Two new Menlo Park restaurants are transforming sleepy Santa Cruz Avenue into a chic culinary destination. Clark’s Oyster Bar and Yeobo, Darling have joined nearby Camper to further rarefy the air on the peninsula.

After closing Maum and Bǎo Bèi, Meichih and Michael Kim opened Yeobo, Darling in June. At the end of our meal, Michael made an appearance in the dining room to explain that “yeobo” is a Korean term for darling. Meichih overheard Michael’s parents using it with each other to express affection. When the couple was deciding what to name their latest concept, the word seemed appropriate for a restaurant run by a pair of married chefs.

The menu reflects both of their heritages, as individuals and as partners. Meichih’s roots are Taiwanese and Michael’s are Korean, and they’re also Asian American, which accounts for lasagna, somyun and chicken wings showing up on the same menu.

Yeobo, Darling’s dining room is smartly sectioned off with occasional draperies. They add privacy, instill a decorative sense of drama, and tamp down the acoustics. The monochromatic color scheme soothes and nudges diners toward a more intimate and relaxed pre-digital world.

Yeobo, Darling specializes in shared plates that increase in size as your eyes move down the long list of items on the menu. We started with a scallion croissant ($24) that was made in partnership with Redwood City’s The Baker Next Door. The Kims smartly decided to leave the laminated dough to an expert.

A clever play on a scallion pancake, the “croissant” actually arrives at the table in the shape of a small loaf of bread. The layers form elegant swirls that twist and turn all the way across the loaf as if it had been designed with a stencil. When torn into, the interior was flaky and flecked with scallions. It’s served with a bright yellow-white side of whipped Irish butter that’s been dusted with the salty crunch of pork floss.

A plate of chicken wings ($20) changed my mind about the dish. Generally speaking, they’re a lot of fuss and bother to get one or two good bites. Yeobo’s, though, are all the right things—crisp and tender exactly where they ought to be. For a minute I did imagine that a dipping sauce, something light with soy, chili and vinegar, might be complementary. But that could have easily dampened the spice mix coating the skin. The plate also included some seared Jimmy Nardello peppers that were sweet and succulent.

Similar to the reinvention of a scallion pancake as a croissant, the chefs are intent on remaking familiar dishes without straying too far from the originals. The results are elegant and imaginative. The Kims’ soondubu ($19) isn’t unrecognizable as a tofu soup served at many Korean restaurants. What’s different is the kitchen’s attention to details. The scarlet broth was spicy but balanced. Our taste buds didn’t burn after sipping it. Each morsel of seafood—whether octopus, clams, or a plump mussel—was also cooked with a great deal of care. 

Another soup-like dish was texturally dim sum adjacent. Our server explained that the primary ingredients, shiitake mushrooms, would come stuffed with a shrimp mousse. But I didn’t gather that they would be served in a broth. Visually, the thickened broth, with its drifting seaweed ribbons, conjured up a sweet and sour soup. But it tasted milder in comparison.

Our main course was my favorite, Hokkaido scallops in a marvelous black bean sauce ($42). The plate was also punctuated with dollops of a white cauliflower purée—a commendable way to represent a vegetable I hold mostly in contempt. Each scallop was seared to secure a crisp top while the center remained tender. We cleaned the plate and decided to end the meal.

Until we perused the dessert menu. At Bǎo Bèi, Meichih made a widely celebrated karat cake® (note the trademark symbol) that she’s brought to Yeobo. But we tried the two gluten-free desserts and were just as richly rewarded. I was told that Anthony Le was the talented pastry chef behind them.

Before dinner, I’d seen pictures of the soft serve milk ice cream and stone fruit ($14) that made me long for it. The dish was packed with fresh slices of plums and perhaps pluots too. I simply loved the combination of tart fruit against the rich ice cream. A dark chocolate mousse ($16) was much richer, but crunchy walnuts and a foamy layer of banana cream made the whole thing heavenly.

Yeobo, Darling, open Tues.–Thu. 5–9pm, Fri.–Sat. 5–9:30pm. 827 Santa Cruz Ave., Menlo Park. 650.665.7799. yeobodarling.com.

On Aug. 21, the American Supreme Leader created yet another dubious government agency. The “National Design Studio” is named with this administration’s mastery of doublespeak.

One imagines this studio as a facility modeled after the one in Noah Hawley’s TV series Legion, where AutoCAD and Photoshop are repurposed for mind-control experiments and all of the meanings implied by “branding.” Because only billionaires matter in the 21st century, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb) was appointed to head the agency as the “Chief Design Officer.” Photos of his smug, benign smile are just as terrifying as RFK Jr.’s official snarl.

