Wednesday Wishlist: Michelin Star Restaurants (2013 Edition)

I do this rant every year and will continue to do so until San Jose nabs a Michelin star restaurant. For the non-foodies out there, a Michelin star represents one of the highest achievements and forms of recognition that a restaurant can get. There are three different rankings:

One Star - A very good restaurant in its category with cuisine prepared to a consistently high standard. A good place to stop on your journey.
Two Stars - Excellent cuisine, skillfully and carefully crafted dishes of outstanding quality. Worth a detour.
Three Stars - Exceptional cuisine with distinctive dishes and superlative ingredients. Worth a special journey.

I have gone ahead and made a Google doc listing all of the 2013 Bay Area Michelin star recipients as well as the recipients for each year since Bay Area restaurants started being evaluated in 2007. This data was surprisingly not that easy to aggregate since it was hard to find the lists of early recipients. If you open the doc, you will also notice a Stats tab on the bottom that shows how things have evolved over the years.

In 2007 the Bay Area received a total of 34 stars across 28 restaurants. Only 2 restaurants were in the South Bay (7% of the total). For 2013, the Bay Area received 52 stars across 42 restaurants and 5 were in the South Bay (12%). So there is definitely some improvement for the region as a whole, but unfortunately there is yet to be a single San Jose recipient. I have been to quite a few on the list below (13 of them in fact), and there are at least two San Jose restaurants that should definitely be there. Le Papillion and La Foret, which are sister restaurants and offer phenomenal food and service equal to many of the places on the list. I also have high hopes that new aspiring chefs will decide to open up restaurants Downtown that may one day qualify for a star.

You can check out the full Google doc here. The South Bay restaurants are highlighted in yellow and the Peninsula restaurants in northern Silicon Valley are highlighted in blue.

P.S. Hat tip to All Spice in San Mateo for being the first Indian restaurant to make the cut in the US as far as I know.

New Craft Beer Tasting Lounge Opening Downtown!

I have a feeling that the craft beer scene is about to explode Downtown. The Original Gravity House and Good Karma are going to have some company very soon.

Sukhjeev Singh is the owner of Bobby's Liquors on El Camino, which features an insane collection of craft brews. He's about to take things to the next level by opening up a tasting lounge called ISO: Beers (In Search Of Beers). With 1,756 sqft, he'll have enough room for 50-60 tap handles, storage for 2,000 bottled beers, comfortable sofas, and of course some tables. This is someone that really knows his beers, so I can't wait to see how this turns out.

ISO: Beers is going to be located at 81 East Santa Clara Street, near 4th Street Pizza and City Hall.

Source: Anonymous Poster, Examiner

San Jose Looking for $1B in NEW Investment

Major Chuck Reed has set a goal to nab $1B worth of new projects over the next 6 months. This will help accelerate job growth as well as generate new revenues for the city. To help achieve this he is putting together a committee to evaluate and monitor economic competitiveness and is expediting planning and building permitting for high-rise residential, office, R&D, campus projects, and retail projects that are larger than 200,000 sqft.

Some good news is that there is already a billion dollars worth of development in the queue:

• 3 million sqft of office/R&D
• 800 high-rise residential units
• 600,000 sqft of retail

Everything already in the pipeline will generate 10,000 jobs and $9M in annual revenue for San Jose.

In addition, to fill up vacant space in Downtown San Jose the city is planning to waive permitting fees and business licensing fees for properties where landlords are willing to discount rates to new lessees for a one year period. These incentives would apply to tech startups, retail stores, or restaurants.

Source: SVBJ

Wake up, fans! The lockout is over, and the Sharks are back!

“Wake up!  Wake up!”  I texted to some of my fellow Sharks fans.  “The lockout is ended!  That Sharks will have a season this year!”

The collective bargaining agreement negotiations finally came to a conclusion around 3AM Pacific Time, and the news spread like wildfire over Twitter and other social media sites.  Many remained hopeful a deal would be made due to the severity of the situation.  If no deal could have been made, the season was likely going to be cancelled.  It was the last opportunity.

To assist with the negotiations process as the time wound down, a federal mediator by the name of Scot Beckenbaugh was brought in.  Many believe his assistance saved the season, due to the high contention between the two sides of the negotiating table: Gary Bettman, Commissioner of the NHL, and Donald Fehr, the executive director of the players’ union, the National Hockey League Players Association (NHLPA).  The negotiations continually fell through primarily due to the players’ insistence they did not want their pay and benefits cut and the league’s insistence they implement lower salary percentage rates due to most owners losing money.

Even though hockey fans in general may be delighted to see there will be a season, many fans feel like they’ve been cheated.  There were a good number of players voicing their displeasure with the potential of having their salaries cut (and even threatening to stay with their professional level teams abroad), the players union ready and willing to cancel the season, and the league not providing realistic agreements to the table and not honoring existing contracts.  As we all love our home teams and support them through all kinds of media, and by purchasing tickets and merchandise, how should the fans feel when the players and owners are carelessly toss aside the fans because some think they’re not making enough?

