Now here is a true advocate of eateries
Some politicians have paid lip service to help keep restaurants afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sunnyvale Mayor Larry Klein has put his stomach where his mouth is.
As of last week, Klein had visited 175 restaurants, coffee shops and food trucks in Sunnyvale, to shine a spotlight on them in hopes that they will attract more takeout and delivery customers so they could keep their doors open. For a while, he was hitting a new place every other day, but Klein has gone back to some old favorites as of late. But he keeps track of them all with links to his Facebook posts on Klein’s Sunnyvale Restaurant Project website, larryklein.com/restaurant-project.
“I still get comments from residents months later that they just tried a specific restaurant discovering it through the webpage,” Klein said. “Especially with the new restrictions, highlighting what places are available for takeout/delivery is really helpful.”
It all started when the first stay-at-home orders did on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. Sunnyvale’s historic Murphy Avenue didn’t have its normal revelry, so Klein ordered a corned beef sandwich at Fibbar MaGee’s Irish Pub to let people know that places still were open for takeout.
“The feedback from residents was positive, so I started to do a daily restaurant review,” he said. “It’s been a great project, and I’m actually happy to see the number of restaurants that have survived. It’s also opened my eyes to certain areas of the city that I rarely went.”
Indeed, Klein’s list is like a culinary tour of the globe, with Japanese eateries side by side with Indian restaurants, Mexican cantinas, pho shops, cheesesteaks and pizza. Not a bad way to discover the hidden gems of your city, wherever you live.
lOOa aiia aiPARTMiNT >> Volunteers from the San Jose Sharks and SAP spent Tuesday afternoon distributing food, toys and gift cards to about 200 households at Esperanza Middle School in San Jose’s Santee neighborhood. The fin-tastic folks bought and donated everything through virtual toy drives staged during the holiday season and gave it out through
CityTeam Ministries’ drive-thru mobile pantry.
By the way, this isn’t just a holiday deal for the team. A community assist grant provided by the Sharks Foundation and SAP also funds the mobile food pantry program’s biweekly visits to Esperanza for the whole year.
But you don’t have to be a hockey team or a tech company to make a difference around here. Quynh Nguyen, a secondyear student at Evergreen Valley College, started a nonprofit called Hope Hearted with three students from other schools she met while volunteering at O’Connor Hospital. They partnered with local shelters, building a team of 150 volunteers to put together care packages filled with soaps, deodorants, masks, hand sanitizer and more for unhoused people.
Hope Hearted has distributed more than 2,000 of the care packages, and Evergreen Valley College is partnering with Nguyen and Hope Hearted to distribute the hygiene kits at one of the drive-thru food distribution sites it hosts for its students. More than 450 community college students receive food and groceries through the program, supported by Second Harvest of Silicon Valley.
KNIGHT FOUNDATION BOOSTS THE ARTS >> We’ve all seen performing arts groups innovating this
year to deal with the challenges presented by the pandemic. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced $750,000 in grants Thursday that should help four San Jose arts groups continue to reach new audiences.
“Artists in San Jose have long been affected by the city’s high cost of living,” Priya Sircar, Knight’s director of the arts program, said in a release. “Add to that the side effects of business closures and it’s visible that they have been faced with a nearly unbearable situation.”
The San Jose Museum of Art is receiving $250,000 to relaunch its art and technology exhibition series next year with a yearlong presentation of Hito Steyerl’s “Factory of the Sun.” MACLA is receiving $250,000 to launch the MACLA Studio and an Artist Fellowship program aimed at technology. The School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza is receiving $150,000 to work with CreaTV to build the digital skills of multicultural arts groups — MACLA, Teatro Vision, Chopsticks Alley, San Jose Taiko and Sangam Arts — that will produce minidocumentaries and digital art about the impact of COVID-19 on their families and community. And San Jose Jazz will get $150,000 to create the Break Room, a pop-up music venue and digital content production hub in downtown San Jose.