By accepting the position, Gebbia’s complicity is a given—whatever damage this Design Studio manages to unleash. But, should we ever return to a less punitive era, will he be considered as culpable as the man, and the Legion of Super-Villains, who appointed him?

In Andres Veiel’s documentary Riefenstahl, the director and the audience have the answer to that question from the start. With vast archival resources at his disposal, Veiel has constructed an eviscerating cinematic response to Leni Riefenstahl’s life and career as well as Ray Müller’s 1993 documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

There is no background narrator summing up Riefenstahl’s collaboration with Adolf Hitler and the broader Nazi party on Triumph of the Will and Olympia, the films that established her reputation as the preeminent documentarian of the era. Veiel, instead, ingeniously repurposes Riefenstahl’s own work, and her own voice, to present a litany of damning evidence.

Filmed ten years before Riefenstahl’s death at the age of 101, Veiel inserts an interview that was cut from Müller’s doc. In it, Riefenstahl exhibits the kind of rage that matches Hitler’s oratorical flourishes as she reaches a fever pitch of unflinching ferocity.

Müller had the audacity to ask what interlocutors had been asking of her for decades. He was looking for a glimmer of contrition since an apology, from Riefenstahl’s point of view, was hors de combat. Veiel skillfully arranges video excerpts from British, German and American television talk shows. Whether in black and white or in bleached-out 1970s sepia tones, Riefenstahl returns again and again with the same set of scripted denials, the same unconvincing mask that reveals rather than hides her spiritual decay. With each passing decade, she remains the injured party, wrongly held to account for gas chambers she didn’t build and guns she never fired.

But the former actress kept returning to the stage. Although Riefenstahl appeared to enjoy tangling with the attention from interviews, both the negative and the positive responses from viewers, Veiel also unearths audio recordings of her conversations with Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments and War Production. After his release from prison in 1966, they engaged in a correspondence. As baleful players on a post-Nazi world stage, they advised each other on how to profit from their besmirched reputations. To feed a news-hungry public, the media paid both shadowy figures handsomely. The steely-eyed Riefenstahl gleefully took the money, retreated to a lovely forest chalet, and answered her detractors with an insolent, downturned rictus.

Riefenstahl cleanly avoids a sexist approach while recounting her life. The documentary does include Riefenstahl’s accounts of a paternal beating and at least two mentions of rape. But anecdotes about her formative years are included to fill in her portrait, not to arouse sympathy from the viewer. For Veiel, she is first and foremost a Nazi propagandist, spiritually and psychically paired with her racist cohorts for eternity.

In 1993, Müller was revisiting Riefenstahl during the production of her final film, Underwater Impressions (2002). Her stance of “plausible deniability” infuses his three-hour film with noxious fumes, but Müller expects his audience to come to its own conclusions. When Veiel marries an audio account of German soldiers murdering prisoners with a close-up of Riefenstahl as an eyewitness, it conveys the truest emotion that ever registers across her celluloid face.

Riefenstahl runs Sept 19-25 at 3Below Theaters, 288 S 2nd St, San Jose. 408.404.7711. 3belowtheaters.com

After Austin, Aspen, Houston and tony Montecito, Clark’s Oyster Bar has opened its second California location in downtown Menlo Park.

The restaurant group knocked down the walls between Menlo Bazaar and Ann’s Coffee Shop, which closed after 75 years, to combine and reimagine both spaces. It’s a reminder that the present tense continues to pave over the past at a steady, persistent and sometimes alarming pace.

The new look conjures a vision of Ralph Lauren’s America, where summer days offer endless opportunities for a wide variety of nautical amusements. The lacquered wooden bar shines like the hull of a docked and well-tended yacht. The coveted booths and counter stools are upholstered like the colors of gemstones, in garnet and sapphire. Just inside the front door, tiny fish swim lazily around the circumference of a crystal clear aquarium.

From its perch, a taxidermied marlin, or the facsimile of one, stares out blankly across the dining room. And, most notably, a lovely plein air mural-sized painting of the coastline by Rob Moss Wilson captures the feeling of a sunny seaside walk.

The oceanic theme even extends to the bread plates, which are decorated with anchors. Only Neptune himself seems to have vacated the premises for his undersea kingdom.

No less than ten kinds of oysters ($4.50 each) start the menu off, indicating a bountiful harvest of fruits de mer to come. The long list of seafood dishes that follows includes (but continues well beyond): shrimp or crab louie salad, ceviche, tuna carpaccio, caviar (an order from Uruguay is $155), clam chowder, grilled Spanish octopus, cioppino, and a lobster roll.

