Santana Row Turns September into a Month of $25 Prix-Fixe Lunches for a Good Cause

September brings a practical reason to leave the office for a proper midday meal when Santana Row launches Let’s Do Lunch, a month-long Taste The Row event running Monday through Friday from September 1 to 30. Sixteen restaurants will each serve a $25 prix-fixe lunch that includes one appetizer and one entrée, giving diners an easy way to sample new spots while supporting World Central Kitchen.

The participating lineup covers a wide range of flavors, from Augustine and Dumpling Time to Fogo de Chão, Ozumo Sushi, Pizza Antica, Straits, Zazil, and more. The promotion builds on last year’s successful Taste The Row dinners and shifts the focus to weekday lunches so more people can take a real break during the workday.

Every lunch helps World Central Kitchen, the organization founded by Chef José Andrés that delivers fresh meals to communities facing disasters and crises. With an average cost of about five dollars per meal, the donations generated during the month will stretch far. Menus, hours, and availability differ by restaurant, and tax, tip, and drinks sit outside the fixed price.

Santana Row already draws people for shopping and evening dining. This September program simply makes the middle of the day more appealing and purposeful. Full details and the current list of restaurants appear at www.SantanaRow.com.

Holland Partner Group Buys the Stevens Creek Corner for 575 Apartments

Holland Partner Group closed on the 4.7-acre corner at 3896 Stevens Creek Boulevard this week, paying $22.3 million according to documents filed August 26 at the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office. Local families that include Joseph Rubino Jr. sold the land. The purchase locks in a project the city already entitled: two eight-story buildings with 575 apartments at Saratoga Avenue and Stevens Creek, a few blocks from Northlake Drive and about two miles west of Valley Fair and Santana Row.

Building 1 will face Saratoga and hold 264 units. Building 2 will front Stevens Creek near Northlake with 311. Twenty-nine apartments are slated for very-low-income households, a band the state currently sets at $71,950 for one person and $102,750 for a family of four in Santa Clara County, against area medians of $143,850 and $205,500. Ground floors will carry about 13,600 square feet of retail, split 7,600 and 6,000 between the two buildings. Plans also call for roughly 25,000 square feet of amenity space, including fitness rooms, co-working, clubrooms, lobbies, and podium pool decks. TCA Architects drew the metal, screen, stone, and stucco faces. A public plaza is mapped to the busy corner.

That corner used to be headed in the opposite direction. Cypress Equities had an entitled 882,000-square-foot office and retail scheme that once included a large Life Time athletic club. Office demand collapsed, and Holland flipped the site to housing. San Jose made the project its first approval under the city’s streamlined ministerial ordinance in December 2025, cutting a process that often takes about 20 months down to eight. The count later grew from earlier 532- and 540-unit versions to 575. Existing low-rise shops, including Hokkaido Buffet, are slated for demolition. Across the boulevard, CRP Affordable Housing is already building 59 income-restricted units at 3941 Stevens Creek.

The Stevens Creek Urban Village Plan asked for exactly this kind of swap: parking lots and strip frontage turned into housing, shops, and sidewalks wide enough that people might linger. Holland’s filings promise a stronger pedestrian edge and a Class IV bike lane along the project frontage. Westsiders who drive that intersection every day will notice the height first. The more useful test comes later, when the retail actually opens and the 29 below-market units lease to the households the paperwork names.

Construction timing and cost have not been published. The deed is recorded. The drawings are approved. The next visible change on that corner will be the wrecking of the buffet and the start of two towers where an office campus never arrived.

Source: The Mercury News

Twenty-Five Startups Will Pitch at SCU’s Eighth Bronco Ventures Demo Day on October 9

Twenty-five founders will take two minutes each on Friday, October 9, inside Santa Clara University’s Locatelli Student Activity Center, and the room will fill with the kind of people who write checks. Ciocca Center’s Bronco Ventures Accelerator will close its eighth cohort with that showcase, then keep the lights on for a two-hour reception. Doors open at 4 p.m. Pitches run 4:30 to 6:30. Food, drinks, and introductions follow until 8:30. Admission is free and open to the public, which means a San Jose engineer, a first-time angel, or a curious neighbor can walk in without a badge from Sand Hill Road.

The companies span healthcare, enterprise software, fintech, construction tech, consumer products, government technology, space, and education. This year’s class pulled founders from every school on the SCU campus and, for the first time in a serious way, from partner Jesuit and Catholic universities abroad through the Jesuit Entrepreneurship Center Alliance. That mix is new. The format is not. Teams spent July through October in a full-time grind of workshops, mentor sessions, and mock pitches, then earned a slot in front of alumni, operators, and investors who already know the South Bay well enough to skip the tourist version of Silicon Valley.

