The Best Places to Eat in Santa Clara, by the Record

A painted grain silo towers over the plaza outside, which tells you something about the ambition of this coffee shop's setting. The Santa Clara outpost of a San Jose small-batch cafe shares an outdoor space with an urban farm, a bocce court, and a community garden that perfumes the whole terrace. Inside, a line snakes out the door, the staff stays warm about it, and drinks lean toward Asian-inflected flavors and single-origin espresso.

1. Sprudge The Sprudge Guide To Coffee In San Jose, California

A ramen shop in a Santa Clara strip mall run by a chef who keeps a tight grip on his broths, making the noodles in-house and letting clean, well-built basics like a smoky shoyu do most of the talking. The real reason regulars check the calendar is the rotating specials, which have swung from crab ramen finished with pistachio oil to buckwheat noodles built around dried red snapper. The San Francisco Chronicle puts it among the Bay Area's best.

1. San Francisco Chronicle Best ramen restaurants in the SF Bay Area

Shelves of cookbooks by Sanjeev Kapoor line the walls, which tells you exactly whose restaurant this is. The celebrity chef's global chain lands in Santa Clara as a fine dining Indian restaurant covering both Northern and Southern regional ground, with the kitchen leaning into contemporary spins on each. The shaam savera, spinach dumplings stuffed with cheese and pooled in tomato gravy, is the signature worth ordering. The San Francisco Chronicle named it among the Bay Area's best South Asian restaurants.

1. San Francisco Chronicle Best Indian, Pakistani, and South Asian restaurants in the Bay Area
2. San Francisco Chronicle Best restaurants in Palo Alto, San Jose, the Peninsula and South Bay

Each location gets its own interior, and the newest one near San Pedro Square Market prompted the owners to describe it as "Willy Wonka meets coffee," which is doing a lot of work but isn't wrong. This specialty coffee shop runs a destination-drink menu named after cities around the world, murals from local artists covering the walls, and enough design ambition that the mayor showed up to cut the ribbon. A chain, yes, but one that treats each outpost as its own thing.

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Each drink on the menu is named for a city, and ordering feels a little like spinning a globe. Voyager Craft Coffee is a specialty coffee shop that started as a cart in a garage and grew into six locations, each designed as its own thing. The aesthetic runs toward murals, bold color, and what the team calls Willy Wonka meets coffee, which sounds like a joke until you're standing inside. Good for a slow pour-over or something more adventurous.

1. Sprudge The Sprudge Guide To Coffee In San Jose, California

The dining room walls look like marble, the ceiling traces a ring of light around wood paneling, and the menu runs about a dozen items. This Santa Clara Korean restaurant keeps its focus narrow: the main pull is seolleongtang, a milky, slow-cooked beef bone broth with oxtail and slippery rice noodles. Weekends pack the strip mall with families willing to wait thirty minutes for a bowl, which tells you most of what you need to know.

1. San Francisco Chronicle #67 · Top 100 Restaurants in the Bay Area
2. San Francisco Chronicle Best restaurants in Palo Alto, San Jose, the Peninsula and South Bay

1. San Francisco Chronicle Best Chinese food and restaurants in the Bay Area

Puranpoli is a vegetarian restaurant in Santa Clara run by siblings, zeroing in on the food of Maharashtra, the western Indian state that gave the world pav bhaji and vada pav. The menu leans into the less-traveled stuff, too, like zunka, a chickpea flour paste sautéed with aromatics and curry leaves that tastes like someone's grandmother made it. The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the Bay Area's best South Asian spots.

1. San Francisco Chronicle Best Indian, Pakistani, and South Asian restaurants in the Bay Area