Roasted black cod with kimchi butter, creamed corn and seasonal greens at the Hedley Club inside the Hotel De Anza in San Jose. The Cal-India Collective, which runs acclaimed Bay Area Indian restaurants Copra, Eylan and Ettan, is opening three new concepts inside the historic hotel.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Chef-owner Sri Gopinathan and chef Enrique Gonzalez, who worked together for years at the once Michelin-starred Campton Place, are teaming up to open a new Mexican restaurant.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
The Cal-India Collective will reopen Palm Court, an open-air patio inside the longtine Hotel De Anza, which is undergoing a major restoration.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Sai Shaga, lead bartender, makes cocktails at the Hedley Club.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Raviolo al uovo with chili ghee, maitake mushrooms, stewed dino kale and pecorino will be on the menu at the Hedley Club.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
The Hedley Club will serve hand-cut pappardelle with a ragout made from lamb barbacoa from the kitchen at Tejer.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
The new Hedley Club menu will be served in the adjacent Palm Court patio.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Sri Gopinathan and Ayesha Thapar, whose Cal-India Collective group has built a small restaurant empire with Copra in San Francisco, Eylan in Menlo Park, Ettan in Palo Alto and Little Blue Door in Los Altos, are bringing three concepts to the Hotel De Anza in San Jose, part of a major restoration of the historic landmark — and none of them will focus on Indian cuisine.
The pair will reopen the Hedley Club, the hotel’s art-deco bar, with a “Northern California bistro style” menu; as well as Palm Court, an adjacent, vine-covered patio that will serve the same menu as the Hedley Club; and debut a new Mexican restaurant called Tejer in partnership with chef Enrique Gonzalez, who cooked with Gopinathan at the once Michelin-starred Campton Place in San Francisco. The Hedley Club and Palm Court will open in September, followed by Tejer this winter.
From left: Sri Gopinathan, Ayesha Thapar and Enrique Gonzalez, who are teaming up on Tejer, a new Mexican restaurant in San Jose.
Courtesy Gino De Grandis
Gopinathan and Thapar had previously considered expanding to San Jose — they once looked at upscale mall Santana Row, and a broker often tried to sell them on opening in a market with less intense competition than San Francisco — but they didn’t feel convinced until Dhaval Panchal, a regular at their restaurants, approached them about working together on the hotel. In 2024, Panchal and Sean Curtis, both San Jose natives, acquired and set about restoring the 100-room hotel on West Santa Clara Street, which was built in 1931. (The hotel is open during renovations.) Gopinathan and Thapar felt drawn to the property’s history and character, and the chance to do something in a new part of the Bay Area.
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“San Jose is such an important city. It’s more populated than San Francisco,” Thapar said. “Why wouldn’t we be in San Jose?”
The pair could have just put another Copra or Ettan or Eylan in the hotel, they said. But “we don’t do a cookie cutter situation,” Gopinathan said. “We never go into a place thinking this is what we’re going to do. We go, we see the place, we look at particular aspects and decide based on that.”
The Hedley Club will serve a bistro-style menu including a hamburger, fries and little gem slaw.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Gopinathan and Thapar felt their defining California-Indian style wouldn’t exactly fit into a historic hotel. Instead, the Hedley Club menu will channel Bay Area ingredients and influences, such as a sourdough pizza, a raviolo al’uovo with melted kale and garlic-infused smoked ghee, and pan-fried sea bass with kimchi butter. There will be some Indian dishes, such as a butter chicken hot dog with a smoked sauce that Gopinathan has been tinkering with for years. “We’re certainly not intending to do anything Indian at Hedley but subtle touches will come that are natural,” Gopinathan said. “It would be dishonest to not do that.”
Cocktails, created by Merrick Rodrigues, “will nod to the grand hotel bars past and present,” a press release states, made with artisanal California spirits and regional botanicals.
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The Hedley Club, Hotel De Anza’s bar, will reopen in September.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
The Hedley Club has long been a San Jose destination: In 1947, Eleanor Roosevelt visited while she was First Lady; the same year, it was the site of the first-ever broadcast of legendary San Jose radio station KEEN. It was later known for hosting live jazz music. The Hedley Club closed along with the hotel in 2024. The new owners embraced its “lovely, old-world feel,” Thapar said, keeping the original painted ceiling, hand-carved bar and ornate chandelier, but painting the walls in rose limewash and adding art deco style curtains and “eclectic, interesting furniture.”
The owners hope Palm Court will be a destination for private and corporate events, especially for nearby tech companies.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
The Hedley Club menu will also be available at Palm Court, a large, open-air courtyard with greenery, mosaics and black-and-white patterned couches. They expect the space to be often booked for private and corporate events, especially from nearby tech companies like Nvidia and Adobe.
Tejer, meanwhile, will take inspiration from the foods of Mexico City and Gonzalez’s Central Mexico hometown, Atlacomulco. Gonzalez started working in restaurants when he moved to California in his early 20s, but he said that his career began in the kitchen with his mother and grandmother in Atlacomulco. It was atypical for a man to be involved in cooking at the time, but “I had that little bit of passion,” he said.
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An ahi tuna tostada with cacao nib salsa macha, serrano peppers and pickled radish will be on the menu at Tejer in San Jose.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Gonzalez started at Campton Place in 2012, working his way up from line cook to sous chef. He described Gopinathan as a mentor, and said they had discussed the idea of opening a restaurant together years ago. In preparation for Tejer, which means “to weave” in Spanish, Gopinathan and Gonzalez traveled through Mexico City, Oaxaca and Atlacomulco, where they cooked with Gonzalez’s mother, Margarita Romero.
Tejer will serve dishes such as a lamb barbacoa that’s wrapped in agave leaves, braised overnight and served with a consomé made from the drippings. There will be several kinds of mole, including a green version thickened with sesame seeds, and lots of seafood. Crudos will be paired with housemade hot sauces, while jars of fermented chiles, including Mexican chiles and kashmiri dried chile, will be on display in the restaurant. Similar to other high-end Mexican restaurants in the Bay Area, tortillas will be made with house-nixtamalized corn.
The once-glamorous Hotel De Anza, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, was built in the art-deco Zig Zag Moderne style, with a stepped parapet and an iconic, recently restored neon sign on the roof. It was “a building that was abandoned for decades, given up for dead and seen as an eyesore. It took city investment and civic ambition to say this is something worth keeping around,” Ben Leech, executive director of the nonprofit Preservation Action Council of San Jose, told the Mercury News in 2025. “Today’s eyesore is tomorrow’s civic anchor.”
Cocktails at the Hedley Club will be made with artisanal California spirits and regional botanicals.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Cal-India Collective restaurants are known for over-the-top, striking designs created by Thapar, though for Hedley Club and Palm Court, she collaborated with a designer who was already on board with the hotel renovation. Tejer’s look, however, is a collaboration between Thapar and Lisa Gill of Studio Mood (who was also one of the designers behind Copra). Tejer’s 95-seat dining room will feature a mural, handmade artisanal lights from Mexico and a stone bar.
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“Instead of franchising the same concept throughout the region, the duo continues to broaden what Indian cuisine looks like in Northern California with each subsequent property,” Chronicle restaurant critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan wrote in a review of Eylan. This year, the pair was nominated for the James Beard Foundation’s outstanding restaurateur award.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect that the Hotel De Anza is open during renovations.
Dining and Cooking