With so many items to choose from, our table weighed the descriptions of each dish against the collective lunchtime mood. The heirloom tomato salad ($21) was a light start to the meal and easy to share. In my mind, I picture heirloom tomatoes as beefsteaks but these were cherry-sized and petite. They were arranged, with cucumber and croutons, on top of whipped ricotta spread that ate like a delicious lemony cloud.

After we left Clark’s, one friend said his Dungeness crab omelette ($34) was one of the best he’d ever eaten. The kitchen’s hollandaise also made him change his mind about the sauce, which can turn up as a heavy pour.

His wife was certain she was going to order linguine with clams ($38) but when our server approached she decisively went with crab cakes ($34). Evidently she’d made the right choice. At the end of the meal, there wasn’t a trace of crab or the companion watercress and frisée salad on her plate.

The most controversial food-related debate had to do with the lobster roll ($45). Someone was expecting it to be served hot. I was happy it was cold, like a tuna or chicken salad, mixed together with chopped green herbs and a refreshing lemon aioli. But I did take umbrage with the vehicle it was served in. The term “roll” applied to the sandwich in the broadest possible sense, as in some form of bread. White, nicely grilled bread, but not a roll per se.

The kitchen hollows out the center of what appeared to be a compact loaf before lining the center with a big leaf of bibb lettuce and then stuffing the cavity with lobster. It’s an awkward eat by hand, and much easier to consume with a fork.

When we sat down, the neighboring table had a small mountain of french fries ($14) that seemed to stay at the same height up until the arrival of their affogato ($13). The lobster roll comes with a quarter amount of the same shoestring fries (or cole slaw), and our table of four couldn’t finish them.

My particular dish, crispy rockfish ($42), was a hit with everyone but me. They all oohed and aahed over the stone ground grits laced with parmesan and the kick of spice from the surrounding moat of a sofrito sauce. But I didn’t like the ugly cut and cook of the fish, which turned an unappealing color. Had I followed my intuition that day, I would have ordered a fish from the “catch of the day” list—cod, halibut, opah, branzino or scallops.

The pristine interior of Clark’s proffers a preppy person’s idea of heaven. But the country club vibe isn’t snobby or unwelcoming. The exterior façade of Ann’s Coffee Shop might have been torn down and trashed but the heart of a friendly neighborhood diner is still beating somewhere inside the same address.

Clark’s Oyster Bar, open for lunch Mon to Fri 11:30am–3pm, brunch Sat & Sun 11:30am–3pm, Dinner Sun to Thur 4pm–9pm and Fri to Sat 4pm–10pm.. 780 Santa Cruz Ave., Menlo Park. 650.285.0855. clarksoysterbar.com/locations/menlo-park.

A plaintive voice echoes across the main gallery of the San Jose Museum of Art, where Pao Houa Her’s exhibit “The Imaginative Landscape” is on view.  A Conversation Between 4 Hmong Women is playing in a video installation in the adjacent room.

The artist places each woman separately, in the center of their respective frames. They’re projected onto a long wall, four in a row. They’re singing kwv txhiaj, a Hmong oral tradition, to each other in a chanted, call-and-response  conversation. Not knowing the language, I ask Her if I’d projected my own sense of sorrow onto this form of sung poetry.

“One of the women I worked with, I learned that she was single, and that she will probably never be married because of the profession that she has chosen—singing,” Her explains. In Laos, the woman is a revered singer. But in the Hmong community, men do not consider female kwv txhiaj singers to be desirable partners. “This conversation between the four of them is about the trials and tribulations of what it means to be Hmong women in my community,” she says.

The main gallery features several of Her’s large-scale photo series. The artist takes a sculptural approach to making images. Colors and textures add depth and meaning to the landscapes and portraits. In untitled (real opium, behind opium backdrop, 2020), Her creates layers within her own visual language by arranging flowers in front of a backdrop that’s printed with flowers.

Dense jungle foliage fills up the series Pictures of Paradise. They are conspicuously devoid of human beings. But when I was standing up close in front of them, I sensed that the photographer’s point of view was from a hidden place, somewhere inside all the greenery. Her made lenticular prints for the series as a way “to activate” the viewer to give them “this perception of depth.”

Lenticular images are digitally sliced into a foreground, middleground and background before being printed on a special paper made with triangular ridges and then assembled. “When you move, the image slightly changes,” Her explains. “It shifts and moves with you.” The backstory only enhances this 3D effect.

Her took the Paradise photos in Laos on a trip with her parents. They had fled the country at the end of the Laotian Civil War (1959–1975). Before they emigrated to Minnesota, Her’s family landed in a Thai refugee camp for a year. And before their time in the camp, they lived in the jungle for two years. Pictures of Paradise revisits that formative place in Her’s family history. “When I started making these photographs, I was really thinking about these places as backdrops for these lives that continue to happen,” she says.

