starting to garner some legitimate buzz. Its cottage setting is reminiscent of a visit to Grandma’s: impossibly clean, surprises for the children and collective sighs of relief from the parents.
