Last week, Table D1 at Home Eat raised the ghosts in at least four different languages, inspired by the ever-shifting landscape of downtown San Jose.
As I slithered into the gargantuan Chinese restaurant at Fourth and San Fernando, NVIDIA conference attendees surrounded me. All of them carried designer laptop backpacks and wore lanyards on lime green necklaces. At Table D1, I ordered an $11.75 Kung Pao Chicken Combo, made to order and fantastic.
Normally the flâneur who emerges to narrate this column remains in perpetual motion. That’s the point. In the style of the French fin de siècle era, he navigates the urban ruins and finds the overlapping points between history and everyday life. Not this time. Instead, I just sat there.
First of all, it was weird not seeing the drunks who normally commandeered the bar, when this same spot was Flames for several years. I could almost see their ghosts, playing air guitar while hammered on mimosas.
Home Eat is a much better idea for this corner. When I walked in, I immediately noticed the robot roaming the floor with a plate of food. The robot wasn’t replacing the servers, of which there remained plenty. It just provided an alternative method of delivery. The NVIDIA folks, as you’d expect, were just plain giddy over a robot delivering their beef broccoli.
Upon arrival, I was immediately escorted to table D1, right at the window along San Fernando. The place was jammed, so the servers were running around everywhere, and I was instructed to scan the QR code on the table and order from my phone, which only took a few seconds. The sheer volume of items on the menu was overwhelming. I scrolled down, and down, and down, through items like “Cumin Lamb,” “Spicy Duck Necks,” “Grandma Curry Wok” and “Explosive Chili Pepper Chicken.”
It was this experience, scrolling through a hundred choices, that brought back even older ghosts because 35 years ago, this exact spot, this very corner, was one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in San Jose history, a legendary place called Quoc Te.
Quoc Te originally opened in 1983 and quickly became a main lunch and dinner hangout for SJSU faculty and staff. If reporters wanted to prowl for campus gossip, they’d show up at Quoc Te, which was also the only place downtown open until 3am on Fridays and Saturdays.
The menu included more than 100 items, most of which were about five bucks. In 1986, a Merc reporter wrote: “The voluminous menus are like James Michener novels of Vietnamese cuisine.”
It was true. When I started at San Jose State a few years later, we often wound up at Quoc Te. There were pages and pages of dishes I had never seen, as a lonely student. I remember scanning the menu, completely ecstatic. At the time, Downtown San Jose was a boring wasteland where most restaurants closed at 9pm. Except for bookstores, one used record shop, the Camera Cinemas and a few rock clubs, there was nothing to do. The exotic menu at Quoc Te was my hall pass to get out. Plus, a bottle of Budweiser was something like $1.75. The Heinekens were only a little bit more—perfect for drunk students and faculty.
By the early ’90s, vibrant Vietnamese businesses dominated the entire neighborhood around SJSU and where City Hall now sits: $1 sandwich joints, noodle shops, pleasantly seedy pool halls and various cafes inspired by both French and Vietnamese stylings. It was fantastic. San Francisco Focus even ranked Quoc Te as the “best Vietnamese restaurant in the Western world.” At a time when local politicians were repeatedly trying and failing to “put us on the map,” businesses launched by Vietnamese refugees were already doing that.
Eventually, after a high-profile divorce and spats between the owning partners, Quoc Te closed its doors in 1993 and relocated to Sunnyvale. The corner of Fourth and San Fernando was never the same.
Quoc Te remained in the shadows as I devoured my food at Home Eat. With ghosts in Vietnamese, French, Chinese and even English stalking the landscape, I didn’t need to move in my normal flâneur fashion. I stayed put. Look for me at table D1 from now on.