For Her’s black and white Mt. Shasta series, she frames the photographs in light boxes. The work, Her says, is heavily influenced by the photographers Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan and Ansel Adams. “I’m thinking about the canon of Western landscape artists and the ways in which they were making work to entice settlers from the east to move westward,” she explains. Light boxes are often used as advertorial objects as seen in malls or airports.

As in the Pictures of Paradise, the Mt. Shasta images purposefully exclude people. “These barren landscapes have this very rich history but might not feel and look like anything if not for the light box itself that’s drawing you in,” Her says. The subjects are gnarled trees and rocky plains but there’s a Hmong community that has moved into the region to cultivate marijuana. For Her, the series is about the resiliency of the Hmong people who are working the land in this forbidding place.

In each of Her’s series, there’s a narrative arc taking place, moving from photograph to photograph. “Early on I decided that I wanted to be a photographer and a storyteller,” she recalls. “I wanted to be a writer but writing was never in the cards for me. But I learned really early on that photography was very similar to writing.”

Her compares her artistic practice to lines in a story, to words and punctuation marks. “I was thinking about ways in which I can sequence the work to tell a story so I started photography in that way,” she says. “I also have this love for the history of photography as it relates to the Americas, the world and the Hmong people.”

Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape is on view at the San José Museum of Art through Feb. 22, 2026. 110 South Market St., San José. sjmusart.org.

A couple of weeks ago the weekday lunch crowd filled out all of the alfresco patios along Castro Street except for the one in front of Johnny & Sanny’s.

Mountain View residents didn’t seem to notice that the owners of Doppio Zero had opened a new restaurant in Vida’s former digs. We had one of the main dining rooms to ourselves.

Could the occasional sound of the train’s bellowing horns have deterred them? The new Italian spot is situated a few feet closer to the train station than its competitors. But they should have taken the time to step inside. Most of Vida’s upscale features and fixtures—the central terrazzo bar, the plush green banquettes—aren’t showing any signs of wear and tear. 

Taking a detour away from Spain and into Italy, the décor now genuflects toward the idealized glamour evinced by Federico Fellini in his 1960 film La Dolce Vita.

Framed black and white film stills featuring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren evoke the era’s devotion to extravagance (a “Sophia Loren” pizza includes pepperoni, salami, San Marzano tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese for $22). There’s even a hand-painted stencil of a quotation attributed to the director: “Life is a combination of magic and pasta.”

The open shelves hanging above the bar, also retained from the Vida days, are lined with prosecco and champagne bottles, and a step-and-repeat pattern of liquors and liqueurs. The menu isn’t astonishing or inventive; it includes a short list of familiar Italian dishes that the well-trained kitchen prepares with precision and verve.

The plates are nicely composed but, because this is Italian food, never challenging, cold or severe. Spillage is de rigueur here.

High summer is the prime season for harvesting squash. Under their antipasti section, Johnny & Sanny’s is making ultra-thin zucchini fries ($15). They’re actually skinnier than french fries, more like fried shoestring onions. To finish the dish, the cooks shave copious amounts of parmigiano reggiano on top.

When I was a kid, we used to eat at an Italian-American restaurant that served fried zucchini sliced into great, hulking spears. As I bit into them, the blistered core of seeds melted in the mouth. Johnny & Sanny’s approach is less rustic and more elegant but the flavor of the vegetable gets a little lost against the breading but that didn’t stop me from snacking on the pile throughout the meal. A side of lemon basil aioli dip was fine but ketchup or ranch dressing wouldn’t have been bad ideas either.

Burrata ($15), our second shared antipasti, was served with tomato, olives, a vibrant smattering of everyone’s favorite microgreens, and a caponatina of eggplant. A caponatina, I learned, uses a finer chop on the eggplant than a caponata. I liked it better because the texture tasted more like a tapenade than a pasta sauce.

Although the half dozen Roman-style pizzas are key attractions on the menu, the burrata plate assemblage mimicked the flavors of a cold pizza so we opted for the homemade fettuccine pasta ($22). Dotted with cherry tomatoes, the serving was big enough to feed the two of us. I have a love-hate relationship with pesto. If the ratio of ingredients is off, the sauce can be too oily or bitter or both. Johnny & Sanny’s gets the balance right. The basil tasted like it had been freshly pulverized, the color green coating every twisted flank of fettuccine.

Fellini’s ghost is unlikely to cross the Atlantic to visit Mountain View but the kitchen does manage to pay tribute to the “magic and pasta” maxim scribbled on the wall.

