Friday, June 10, 2011

Next SJ Eats is Coming to San Pedro Square on June 18th!

Come feast on an army of food trucks on Saturday, June 18th, from 5-9pm!  This is easily the best food truck event in the Bay Area.  Plenty of seating, great atmosphere, and you might even get a preview of the San Pedro Square Market. Same as last time, the trucks will be lined up on St. John Street and there should be plenty of free parking after 6pm around City Heights.


Thursday, June 9, 2011

Dia de Portugal Celebration this Saturday in History Park!

Last weekend San Jose had a terrific celebration of Greek culture, and this weekend it's Portugal's turn. We're really lucky to live in such an ethnically diverse city and to be able to emerse ourselves in so many different cultures!

This is an event that is dear to my heart since both of my parents emigrated from the Azores to San Jose about 35 years ago. Dia de Portugal will be filled with tons of great Portuguese food (you must try authentic linguica if you've never had it before), Portuguese wines, beers, art, music, dancing, and some really interesting cultural events. They will also be featuring a new exhibit in the Portuguese Heritage Museum that documents the migration of Portuguese people to California and Hawaii. Admission is free and children of all ages are welcome.

For more information, click here for the Dia de Portugal website.


This video is almost all in Portuguese but shows some of the cultural booths and events.

Trans Am Cruise - without the bootleg beer

I don't know how many people here remember the movie "Smokey & the Bandit", I myself didn't until Steve Natale sent me a link about the Trans Am Cruise event.

The Second Annual Trans Am Cruise kicks off in San Jose this Saturday, June 11.  The event is organized by Lisa Dalisa, who purchased her first Trans Am in 1983, and has been collecting and restoring them ever since.   A group of 20-30 Firebird and Trans Am cars are scheduled to descend on GM Sports in San Jose at 8:30 a.m. Saturday morning
To read the rest head over to Steve's article on the Examiner here

Evergreen Music Night with Alvon Johnson

Finally we've been getting nice weather & the nights are great.  A good way to spend one of these nights is at the Evergreen Village Square Music Night featuring Alvon Johnson & the All Stars.  Relax with a starry night & the blues.  They'll also be showing "Kung Fu Panda" to kick off the Summer Movie Night.  A night of music & laughs, that's hard to turn down.
EVERGREEN VILLAGE FRIDAY JUNE 10TH
LOCATION: RUBY AVENUE AT ABORN ROAD SAN JOSE, CA 
TIME: 6:00PM to 8:00PM

Wednesday Wishlist - More SubZEROs!

Last week's SubZERO festival was perhaps the best ever. These are exactly the types of events that we need to showcase San Jose's unique artsy subculture. It would be awesome to have more SoFA events at the scale of SubZERO throughout the year. We'll get a little taste of this next year with both SubZERO and ZER01 festivals going on in the summer. However, I still think we can support more. I would love to see a quarterly SoFA festival or event in addition to or as a supplement to South First Fridays!

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Downtown San Jose Restaurant List Updates!

It's been a while since I posted about the Downtown San Jose Restaurant List, and there have been a ton of updates! 
  • Restaurants added to the list:
    • Myth (NEW)
    • Agenda Restaurant (NEW)
    • Froyo Delight (NEW)
    • Fusion Cafe
  • Added the following new columns:
    • Special Menus - this is to highlight restaurants that have Vegan, Gluten-Free, or Slow Food menus
    • Outdoor Seating - this one is self explanatory =) 
    • Private Dining - denotes restaurants that have private dining rooms available, very handy for corporate parties
  • Morocco's has been added to the list of chains started in Downtown San Jose due to the upcoming opening of their 2nd location in Mountain View (the full list is in the Chains tab at the bottom).
We also hit a sweet milestone... over 200 restaurants on the list!  

If you see any mistakes or know of restaurants that have special menus, outdoor seating, or private dining rooms that are not marked as such on the sheet, please let me know. Keeping this accurate will be a team effort.

If you haven't bookmarked it yet, here's the link to the spreadsheet! There is also a permanent link over to the right entitled Downtown San Jose Restaurants.


Monday, June 6, 2011

Photos of subZERO 2011

This is subZERO!  It was my first time being at subZERO and it was great, a night of art, music, food and friends.


For me it all started off early at 5p doing some behind the scenes photos for Trina Merry the body paint artist.  It was like a zoo, we had makeup artist, hairstylist, painters, models and dancers everywhere.  It was pretty hectic and I’m sure a logistics nightmare dealing with so many people but Dez did a great job of keeping everything moving forward.


In the end even I ended up helping to shuttle and escort the models/dancers everywhere before the show started.

Got some pre-show pictures of the Tahira: the Pure Dance Theatre.  Imani and Trina collaborated together to create an exhilarating mashup of living art.  Elizabeth, one of the living statues, looked great with her intricate hairstyle.  I was able to talk to James, the hair stylist, briefly and he came up with the style as a fusion of Victorian and Modernism.


Got a quickshot of Trina + Regard Tang, one of the Makeup Artist.


Not everything went according to plan, due the sound checks taking longer than expected but eventually the Black Lotus Fashion Show kicked off.  Most of the outfits were gothic in nature and fantastic.


Finally the Tahira Dance Troupe kicked off and it was brilliant!  Part of me wanted to just stop bothering with photos and watch them dance.


Afterwards, went to meetup with Josh and the others at the Single Barrel.  A massive line as always, but worth the wait.

We then went around to check out the rest of subZERO and although I was suppose to do more photos of the event I ended up taking photos of us instead.  I did get some fun photos of us, but the girls would beat me for posting them.



I still managed to get a few shots of what was going on.  The Disco Fish Mobile!


Here are the cosplay body paint models portraying DC comic book characters.   I actually drove Wonder Woman over, pushing the speed limit a few times to make it on time. =)


Luckily got some of the blacklight performers as well before the night ended.


To wind down the night we grabbed some food at the Mogo BBQ truck.  We hung out by the crub while waiting.  Now my question is, will she be towed for stopping?


Oh and I bet you’ve never thought of a massive Tofu Burrito before did you?  Well, the verdict is that it’s quite good.


It’ll have to be something I try next time since I got the tacos instead.  I have no picture of the tacos as I’m busy eating them, so here’s a picture of Josh eating his burrito to wrap things up.  (Get it? Burrito, wrap? haha)


You can check out the rest of the photos at the T2L site here.