Alumni of earlier cohorts have collectively raised more than $100 million from angels, venture firms, the Bronco Venture Fund, and the JECA Fund. Some later landed at Y Combinator or Alchemist. The accelerator itself takes no equity, which is rare enough in this zip code to mention twice. Program director Cristina Cismas Florea and Bronco Ventures founder Morgan Slain have built the night as both graduation and deal flow. Last year’s Demo Day packed hundreds of in-person guests plus a remote audience. This one sits during Grand Reunion weekend, so the campus will already be full of people who remember the Mission Church and now run product teams in North San Jose.

San Jose readers have a short drive and a real stake. SCU sits on El Camino Real, a few minutes from The Alameda and Downtown San Jose. Founders who raise here tend to hire here, rent offices here, and sell into the same hospitals, school districts, and construction sites that keep this city moving. Bring a card if a two-minute clock makes you lean forward. Stay for the reception if the pitch that mattered was the conversation after the slides.

Questions can go to ccismasflorea@scu.edu. Locatelli Center is at 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara.

Event details and Bronco Ventures programs: https://www.scu.edu/cioccacenter/bronco-ventures/

DSW Prepares Second San Jose Store at Almaden Plaza

Footwear retailer DSW will open a second location in San Jose at Almaden Plaza. The new store will occupy roughly 14,400 square feet previously held by a furniture retailer at the 5353 Almaden Expressway shopping center.

Almaden Plaza already anchors a mix of large tenants including T.J. Maxx, Sports Basement, and Hobby Lobby. Recent additions include TleafGreen Burmese Kitchen, with a Benihana restaurant also on the way. The center sits near residential neighborhoods and other retail destinations such as Oakridge Mall and Almaden Ranch Marketplace.

DSW currently operates one San Jose store on Stevens Creek Boulevard, more than six miles from the planned Almaden Plaza site. The chain, owned by Designer Brands, runs more than 500 stores nationwide and has signaled additional openings this year.

Silicon Valley retail vacancy has tightened over the past year, falling from 5.3 percent to 4.9 percent. Limited new construction has helped strengthen leasing demand, particularly in the San Jose-Campbell-Los Gatos area.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

Sonries the Jaguar Has Moved Into Happy Hollow, San Jose Gets Its Big Cat Back

Happy Hollow Park & Zoo has a new jaguar. His name is Sonries, he arrived from the Los Angeles Zoo through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Jaguar Species Survival Plan, and he is still settling in behind the scenes. Guests walking the bamboo path through Zoo in the Hollow will not find him on exhibit yet. Keepers have given him time to learn new sights, new sounds, and a new daily rhythm before he steps into the outdoor habitat that once belonged to San Jose’s last resident cats.

That gap lasted more than a year. Sophia, the jaguar many local kids grew up watching from the viewing rail, died in June 2025 at age 21 after kidney disease. She had lived at Happy Hollow for about two decades and became one of the oldest jaguars in an AZA-accredited zoo. Kianto, the park’s other senior male, was already gone. The empty habitat left a hole in a 16-acre park that has mixed rides and conservation since 1961. Sonries’ transfer is the Species Survival Plan doing what it was built to do: move animals between accredited zoos so the North American population stays genetically healthy.

The animal care team has refused a fixed debut date. Positive reinforcement training is underway, the same slow, treat-and-trust work that lets a big cat choose when a new step feels safe. Happy Hollow published Chapter 1 of a “Meet Sonries” series on August 16 and promised milestones, enrichment clips, and keeper notes in the weeks ahead. When he is ready for public viewing, the park said it will say so first.

A trip to Kelley Park still pays off while the wait continues. Twix the red panda, capybaras, lemurs, meerkats, and the petting barn remain on view. Danny the Dragon, the carousel, and the Pacific Fruit Express keep running. Every ticket still feeds Quarters for Conservation, the program that sends a slice of admission to field projects abroad. General admission currently runs $22 for ages 2 to 59, $19 for seniors and military, and free for children under 2. Parking is $10. Note the current detour: Story Road at the main entrance has been closed, so drivers should use the lot at 1300 Senter Road until the park says otherwise.

Follow the zoo’s updates, then take the kids anyway. The hollow already has a jaguar again. The rest of us just have to wait until Sonries decides the yard is his.