Johnny & Sanny’s, open Mon to Thurs 11:30am–2:30pm and 4:30pm–9:30pm (Fri until 10pm), Sat 11:30am–10pm and Sun 11:30am–9pm. 110 Castro St., Mountain View. 650.282.5251. johnnyandsannys.com.

The pastry case at the new Craftsman and Wolves location in Mountain View was empty by the time I arrived. To the right of it, seven brightly colored desserts remained on hand.

They were all fancifully composed in jewel tones on their temporary plates. A thin green smile (or mustache) made of a curved sliver of cucumber skin was held in place on the side of three strawberry cucumber pink “pills” ($14). A pansy—violet, purple or yellow—was centered on top of each one. The two blood orange cardamom clouds ($16) looked like extra material removed from Elmo’s furry coat. And one remaining yellowy mango prism cake ($16) glowed intensely in the corner of the drawer.

Since first opening in 2012, Craftsman and Wolves has been making surprising or challenging baked goods, depending on your goût de vivre. Guided by William Werner until 2019, and then by Lawrence Lai until his death earlier this year, ordinary chocolate croissants turned into triple chocolate croissants. Ham and cheese croissants transformed into havarti and mortadella ones with cornichon relish and vegetable confetti. Their Scotch egg, called “The Rebel Within,” became a signature item on the menu.

As the company continues to expand its presence in the South Bay, Sam Ceccotti is the current executive chef who’s continuing the bakery’s commitment to making sweet and savory innovations. After a tour of “the Den,” the central kitchen and distribution hub located in San Francisco for all of the Craftsman and Wolves’ locations, Ceccotti talked with me about her culinary approach. “I’m all about texture,” she said.

Lai hired Ceccotti after she passed a baking test. “I was asked to make a mousse cake and something laminated that showed my style and my flavors,” she recalled.

Right out of culinary school, she worked as the executive pastry chef at the Plumed Horse in Saratoga. Growing up, her paternal grandmother took her through the Wilton Cookbook, which demonstrates the myriad ways bakers can decorate their cakes.

After being drawn to the art of making sugar flowers and piping, she decided she wanted to become a pastry chef. “I would always experiment in my kitchen and loved to make pastries,” she said.

For the pink pill, she drew inspiration from a cocktail with the same flavors. Its central core is made with a cucumber lemon mousse and an elderflower sponge cake. It tastes like an ethereal mini-cheesecake. She coats the bottom of the cake with a layer of puffed rice, tinted pink from strawberries. The outside corresponds with a strawberry confiture inside, the pink coat shines like a fresh coat of nail polish.

Ceccotti said she started with the elderflower cake first. “The next element that I put on top of that will highlight or enhance it,” she explained. “It has the floral quality of the St. Germain [liqueur]. Since it’s summer, strawberries are so delicious—they’re bright red and sweet—and then the strawberry cucumber mousse adds a bit more acidity to balance out the sweetness.” The strawberry puffed rice complements all of these textures with a final pop of crunch.

There is a broadcast quality air of perfection about Craftsman and Wolves’ desserts. “Our products are not cheap, so we want to put the best product out for the price,” Ceccotti said. “If you’re going to give someone a cake that looks like it got bumped, we don’t want a culture of putting out something that’s less than ideal looking.”

To carry out this level of quality control, she trains her sous bakers to lead individual sections of the kitchen. “We all collaborate on everything. It’s always an ongoing thing, learning what works and what doesn’t work.”

With new bakeries opening every month in the Bay Area, Ceccotti understands the nature of retail competition. “In the city, if you’re not constantly changing and bringing a new product, people get bored of you,” she said. They’ll move on to the next hotly anticipated thing. “My job as a chef is to keep new creativity flowing and put it on the menu to keep everyone interested.”

Craftsman and Wolves, 400 San Antonio Rd., Mountain View. Open Monday–Friday 7:30am–2pm, Saturday–Sunday 8am–2pm. craftsman-wolves.com

In French, Catalan and Occitan, the Pyrenean chamois, a mountain goat, is also called an izard. Chef Stephanie Izard uses her last name as an inspirational theme at all seven—and soon to be eight—of her restaurants.

Goat empanadas and banana goat’s milk ice cream are on the menu at Valley Goat, the newest member of her restaurant group. But at the Sunnyvale location, visitors will be more aware of the many goat figurines hanging out in random locations throughout the dining room.

For anyone suffering from capro-phobia, there’s no need to fear. These are benign, pastel-colored goats wearing cheerful, cartoonish expressions, not at all like the diabolical one who starred in Robert Eggers’ film The Witch.

