SAN JOSE — A new restaurant and rooftop deck are being eyed for an empty San Jose building, a project that could help enliven a prime stretch of the city’s downtown.
The project is being considered for 374 South First St. in downtown San Jose, a building that over the years has been the site for Eulipia Restaurant & Bar, Cafe Stritch jazz club, and the Mama Kin restaurant and music venue.
These have all closed their doors, leaving the two-story building vacant.
Now, a proposal being floated by restaurant entrepreneur Viet Nguyen and architect Abraham Zavala would bring a Vietnamese restaurant to the address.
“I want to bring people back to downtown from other places and work with other downtown businesses to revamp downtown to attract more people from all over, not just people in the area,” Nguyen said in comments emailed to this news organization.
Nguyen added that he hopes to accomplish this “through our brand and my reputation on social media.”
The proposal envisions a full-service restaurant and a bar on two floors of the building, according to Zavala, a principal executive with AZ Design and Engineering.
“The idea is to have the same line of restaurant as what Viet Nguyen offers in San Mateo and San Francisco,” Zavala said. “It would be a great addition to SoFA.”
The proposal also floats the notion of a rooftop venue atop the building.
“We would put the deck on the existing roof with a railing all around,” Zavala said. “The deck would be set back from the front of the building so it wouldn’t even be visible from First Street.”
The roof deck would be roughly 850 to 1,000 square feet, the project plans state.
A lot of work would be performed on the inside of the building, according to Zavala.
“We would completely transform the inside of the building,” he said. “We want to use stairs and an elevator to connect the two floors and the roof to each other.”
The plans indicate that a seating area would be on one side of the first floor and a bar on the other side.
In July 2025, an affiliate headed up by Nguyen paid $2.2 million to buy the building where the restaurant would operate, documents posted with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office show. Nguyen’s group obtained $2 million in financing from Bank of America at the time of the purchase.
Constructed in 1927, the narrow building totals about 8,000 square feet.
The development team hopes to avoid applying for a historic permit to revamp the property and build the roof deck, according to Zavala.
Nguyen operates Gao Kitchen & Bar in San Mateo and San Francisco as well as Ben Tre Vietnamese Homestyle Cuisine restaurants in Millbrae, South San Francisco and San Francisco.
“All my locations were dead spaces nobody wanted,” Nguyen said. “They are now very popular restaurants that help the surrounding businesses. That is really my goal.”