Tickets and hours: https://happyhollow.org/visit/
Meet Sonries, Chapter 1: https://happyhollow.org/happy-hollow-blog/meet-sonries/

A Parking Lot Beside Hammer Theatre Moves Toward 168 Affordable Homes

Planning Director Christopher Burton is scheduled to hear a seven-story affordable project on September 3 that would replace a 1.3-acre surface lot between South Second and South Third streets, just south of East San Fernando. The Sobrato Organization owns the asphalt. Pacific West Communities would build. AO drew the plans. The site sits next to San Jose State’s Hammer Theatre Center and across from the San Antonio light-rail stop, which is the whole point of putting housing here instead of another decade of empty spaces after the last show lets out.

Staff have recommended approval. Under the state’s Density Bonus Law the current count is 168 apartments: 33 reserved for very-low-income households, 133 for low-income households, and two market-rate manager units. Earlier filings this spring described 173 homes with a slightly different mix, including extremely-low-income apartments. Numbers often shift as drawings harden. What has not shifted is the claim that nearly every door would be deed-restricted. Sobrato held this lot since about 2010 and once floated a 24-story, 393-unit market tower that never left the page. The new version is shorter, cheaper to finance, and aimed at people who already work or study within walking distance of Paseo de San Antonio.

San Jose’s state housing assignment for 2023 through 2031 is 62,200 units. Council spent recent weeks arguing about whether denser housing should spread into more neighborhoods. This parcel does not need that debate. It already sits in the core, next to a campus, a theater, restaurants, and a train. Residents would not need a car to reach a job on Santa Clara Street or a class on campus. They would need the project to survive financing after the director’s stamp.

Pacific West has become a regular partner on below-market work around Northern California. Sobrato, long an office landlord, has been steering more of its land toward housing. Neither fact guarantees a groundbreaking. An approval on September 3 would still leave tax credits, construction costs, and a construction schedule. The useful test for Downtown San Jose is whether a parking lot that has sat idle beside a university theater finally turns into addresses instead of another rendering.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal\

Neighborhood Favorites Across San Jose Just Received a Welcome Boost

Family-run kitchens from The Alameda to Vietnam Town and South San Jose recently secured $5,000 resilience grants. The California Restaurant Foundation and The PG&E Corporation Foundation directed the money to more than 150 Bay Area restaurants, with a solid share landing in Santa Clara County.

Independent owners with fewer than five locations and under $3 million in annual revenue qualified. The funds will cover kitchen equipment, technology upgrades, staff training, retention bonuses or unexpected costs. This year’s cycle set records: 239 restaurants across 30 counties received $1.4 million total. Since 2021 the partnership has delivered $5.7 million to more than 1,100 restaurants.

San Jose winners include Via Mia Pizza, T-T Deli at 1520 The Alameda, Pho This Way on Story Road, Angelo’s Italian Restaurant on Blossom Hill Road, Hop & Vine at 1435 The Alameda, Anh Hong, Birria Patro Jaramillo, Golden Harvest, Huynh Dining, Mimi’s Kitchen, MOC DELIGHTS and Bun Mam Ha Tien & Simply Boba. Several sit close to Downtown San Jose or along The Alameda corridor where regulars already know the owners by name.

These spots employ local crews and give each neighborhood its own flavor. Better equipment and extra training let owners keep the same recipes while running smoother operations. Readers who already count these places as weeknight standbys can expect the same welcome plus a few operational upgrades behind the scenes.

The next time a craving hits, drop by one of the grant recipients. A bowl of pho, a banh mi, a pizza or a plate of pasta from a family kitchen keeps money circulating close to home and helps San Jose’s restaurant map stay varied and independently owned. Additional information on the Restaurants Care Resilience Fund lives at restaurantscare.org.

GalaxyCon Holds Downtown Through Sunday. Saturday Doors Open at 10.

GalaxyCon’s third year at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center is already underway. Friday’s late start is over. Saturday runs 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with the exhibit hall closing an hour earlier on Saturday. The address is 150 West San Carlos Street, which puts the whole circus inside walking distance of light rail, hotels, and whatever else Downtown San Jose is doing this weekend, including Silicon Valley Pride a few blocks away.

The guest list is the reason people bought badges months ago. Hayden Christensen is listed for Saturday only. George Takei, Brent Spiner, Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong, Ian Somerhalder, Temuera Morrison, Wayne Knight, Joseph Mazzello, and Ariana Richards stretch across Saturday and Sunday or all three days. Cassandra Peterson, Tyler Hoechlin, Sean Gunn, and Scott Patterson were Friday-Saturday. Muppet veterans Steve Whitmire and Dave Goelz are on the board. Voice work includes Colleen O’Shaughnessey. Comics side has Marv Wolfman and a long artist alley. A handful of announced names already dropped out, including Don Bluth and Jaime Pressly, so check the official guest page before lining up for a signature that is no longer there.