Valley Goat is part of the newly refurbished Treehouse Hotel campus (a former Sheraton). The pathways linking the parking lot to the rooms, the pool and the restaurant are all landscaped like the grounds of a Napa Valley spa or winery. The freeway onramp is a block away, as is a Google sign mounted on the top of a nearby office building, but all the lavender and native grasses induce a kind of forgetfulness about the exact location. Inside, the restaurant is filled with plant life. Garden light streams in through a series of tall windows.

While en route to the restaurant, Izard told me she was returning to her native Chicago that Sunday for a “Make-A-Wish” dinner before filming a new episode of Guy’s Grocery Games the following week. She said that Valley Goat’s menu, like the ones at her other restaurants, “celebrate flavors from all different parts of the world.” A potato crepe ($26) was inspired by “that crunch you get from bánh xèo, a Vietnamese crepe that’s made out of a rice flour batter.”

My friend affectionately called it a “hash brown omelette.” The potatoes are made the same way at the chef’s Little Goat Diner in Chicago. “We par-cooked the potatoes to a particular temperature—after a month of testing to see what temperature works best,” the chef explained. Then it’s grated, cooked on a griddle and folded in half.

As with many of Izard’s dishes, she adds several flourishes to finish them. The crepe is conceived of as a lettuce cup dish, with an assemblage of the following ingredients: Vietnamese sausage, fish sauce mayo, Thai sweet and sour sauce, pickled red onions and thin slices of red fresno chili. I ate the crunchy, perfected hash browns both in a leaf of lettuce and on their own but longed for a couple of poached eggs on the side. The chef said it’s one of her favorite dishes and is also featured on the brunch menu at her Girl & the Goat restaurant in Los Angeles.

Were there, perhaps, one too many sauces? Izard won Season 4 of Top Chef in 2008 and is also one of TV’s Iron Chefs but I did hear Tom Colicchio’s judgmental voice in my head when we were served a plate of roasted asparagus ($20). He’s always advising contestants to edit and pare down their busy dishes. I believe he’d agree with me on this one, but Kristen Kish and Gail Simmons might not. The asparagus got muffled beneath a canopy of fresh herbs. “Party nuts” and a golden beet giardiniera didn’t bring much flavor-wise to the rustic plating.

We also ate two sweet brunch dishes to complement the savory ones. Lately, kumquats are starting to appear on Bay Area menus. That’s right. I’m calling out a trend. This is going to be the summer of kumquats. They were nestled within a thick layer of oat streusel which topped a high stack of blueberry pancakes ($20). The pool of maple syrup at the bottom of the plate was said to be infused with espresso and lime although my taste buds weren’t subtle enough to detect those flavors. The pancakes themselves were delicious but the syrup should have been served separately, on the side. And I could have lived without the streusel, an extra distraction.

The last dish we ate was a cinnabiscuit ($17), an Izard original. It’s a cross between a cinnamon roll and a biscuit. The texture of which lands somewhere between a scone and a muffin. Photos of this hybrid beast of a pastry are saturated with a messy, melty frosting but the edges get nice and crisp. Izard, mercifully, is able to temper all that sugar with a “Chinese 12-spice,” another one of her very own concoctions.

Valley Goat is open daily for lunch/brunch (11am-2pm), bar & bites (2–4pm) and dinner (4–10pm). 1100 N Mathilda Ave, Sunnyvale. 408.900.9470. valleygoatsv.com.

They say that heaven is like TV / A perfect little world that doesn’t really need you.

—from Laurie Anderson’s song “Strange Angels”

Wes Anderson’s visual fetishes are carefully curated and pristinely displayed in every perfectly composed frame of The Phoenician Scheme. The catalogue of beautiful goods for viewers to covet is inexhaustible. There are telephones on private airplanes with enormous black plugs; mid-century department store apparel boxes repurposed to stow away paperwork; a crossbow; watches; eyeglasses; record players; hardcover books; hats, bow ties and ashtrays. Watching the film is like visiting a museum exhibit in which a lost world is preserved behind walls of glass.

The exquisite set designs are transportive. They conjure a “it was better before” world in which technology was solely inspired by Rube Goldberg machines. This retro-futurism is fun to look at but the people posed inside these dioramas are as lifeless as dolls. Anderson places them inside of a weightless plot whose elements have been pilfered from early 20th century young adult adventure novels. Even an actor as shrewd as Benicio del Toro looks stranded inside of his middle-aged suits. They thicken his torso and slow him down.

Del Toro plays Zsa-zsa Korda, a wealthy con man who’s mastered the art of the deal. After he survives a plane crash with a vestigial organ in hand, he recalls a vision of God (a heavily bearded Bill Murray) with a host of Heavenly angels. Forced to confront his own mortality, he draws up a will. Korda passes over his 11 sons’ inheritance in favor of daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Although the question of his filial paternity is brought up intermittently throughout the narrative and ultimately left in doubt.

