Palo Alto Restaurant Reviews

Palo Alto Restaurants | Palo Alto Restaurant Reviews

From the culinary art of Google’s former chef to international fusion of all stripes, Palo Alto’s dining scene mirrors the innovation and diversity for which Silicon Valley is famous. Here are Metro Silicon Valley’s food editor Stett Holbrook’s picks for the essential spots.

Calafia Café and Market A Go-Go
858 El Camino Real, Palo Alto CA 94305; Tel. 650.322.9200
Calafia Cafe and Market A Go-Go combines elements of the fast-food world and the labor-intensive slow cooking of more high-end restaurants. Owned by former Google chef Charlie Ayers, Calafia offers “slow food fast”—good-to-eat and good-for-you food that he hopes will appeal to Silicon Valley’s frenetic, too-busy-to-eat pace of life. Ayers says there are people working in the kitchen 22 hours a day because they make everything themselves from bread to soda pop to ketchup. The food is affordable and often quite good. Calafia’s menu contains tacos, rice bowls and noodle dishes made with premium, often organic, ingredients. The rest of the menu is a combination of comfort food like turkey meat loaf and short ribs, quick bites and vegetable-driven dishes like veggie burgers, stir-fried greens and fresh salads. The dining room is warm and inviting and in full view of the open kitchen.

Coconut's
642 Ramona St., Palo Alto CA 94301; Tel. 650.329.9533
Chef Robert Simpson is Silicon Valley's culinary ambassador for Jamaica and the Caribbean at large. When he opened Back A Yard in Menlo Park three years ago, it quickly became one of the Bay Area's premier outposts of Jamaican cooking. No one cared much about the restaurant's spare appearance, scarce seating or dodgy location. Now, Simpson has gone upmarket with a second restaurant in downtown Palo Alto. The menu is similar to Back A Yard, minus the fried chicken. But where the Menlo Park restaurant is mainly a take-out place that doesn't offer beer or wine, Coconuts is an upscale, sit-down place complete with full bar and outdoor patio. The colorful, Caribbean- and ocean-inspired art and soft breeze blowing through the open windows make the dining room a cool place to be. Even though Coconuts caters to a different clientele, Simpson deserves credit for staying true to his mission: real Jamaican food.

Coupa Café
538 Ramona St. Palo Alto CA 94301; Tel. 650.322.6872
Downtown Palo Alto has more than its share of cafes. University Avenue and its side-street environs offer a multitude of choices for all your caffeine, pastry and light-bite needs. But Coupa Cafe stands apart. Owners Nancy and Jean Paul Coupal have given their cafe a distinct Venezuelan flavor. The Coupals live in Venezuela, where they run a coffee-roasting business and a cafe in Caracas. While Venezuela is best known for its oil production and resilient populist president Hugo Chavez, Nancy Coupal focuses attention on the country's premium coffee and chocolate. Coupa Cafe's chocolate products come from Chuao Chocolatier, a premium Venezuelan chocolate producer. Along with the chocolate and coffee, arepas are the other stars at Coupa Cafe. Arepas are Venezuela's national snack. Little bigger than a White Castle hamburger, arepas are white-corn griddle cakes with a crispy exterior and a moist, grits-like interior. Slit in half, they make a perfect container for various savory fillings. They're eaten between meals and as late-night snacks on the streets of Caracas.