Cosplay contests are offering more than $4,000 in cash plus medals and trophies. Photo ops and autographs are separate tickets on top of a badge. Official passes still sell through Eventeny; weekend VIP packages climb into four figures, while single-day general admission on the secondary market was running well over $100 by Friday night. Lockers, accessibility notes, and a prop policy live on the GalaxyCon San Jose pages. Parking details were still labeled coming soon on the site, which in this building usually means pay lots and garages around San Carlos and Almaden, plus a walk.

People-watching may be the cheapest programming. A convention that books Star Trek, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Elvira, and Cheech & Chong in the same hall will fill the sidewalks with armor, robes, and at least one person in a full foam suit who should have taken the light rail. If Saturday feels packed, Sunday is shorter and often easier. If the goal is one specific guest, confirm that name’s remaining days before buying a last-minute pass.

Official tickets and guest list: https://galaxycon.com/pages/galaxycon-san-jose

Ticket desk: https://www.eventeny.com/events/ticket/?id=22673

Campbell’s Restaurant Shuffle Adds New Cocktails, Sushi, and Dumplings

Campbell’s downtown has spent the past year swapping nameplates faster than a Friday night reservation list. Lira, the contemporary dining room that opened in January 2025 at 368 East Campbell Avenue with San Jose native and “Next Level Chef” winner Tucker Ricchio in the kitchen, shut after New Year’s Eve. Ricchio had already left in June 2025. The owners later said the fine-dining math no longer worked. Into that 110-seat room, including the patio, Jason Seele of Los Gatos Soda Works is building Trial | Error, a modern cocktail bar with small plates, aiming for an October opening and evening hours around 4 to 11 p.m.

A few blocks over, A Bellagio closed after more than two decades of Italian dinners at 33 South Central Avenue. Honō Izakaya & Sushi has already taken the address, with a bar in the middle of the room and a Japanese fusion menu that started drawing first-time reviews in July. Opa! left 276 East Campbell Avenue after a chain-wide collapse and Chapter 7 filing. Elia, the Pleasanton-born Greek and Mediterranean group, moved in with mezethes, weekend brunch, and late hours that stretch toward midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Mexican spot Distrito Federal at 379 East Campbell Avenue has been reported as temporarily closed under a court-appointed receivership, another reminder that even busy storefronts can stall.

The Pruneyard told a cleaner story. Bellevue-based Dough Zone Dumpling House opened June 5 at 1875 South Bascom Avenue, Suite 405, in the old Patxi’s Pizza space between Trader Joe’s and Humphry Slocombe. The 3,167-square-foot shop is the chain’s sixth Bay Area location and sits alongside existing Dough Zone rooms on Lundy in North San Jose and on Cherry in South San Jose. Xiao long bao, Q-Bao, and dan dan noodles now have a Campbell address for anyone who already makes that Bascom drive.

Hamilton Avenue is lining up the next wave. Dutch Bros and Chipotle have floated drive-thru plans. Earlier reporting also pointed to an Apni Mandi Indian supermarket and a Da Vien Vietnamese coffee shop along the same corridor. Downtown still waits on Ainsley’s Spout House, the Scottish-Californian beer garden Alan Hicks has been building into the old Ainsley Corporation offices on Harrison Avenue. City staff have framed the turnover as concept replacement rather than a hollowed-out district, which is the generous reading. The honest one is simpler: some rooms could not carry white-tablecloth rent, and operators with cocktails, sushi, dumplings, and mezze moved faster than the vacancies.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

Plaza de San José Leads Community Survey for Downtown Park Name

A ranked-choice survey of more than 10,000 participants has put Plaza de San José well ahead of four other finalists for the downtown park at Market Street. Parks spokesman Ed Bautista called the margin about two to one over the next-highest choice.

The list of names grew out of more than 600 public suggestions. After Plaza de San José came Farmworkers Plaza, Plaza del Pueblo, Plaza Park, and Plaza de Quetzalcoatl. Before 1993 the square was known simply as Plaza Park.

Staff will take the results to the Parks and Recreation Commission on September 2. The commission will then send a recommendation to the City Council, which makes the final decision later this fall. Council members may accept the survey winner or pick another name.

The 2.3-acre plaza is Northern California’s oldest public square and already hosts Christmas in the Park, Music in the Park, San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, Fountain Blues and Brews, and Silicon Valley Pride. A name that points straight back to the city itself would match the role the space has played for generations.

Downtown San Jose residents and visitors who already treat the park as a shared living room now have a clear sense of where the public conversation landed.

Source: San Jose Inside