Covered by a white novitiate’s habit, the principled Liesl arrives at Korda’s palazzo armed with a strict sense of faith and propriety. She and Korda, her father/not-father, both agree to a trial period to determine if, as companions and cohorts, they’re a match. As they embark upon a road trip to sell potential investors on Korda’s Phoenician Scheme—the details of which become irrelevant as soon as they’re explained—their respective traits slowly bleed into each other’s way of being.

Liesl insistently insinuates her conscience into Korda’s amoral sphere of business dealings. Whereas Korda’s loucher life materializes, bit by bit, onto Liesl’s person in the form of cricket-green leggings, a jewel-encrusted string of rosary beads, eye shadow, lipstick and her first pint of beer. Makeup is all that Anderson adds to the 24-year-old Threapleton’s appearance to sexualize her. The relationship between her and del Toro, who is 34 years her senior, remains platonic but the film essentially documents their connection, a de facto love story. Michael Cera’s presence as Bjørn, a Nordic entomologist, adds comic relief to the trio’s travels but he isn’t  plausible as a potential partner for Liesl, emotionally, spiritually or otherwise.

Threapleton is Kate Winslet’s daughter. When she delivers her lines archly, dryly and sullenly, she sounds like her mother’s double. Del Toro too seems to be channeling the cadences and timbre of Willem Dafoe’s voice (Dafoe appears in one of several scenes set in Bill Murray’s Heaven). This aural landscape is disorienting because it gives the impression that the movie has been dubbed into English, compounding the artifice of Anderson’s universe.

While Threapleton grounds Liesl, and the film, with a stolid backbone, her presence suggested the possibility of a more robust and relatable Phoenician Scheme. One in which Winslet stars as del Toro’s equal. But Anderson portrays adults interacting with adults through a detached adolescent’s lens. Human sexuality remains PG-rated, Spielbergian, yet to be realized. Men yell at and over each other to accomplish their nefarious negotiations but the menace is either comical or undercooked. Nothing is at stake for viewers when the characters don’t suffer from any actual consequences. In this screenplay, women—and not talented ingénues—are absent players, reduced down to off-screen anecdotes.

The Phoenician Scheme’s charm relies on an expensive array of lacquered surfaces. For a couple of hours, the audience can step inside Anderson’s alternate, slowly fading, sweet-natured reality. But it’s a playground that’s so far removed from ordinary life, only movie stars and their satellites have access to it. The director has created an enviable world on screen but it’s also an alienating one. I walked out of the theater feeling the way that Mia Farrow’s character does at the end of  The Purple Rose of Cairo, cast out of a shimmering mirage of paradise.

Opens locally June 6 at AMC theaters in San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale; Cinemark theaters in Milpitas, Mountain View and San Jose; and Landmark’s Aquarius Theater in Palo Alto.

As teenagers, we used to end up at Denny’s late at night. After wasting the summer nights away, we’d order shakes and fries and pancakes. Stimulated by high school parties and close encounters with our crushes, we’d pool a pile of bills and coins on the table before heading back to the isolation of our cold suburban bedrooms.

This was a starting point, when we were making the transition from adolescence to young adulthood. Defying common sense, we borrowed cars, ate out in public at formerly forbidden hours and gossipped about our friends and enemies in order to understand them. We were both earnest and playacting in our fumbling efforts to grow up.

Unlike many of my more focused peers, as a 16-year-old I had a hard time imagining the future and lacked the maturity to plan ahead. Sitting under the fluorescent lights in Denny’s red booths, I didn’t know that, while the outside circumstances of my life would change, in the decades that followed I would continue to connect with friends and seek out respites from reality with them in “third places.” Restaurants that stay open beyond the initial buzz cast a spell on diners. Whether the experience is undercooked, medium or well done, the recurring question is, will we be charmed enough to return?

By any number of leaps and bounds, The Pressroom is posher than the national chain of Denny’s restaurants that populate forlorn landscapes across the country. The Pressroom’s owners have created an upscale diner that’s an infinitely more sophisticated equivalent for adults. Decked out in teal, gold and green, the active dining room is animated by staff members who’ve been trained to be welcoming and attentive.

From the circle of high stools surrounding the bar to the long rows of booths and tables, the décor is luxe and comfortable, a winning combination. Customers will want to hang out for leisurely conversations over meals and drinks. Bored teenagers have the option of sneaking away from family occasions to check out the goings-on in San Pedro Square one block away.