Evvia Estiatorio
420 Emerson St., Palo Alto CA 94301; Tel. 650.326.0983
Everybody seems to be having a great time here—most of them dining family-style in large tables, sharing huge plates of food. Generosity, forward flavors and plenty of laughter. And that's Evvia's secret. Suddenly you feel that you've turned a corner and entered a taverna on Paros—only with an unmistakable Bay Area sophistication. Everything on this menu appeals; little plates of feta and olives, pita and skordalia, the creamy potato and garlic spread of Greece. Pasta and moussaka, grilled meats and chops. There is nothing precious or timid about this food.
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Joya
339 University Ave., Palo Alto CA 94301; Tel. 650.853.9800
Joya has good looks to spare. It’s hard to believe the place was once a bank—it reportedly took two weeks just to remove the vault. The restaurant has undergone a top-to-bottom remodel and has been done up in a cool, modern style with horizontal wood panels, exposed steel and a glassed-in wine cellar featuring selections from the eclectic wine list. The wall of windows at the front of the restaurant can be pulled back to open to the sidewalk, perfect for warm afternoons. In addition to the dining room, there’s an appealing lounge, a cozy bar and space for private parties. It’s easily one of University’s Avenue’s best-looking restaurants. Chef Fabrice Roux has created a well-priced menu of “modern Latin cuisine” that pulls in equal measures from Spain and the New World. On the plate, the food ranges from the magnificent to the mediocre. Tapas make up more than half the menu, and there are plenty of winners. From the list of entrees the Cuban spiced pork tenderloin is a standout.
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Junnoon
150 University Ave., Palo Alto CA 94301; Tel. 650.329.9644
Junnoon is not an Indian fusion restaurant. That’s what our server told us soon after we sat down. She described the food as eclectic modern Indian food, the kind one might get at an upscale restaurant in Bangalore or Mumbai. Consulting chef Floyd Cardoz, best known for his high-concept Indian restaurant Tabla in New York City, has teamed up with other chefs at Junnoon who have similar experience with high-end Indian restaurants in New York City, Washington, D.C., and London. In spite of the colorful fabric that hangs over the windows, Junnoon has a muted, earthy feel that’s cool and comforting.
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Kan Zeman
274 University Ave., Palo Alto CA 94301; Tel. 650.328.5245
Kan Zeman has managed to create a sexy niche of ancient Lebanese, Greek and Turkish cuisine. Kan Zeman has it all: wonderful food freshly minted by a crafty kitchen, life-enhancing ambience and a sense of the festive that just can't be faked. Specialty items include dishes like magluba--chicken, special rice mixed with eggplant and cauliflower, topped with roasted pine nuts, almonds and manssaf, a traditional Jordanian lamb shank dish cooked in a special yogurt sauce and served on top of a lavash bread and rice. Belly dancing on Friday and Saturday nights.

Mantra
632 Emerson St., Palo Alto CA 94301; Tel. 650.322.3500
Mantra serves inventive French and American food that speaks with a moderate Indian accent. This isn’t fusion, but rather a subtler blend of surprisingly compatible flavors and techniques. Walk into Mantra and it’s hard not be seduced by its dark and moody good looks. The long black bar gleams like polished marble. Bass-heavy electronic music pulsates through the lounge as black-clad servers dart about. In the dining room, water gurgles from a wall-mounted fountain and colorful modern Indian art dangles from thin cables below the lofty ceiling.
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Oaxacan Kitchen
2323 Birch St., Palo Alto CA 94306; Tel. 650.321.8003
In a land of heavy-on-the-sour-cream, overcheesed Mexican-American food, the Oaxacan Kitchen offers a refreshing, if unfamiliar, side trip into one of Mexico’s greatest and yet least appreciated regional cuisines. There are tacos and tortas, but also an array of Oaxacan street snacks seldom seen in these parts. My favorite is the molotes, tubes of masa filled with potatoes and chorizo and topped with a creamy—delicate, even—black bean purée and queso fresco, salsa and guacamole. The masa is lightly fried and the interior is moist and flavorful. It quickly turns into a delicious mess. Tlayudas ($8.50) are another Oaxacan classic that is well done here. The dish consists of a thick sole of masa that’s crispy on the outside and still moist inside and topped with the same goodies as the molotes, but served with a choice of poached chicken or grilled steak. It’s safe to say this ain’t your typical sombrero-on-the-wall taqueria.

