Original Joe's, San Jose's landmark restaurant, turns 70 this month
Matt and Brad Rocca have literally grown up at Original Joe’s, the landmark Italian restaurant their grandfather and father opened in downtown San Jose on May 24, 1956.
The brothers remember starting to work at the restaurant when they were each 12 years old, washing dishes and making salads before moving up to waiting tables and serving as the front-of-house host. Now co-owners of the restaurant, the Roccas are looking forward to celebrating Original Joe’s 70th anniversary with their customers on May 24, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.
They say it won’t be an extravagant party, but singer Jerry Sauceda will be performing Frank Sinatra songs for diners, and there’ll be special 70th anniversary merchandise like hats and shirts to buy.
Despite a $1 million interior renovation in 2007, walking through the front doors still feels like you’re being transported back to the 1950s. The red mahogany booths, beige popcorn ceilings and the huge circular ceiling vents all lend to the throwback atmosphere. If you’re lucky enough to grab a seat at the counter, you’ll get a real show as the cooks in the open kitchen put on a culinary ballet — broiling steaks over the charbroiler, cooking sausages and breaded chicken breasts on the grill and tossing mushrooms in a sautee pan.
But you’re just as likely to see customers in T-shirts and shorts as you are to see sport coats and ties. And the Roccas wouldn’t want it any other way.
“Everybody feels comfortable here. That’s the beauty of this place,” said Matt Rocca, who was born about nine months before the restaurant opened.
Louis Rocca Sr. was one of the partners who opened Original Joe’s in San Francisco in 1937. Nearly 20 years later, he and two partners — Otto Tortore and Nino Caramagno — opened the San Jose restaurant to be run by his son, Louis Rocca Jr. (known to all as “Babe”). Matt and Brad Rocca bought into Original Joe’s in 1980, a couple of years before the family sold its part in the San Francisco restaurant. While there are many different “Joe’s” in the Bay Area, San Jose’s Original Joe’s stands alone now.
Brad Rocca said the restaurant has tried to stay true to its roots, keeping up with the times but not going in for fads (the recently added burrata salad being a popular exception). Sweetbreads and liver remain on the menu, he said, because diners still come specifically to Original Joe’s to order the hard-to-find dishes. “If we didn’t sell ’em, we’d get rid of ’em,” Rocca said.
Chicken parmesan has long been the most popular dish, but there are now more burgers on the menu, reflecting the public’s changing tastes. And that’s not all that’s changed.
When OJ’s first opened, the hours stretched from 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. The late-night hours were eventually pared back, and lunch service ended in 2019 after it had been getting slower for several years. The current hours are 4 p.m. to 11 p.m., and the days of cash-only and paper dining checks gave way to credit cards and a computerized point-of-sale system years ago. Heck, there’s even a website now, sanjoseoriginaljoes.com, where you can order delivery.
A few years back, the serving staff switched from wearing their iconic tuxedos to an all-black look, a change, Brad Rocca said, that makes the dining room seem less intimidating to younger customers. The all-male workforce slowly transformed, too, with the first female chef hired in 2000, followed by servers. In 2021, Aryn Miller applied for a bartending job because she wanted to be the first woman to pour drinks there. And Michelle Rocca, Brad’s wife, offered to start putting her experience in banking and the restaurant business to work as a manager when Original Joe’s reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Original Joe’s opened just before downtown San Jose started a decline and has seen its ups and down since. Contemporaries like Lou’s Village, the Bold Knights and Paolo’s are long gone, but the giant sign that has lit up the corner of First and San Carlos streets for seven decades is as much a San Jose landmark as the Bank of Italy tower.
“All the other restaurants seem to be owned by corporations now,” Brad Rocca said. “We’re among the last of the independents.”
DINING DOWNTOWN: Unlike Original Joe’s 70 years in business, Strāta in downtown San Jose hasn’t even opened to the public yet. But it already had quite a celebration Thursday as the ribbon was cut for the new restaurant in the former Rollati space across from San Jose City Hall.
M.O. Hospitality principals Dan Phan, George Lahlouh and Johnny Wang held court at the preview event for the eatery and bar, which opens May 13. The space seems to be in good hands with this ownership group, which also has Eos & Nyx, Paper Plane, Miniboss, Still O.G. and Alter Ego in downtown San Jose. That strong track record is probably why so many elected officials attended, including Assemblymember Ash Kalra, Santa Clara County Supervisor Betty Duong, San Jose Councilmembers Anthony Tordillos and Michael Mulcahy and even a staffer from U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s office.
You can count on this becoming the most mispronounced restaurant name in San Jose since Eos & Nyx opened two years ago. It’s pronounced “stray-tuh,” not “strat-uh.” And if the name sounds familiar, there was a Stratta (“strat-uh”) Grill on East San Fernando Street about 25 years ago. I still miss those mojitos.
ARTISTIC ANNIVERSARIES: San Jose residents Zivile and Eric Rawson celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary Tuesday at the San Jose Museum of Art with their daughter, New Ballet co-founder Dalia Rawson, and her husband, Gareth Hughes, who were celebrating their 20th anniversary.
Dalia Rawson said her dad was a physicist for PARC Xerox during the first wave of Silicon Valley innovation who has shared a lifelong love of the arts with her mom, who was one of the San Jose Museum of Art’s “Let’s Look at Art” docents in the 1970s.
That clearly passed on to their children. Dalia’s brother Cliff runs the music program at Don Callejon, an arts magnet middle school in Santa Clara. Dalia took art lessons in the museum’s basement when she was a child, and one of her drawings of a ballerina was published in a museum newsletter when she was 7. And that’s where she and her husband celebrated their wedding in 2006.
For the double-anniversary party, New Ballet dancers Mikey Desai-Knight and Stefana Seizovic performed the pas de deux the upcoming production of Rawson’s world premiere staging of "Giselle."
VALLEY PIONEERS: The Computer History Museum held this year’s Fellow Awards on April 25, honoring Silicon Valley innovators whose work remains part of people’s lives not only here in the valley but around the world.
The Palm team — Jeff Hawkson, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan — blazed the trail for handheld devices and smartphones. John Chowning was recognized for “the invention of audio FM synthesis,” and it was his collaboration with Yamaha engineers in the late 1970s and early ’80s that produced the first inexpensive digital music synthesizer. CHM Fellow Brewster Kahle was honored for founding the Internet Archive in 1996.
And a new Silicon Valley Laureate Award was presented to venture capitalist Mark Stevens for his investments, credited with powering “modern digital economy and era of artificial intelligence.” While he was a partner at Sequoia Capital, Stevens put money into a few companies you might have heard of: Google, YouTube, Yahoo and Nvidia. You can read more about all of them at computerhistory.org.
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This story was originally published May 9, 2026 at 6:49 AM.