Best norcal foodie towns series#

Somehow, though, this culinary identity gets left out of the broader, tech-heavy narrative of Silicon Valley. Indeed, if San Jose has any distinguishing characteristic, it’s that it is, far and away, the Bay Area’s greatest immigrant food city. When an outpost of the elusive Taiwanese xiao long bao chain Din Tai Fung finally came to Northern California, it almost goes without saying where it opened: a mall in San Jose. It has not one but two H-Marts amid a sea of superlative ethnic supermarkets.

San Jose is home to the only Somali restaurant in the entire Bay Area. It’s where you’ve had the best Ethiopian meal you’d ever eaten in the Bay Area. It’s your early morning weekend pho destination when you don’t want to settle for some spot in Oakland or San Francisco that won’t even be 30 percent as satisfying. It’s where you go, rush hour traffic be damned, if you want to score an actually good bowl of ramen. But beyond that, a place of culture? And, more to the point, a destination-worthy dining scene?īut in the circles I run in-which is to say heavily Asian American and immigrant-San Jose has always held a different meaning. In the eye of a certain beholder, the sprawling South Bay city is just a bland tech suburb-the “ Capital of Silicon Valley ,” sure. Hen I talk about how I’d rather eat in San Jose than almost anywhere else in the Bay Area, I tend to get a lot of blank stares.

A new installment will post each weekday from Oct.

Best norcal foodie towns series#

KQED's San Jose: The Bay Area's Great Immigrant Food City is a series of stories exploring San Jose's wonderfully diverse immigrant food scene.