{"id":20178771,"date":"2024-12-31T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-31T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.metrosiliconvalley.com\/?p=20178771"},"modified":"2024-12-30T23:05:50","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T07:05:50","slug":"my-back-alleys-ramblings-on-restaurants-dominated-in-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.metrosiliconvalley.com\/my-back-alleys-ramblings-on-restaurants-dominated-in-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"My Back Alleys: Ramblings on Restaurants Dominated in 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As of today, 2024 is out the door. Just as my friends contemplate the previous year in various ways throughout these pages, the columnist also needs to recap his most memorable screeds of 2024, with gratitude in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Above all else, San Jose is a landscape of neighborhoods. For many of us, it\u2019s also a landscape of memory. Visual artists explore these themes all the time. For the moment, I only have words. And the words aren\u2019t limited to San Jose proper. The whole valley endures. It changes and it warps. So does memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I look back through a year\u2019s worth of those memories\u2014or memories of the memories I covered on this page\u2014restaurants played a larger role in 2024 than they normally did, which might explain why restaurant PR people buried me with emails more than they normally did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lahori on East Santa Clara Street, for example, will not appear in luxury travel magazines, yet it became a headquarters for me to contemplate intergenerational trauma from the Partition of India and how that city, Lahore, was part of India before it was part of Pakistan. The faded Marco Polo poster in front of the Mexico Theater across the street only added to the exploratory nature of that column.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was more. Angelou\u2019s Taqueria reopened in the former Flying Pig Pub location, although the fireplace from 20 years ago wasn\u2019t there anymore. Teske\u2019s Germania landed on an episode of Check Please! Bay Area<\/em>, so we all sat there and watched the show at Teske\u2019s. A new place, Eos & Nyx, probably will be in luxury travel magazines. The people who read those publications won\u2019t care about the botched UA Theater that used to occupy the building. But I did care so that\u2019s what I wrote about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I carried on and on, this year, about restaurants. In two separate yet related journeys, the ghost of food writer Joe Izzo took me to Mark\u2019s Hot Dogs and Super Taqueria, both killer local joints he wrote up decades ago. Izzo\u2019s restaurant reviews were not just restaurant reviews. They were history lessons from the grave. I was grateful for the opportunity to carry on the torch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Plate<\/a>
A stop at Zareen\u2019s became part of a pilgrimage to Palo Alto, haunted by the ghost of Jerry Garcia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Even when I wasn\u2019t merging the food landscape with the spirits of the physical landscape, the memories just kept on coming. I wrote screeds about specific roads, pockets or neighborhoods, maybe even just intersections, and the ways those locales have evolved over the years, including the inseparability of those evolutions from the columnist\u2019s own evolution. For me, this is what makes San Jose fun. Same with Palo Alto and Los Gatos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of Palo Alto, the ghost of the Grateful Dead\u2019s Jerry Garcia took me to a few different places in a few different columns. With the abandoned Antonio\u2019s Nut House on California Avenue providing the bass line, I harmonized the rest of the column with Jerry\u2019s whereabouts on that same street 60 years earlier. Same with Menlo Park, where the Dead first performed as the Warlocks at Magoo\u2019s Pizza. In both cases, city officials are actually proud of local rock history, unlike San Jose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were even columns about literature. The Center for Literary Arts at SJSU hosted novelist Percival Everett, whose book The Trees<\/em> listed all the people who\u2019d ever been lynched in the US, including Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes\u2014strung up in St. James Park after being jailed for the 1933 murder of Brooke Hart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following Everett\u2019s author appearance, I pointed to Thurmond and Holmes in his book and told Everett those two were lynched right down the street, since he wasn\u2019t aware of the connection. The fact that we were now sitting at Hammer Theatre, just a few blocks from where the crime unfolded, was mind-blowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI love those kind of stories,\u201d Everett told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what did I learn this year? People and places remain alive as long as someone else remembers them, even if the memories aren\u2019t always squeaky clean. When one transforms the memories into poetry, they will resonate more, at least according to the responses that appeared on the letters page all year long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this upcoming year, feel free to send me your memories. Twelve months from now, I\u2019m looking forward to remembering 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2024 is out the door, and this columnist needs to recap his most memorable screeds of 2024, with gratitude in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14789,"featured_media":20178775,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_expiration-date-status":"","_expiration-date":0,"_expiration-date-type":"","_expiration-date-categories":[],"_expiration-date-options":[]},"categories":[1877],"tags":[15007,18086,3575,15859,15923,10772,840],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n