The Pressroom moved into the ground floor of the Lyndon Building, the former Times-Mercury headquarters. The nod to newsroom themes shows up in subtle ways throughout the restaurant. A collage reproduces newsprint as wallpaper; cocktail napkins read, “Extra! Extra!”; and, there’s a sign inside the main dining room—Bar Mercury—which leads to a separate, interior bar. Mixologists there make a “Smash or Pass” vodka cocktail served in a golden owl-shaped vessel that already is a frequent visitor on social media feeds.

The food is set squarely in familiar American territory with occasional, but minimal, foreign culinary influences. No restaurant nowadays creates such a menu without including a cobb salad ($19), soup of the day ($12) or a cheeseburger ($26). Served on a sesame brioche bun, the “prime burger,” with a basket of crispy fries, is a satisfying plate of food. Big, but not giant, it’s scrumptious well-above-average bar food.

At lunchtime, the kitchen happened to be out of a fried artichoke starter ($20). Reluctantly, we ordered crispy brussels sprouts ($17) instead. In a refrain I’ve repeated far too often, I got tired of the brussels sprouts appetizer trend over a decade ago. But roasted cauliflower ($17) was an even less desirable option. In this case, I am happy to report the ubiquitous balsamic glaze didn’t create a soggy mess of greens. Dusting the sprouts with parmesan was also a nice touch but didn’t dislodge my longing for that elusive artichoke.

What didn’t work was a Thai salad ($20). Apart from the misleading description, which announced a long list of mostly absent vegetables, the spring mix of lettuces had been pre-dressed ages before it was brought to the table. Under the weight of the ginger-lime vinaigrette, the spring mix was wilted down and wet. We decided that, in comparison, Mendocino Farms’ Thai mango salad ($15.75) makes a better version of a similar dish.

Southern influences appeared on the menu in the form of beignets, fried chicken and another photo-friendly dessert, bread pudding ($14). Topped with ice cream and then crowned with a buñuelo, a fried doughnut-like fritter blanketed in powdered sugar, it’s one way to end the meal on a very, very, very sweet note.

The Pressroom, open Mon-Wed 11am-9pm, Thu-Fri 11am-10pm, Sat 10am-3pm and 5-9pm, Sun 10am-3pm and 5-8pm. 189 W. Santa Clara St., San Jose. pressroomsj.com

Kambui Olujimi’s current exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art is fueled by one of the artist’s recurring dreams. He runs faster and faster until, “I approach the speed of light, my body starts to dematerialize and tear apart into this beam of light.”

In each of the large-scale watercolor and ink paintings on view in his North Star exhibit, bodies, not just Olujimi’s, float in a human-friendly, breathable outer space. It mustn’t be cold in this imaginary place because nobody’s clothed.

The entire gallery is covered in a comforting cobalt blue mural. Spectral motifs lift up and out of the paintings and onto the walls above their frames. Wandering through the gallery is a submersive experience. The outer space painted from Olujimi’s dream life resembles an ocean, or oceanic states of mind, as much as it does a map of his internal cosmos.

When he first dreamed about running and speeding into space, Olujimi writes that it was terrifying. “I’d feel myself getting hot, tearing apart one atom at a time. But these days when I have it, I just love it.”

Central to the series is a cadre of acrobatic bodies whose motions are slowed down to the pace of meandering sleepwalkers. Without gravity, their limbs and torsos overlap and somersault but in a relaxed, slow-motion drift rather than as a group of determined athletes racing to get to a finish line.

While the dark backgrounds within each painting remain in the same tonal register, Olujimi also subtly incorporates pale violets, yellows and oranges. Collectively the color scheme forms a coherent whole. One that the artist describes as “the black that birthed us.” The canvases are also populated with stars and tendrils and scintillating clouds of cosmic dust.

As the bodies circle and turn upside down and back again, their outlines trace out new constellations. In dreams, Olujimi and his cohorts companionably expand into the territory taken up for centuries by ancient Grecian myths. Their gymnastic poses also appear to be inspired by what the artist gleaned from his video installation North of Never. He arranged a parabolic flight for a group of Black artists and filmed them as they experienced weightlessness.

A note from the exhibit explains that the feeling of weightlessness Olujimi records and paints “is the innate state of freedom from the everyday violence of anti-Black racism and entrenched representational politics.” All those naked bodies are tumbling about and gently colliding on an astral plane that’s removed from the confines of this planet and the routine cruelty of its judgmental inhabitants.

Kambui Olujimi: North Star is now on view at the San José Museum of Art through June 1. Open Thu 4–9pm, Fri 11am–9pm, Sat–Sun 11am–6pm. 110 South Market St., San José. sjmusart.org.