With that said, however, there were a healthy amount of players communicating to fans using social media apologizing for how the situation has turned out and how they’re going to “play their hearts out” for the fans if the season is allowed to continue.  (We can only hope they deliver now.)

The new collective bargaining agreement has a ten year life (although there’s a potential “opt out” in eight years), with an eventual salary cap set between $44 million and $64.3 million.  The salaries in individual contracts cannot vary more than 35% year to year, and the final year cannot be more than 50% of the highest year.  (This acts to prevent some of the high front loaded contracts seen in the previous years, such as the contracts the Minnesota Wild signed with Zach Parise and Ryan Suter.)

Another important statistic, the revenue sharing percentage between the owners and the players, is now a 50-50 split, instead of the previous 57-43 split, in favor of the players.

As for the Sharks’ season, if play begins on January 15^th, which it very well should, the season will be 50 games long (instead of the full 82), although it is possible for play to continue a bit later, which would then result in a 48-game season.

Either way, we will have hockey this year, which means there will be plenty of opportunities to cheer on our Sharks.  Most importantly, however, is the continuation of the season puts the Stanley Cup back into play.

LET’S GO SHARKS!

Breaking: NHL Lockout is Over, Sharks Season is Coming After All!

More info to come soon from our Sharks fanatic, Jarrod!

Source: The Merc

Boston Private Bank Opening in Downtown San Jose

Another bank is coming Downtown, although most of us won't casually be walking into this one. Boston Private Bank focuses mainly on wealth management, wealth advisory and trust services, commercial lending, and private banking. The new branch is scheduled to open this quarter at 60 S. Market Street, and it will be the first location in San Jose. They already have other Bay Area locations in Palo Alto, Los Altos, Burlingame, and San Francisco. Tenant improvements are happening as we speak and I'm sure we'll all look forward to having another business Downtown.

Source: SVBJ

Saturday Stats: SJC Has the Top On-Time Performance in California

Since we're just days away from getting an international direct flight to Tokyo, I figured that this would be a good week to do an airport related Saturday stat. Last year, San Jose International was ranked as having the best on-time performance in California. This shouldn't be a huge surprise given our good weather, a streamlined airport layout, and advanced systems for handling luggage. Heck, the last few flights I have taken out of SJC ended up arriving early.

On the other side of the Bay, SFO came in dead last in terms of on-time performance for California airports.

In terms of all medium to large airports in the US, San Jose ranked 4th in on-time performance, Oakland claimed the 17th spot, Sacramento took 20th, and SFO ranked 64th. 65 airports were evaluated.

Source: SiliconBeat

Silicon Valley in the Media

For all of Silicon Valley's fame and prominence in the international business community, we have rarely been featured in the entertainment scene. So many TV shows and movies are set in New York, LA, SF, and Chicago... but Silicon Valley rarely if ever is featured even as a background location. The one exception would be the 1985 bond movie A View to a Kill, where the main plot was to prevent the annihilation of Silicon Valley. And look at what Silicon Valley was portrayed as in that movie below.



Well, things are about to change. Several new TV shows and movies are coming out where Silicon Valley is at the very least a supporting role. This actually started a couple months ago with the show Start-Ups: Silicon Valley. While I did enjoy seeing at least a dozen shots of San Jose throughout the show's 8 episode run, for the most part the show was considered a failure by the media. I'm not going to shed too many tears since I don't think it accurately portrayed Silicon Valley (and most of it was shot in SF). You can read the postmortem at SiliconBeat.

Now for what's coming up. HBO has just green-lighted a live action sitcom series called "Silicon Valley." This is a "single camera" dark comedy by Mike Judge, the creator of Office Space, King of the Hill, and Beavis and Butthead. Here is how the show is described: "Silicon Valley is set in the high tech gold rush of modern Silicon Valley, where the people most qualified to succeed are the least capable of handling success." Sounds very promising. For more info on this one check out Deadline Hollywood.

Next up is a feature film called the Internship. This movie has two big-name stars, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, as a couple of 40-something salesmen who get laid off and decide to restart their careers at Google. Part of the movie is even shot onsite at Google's HQ in Mountain View. More info on this one is available at Marketing Land.



Last one for now is a new show by Simon Cowell and Will.i.am called X Factor for Tech. They are hunting for the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerburg. The producers are claiming that this show will generate a lot of jobs and give youth a platform to express themselves using science and mathematics. While this show is not yet confirmed to take place in Silicon Valley, it will no doubt fuel more media interest to the region which is king of entrepreneurship and technology. More info over at Venturebeat.



I'm sure this is only the tip of the iceberg. If any of these are successful, you can be sure that there will be more Silicon Valley-oriented shows to follow.