Petiscos

Petiscos sits on South First Street in San Jose's SoFA District — the downtown arts quarter that, over the past decade, has become the city's most coherent dining neighborhood. The restaurant opened in 2022 as the second project from the Jorge family, the Portuguese-American restaurateurs behind Adega, Silicon Valley's only Michelin-starred table. Where Adega is formal and fine-dining in every line, Petiscos is the looser, more generous sibling: a tapas-style Portuguese kitchen built around thirty-plus small plates and a casual room that invites lingering.

The Michelin Guide awarded Petiscos a Bib Gourmand — the inspectors' recognition of restaurants offering exceptional food at genuinely reasonable prices (two courses and a drink for $40 or less). The menu runs to roughly sixty dishes, with most small plates in the $9–$20 range. The bacalhau fritters — salt cod and potato whipped into airy golden spheres — have become the calling card, along with the octopus salad (poached, grilled, dressed in olive oil and paprika) and the piri-piri chicken wings, which arrive with enough heat to reset your palate before the next round. Grilled sardines, chouriço sizzling in a clay dish, and lupini beans come straight from the Portuguese taberna tradition. The arroz de marisco and bacalhau à Brás are the larger dishes worth building a table around.

The wine list does quiet, confident work: a generous Portuguese selection (Douro reds, Vinho Verde, Alívarinho) alongside fortifieds and a short list of French and Spanish bottles chosen to complement rather than compete. Service is friendly and notably well-informed — many of the staff have worked at Adega, and the Michelin attention to detail translates directly to the sibling room. Petiscos is how the SoFA District eats on a Tuesday night: sharp, considered, and not pretentious. Which is, in many ways, the highest form of a restaurant there is.