Quattro Restaurant and Bar
2050 University Ave., Palo Alto CA 94303; Tel. 650.470.2889
Quattro Restaurant and Bar brings high-style, impeccably sourced Italian cuisine to the South Bay, an area that has about as many great Italian restaurants as it does snow days. OK, so Quattro is located in the gleaming Four Seasons hotel and it feels more PA than EPA. It’s on the west side of Highway 101 and its glass tower, flowing fountains and late-model luxury cars purring out of the parking garage say money and power and not the grit many people conjure up when they think of East Palo Alto. Chef Alessandro Cartumini has created a big, almost-too-long menu of modern edged Italian food full of surprises and deliciousness.
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Shokolaat
516 University Ave., Palo Alto CA 94301; Tel. 650.289.0719
Situated at the lower end of restaurant-dense University Avenue, this one is easy to miss; it’s set back off the street behind a 35-seat patio that is starkly empty in these chilly months of winter. Shokolaat isn’t giant in size, but the ambition and skill of the kitchen are big. The restaurant is a partnership between husband and wife duo Shekoh Moossavi and Mark Ainsworth. The two once owned Saratoga’s Restaurant Gervais and both boast impressive culinary pedigrees. The open kitchen and the pastry display counter are as gleaming and clean as a laboratory, which would be a fitting setting for Moossavi’s technically precise, modern European cooking.
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Reposado
236 Hamilton Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94301; Tel. 650.833.3151
Reposado opened in the cavernous space formerly occupied by Cafe Verona. Rob Fischer, owner of the Palo Alto Creamery in downtown Palo Alto and the Stanford Shopping Center, is the man behind the restaurant, and it is new territory for him. The restaurant offers modern, refined Mexican food served in a lively setting. The menu wisely takes classics of Mexican cuisine and several lesser-known dishes and gives them a smart, urbane spin. While some might quibble with the downtown flourishes and fancy ingredients, I think they make sense. For an upscale "ethnic" restaurant like Reposado, there's a danger in offering food that's too traditional, because chances are there is a mom-and-pop joint in a lower-rent neighborhood that serves food that's just as good for a lot less money.

Tamarine
546 University Ave., Palo Alto CA 94301; Tel. 650.325.8500
Tamarine is one of the Bay Area’s exemplar’s of modern Vietnamese food as imagined by the duo of Anne Le and executive chef Tammy Huynh. The restaurant’s sleek, modern and stylish lines match the food. The menu is built around small plate dishes and served family style to invite sharing. Standouts include coriander lamb meatballs, crab and garlic glass noodles, kaffir lime snapper and kumquat glazed chicken with roasted cauliflower. The top-rate, contemporary Vietnamese artwork hanging on the wall adds to the restaurant’s appeal.
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The Counter
369 California Ave., Palo Alto CA 94306; Tel. 650.321.3900
The Counter takes the quintessential American burger and turns up the Americanness by letting diners choose from dozens of options to build a custom burger. We Americans love our burgers almost as much as we love our freedom of choice. Combine the two under one roof and you’ve got a winner. The multitude of patty choices, buns, toppings, cheeses and sauces add up to more than 312,000 different combinations. To order, simply tick off choices from a clipboard-mounted order form and hand it to your server. Interestingly, there’s no box to check for desired doneness. All burgers are cooked medium unless you tell your server otherwise. Add a full bar, industrial chic décor, hip music and a young staff with cool T-shirts, and it’s easy to see why the Counter has struck such a chord.

Three Seasons
518 Bryant St., Palo Alto CA 94301; Tel. 650.838.0353
The modern Vietnamese restaurant in the Bay Area has developed to the point where one can predict much of what the menus will say. Nontraditional spring rolls filled with things like mango, duck and avocado: check. Catfish in a clay pot: check. Green papaya salad: check. A friend steered me toward Three Seasons, a Palo Alto purveyor of modern Vietnamese food. While I trust his judgment in restaurants, I wondered whether this place would be more of the same old thing. The restaurant checks off many of the boxes for upscale Vietnamese food, but the results are better than most. Much of the menu is familiar, but Three Seasons scores on account of its superior execution and light touch. A cool, two-level dining room dominated by a striking circular stained glass ceiling and an ornate wooden bar that serves great cocktails help set Three Seasons apart, too.
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