Trying More New Restaurants: Peruvian at Inka's

I blogged a few days ago about my 2023 New Year's resolution to try new restaurants when I ate at two new restaurants in one day. They were even both Greek food. 😂🍢😋 But those aren't my only forays into eating at new* (or haven't-been-there-in-like-20-years) restaurants recently. This month already I've eaten at four new places. The other two are pizza and Peruvian.

The Peruvian was Inka's Restaurant in San Jose's West San Jose neighborhood. Housed in an unassuming strip mall location the restaurant doesn't look like much from the outside. Frankly it doesn't look like much from the inside, either. "Unassuming strip mall" is a motif that extends straight into the restaurant's decor with neutral green-gray colored walls, generic tables and chairs, and minimal thematic decoration. Mexican restaurants are always festooned with things like sombreros and murals on the walls. This place? Add a few Vietnamese ladies wearing masks and gloves and I could've believed I walked into a nail salon by mistake. 🤣

The saying "Looks can be deceiving" certainly applies at Inka's Restaurant. While nothing about the appearance of the place suggests anything more than a bland food in a weak facsimile of Peruvian culture, the meals sure seemed legit. Three of us ordered dishes that spanned a range on the menu. Hawk chose Lomo Saltado, a classic beef dish with beef, onion, and tomato stir fried together; our friend, Mike, chose a Peruvian style seafood paella; and I ordered Seco de Cordero, a lamb shank slow cooked in a stew with cilantro sauce. Everything was delicious.

Would I go back to Inka's? Yes... but also No. The food was great, and the prices, while not cheap, were totally reasonable for the quality and quantity. I'd totally go there again if I were in the neighborhood. But that's the thing.... We're rarely in that area. And going to West San Jose feels like a haul, even though it really isn't. This is where the restaurant's completely anonymous decor detracts from the experience. It just didn't feel special to go there to eat. It needs something like brightly colored murals on the walls to set the tone. Or ladies doing people's nails.

Better Call Saul 3.02: Still no Saul, More Adventures with Mike

Across the first few episodes of Better Call Saul season 3, hit-man Mike Ehrmantraut continues to be a featured minor character. I've remarked many times that the series often feels lkke it should be Better Call Mike as his charcter arc gets so much screen time. But I say that in a fond way as Mike, played with acerbic wit by actor Jonathan Banks, is fun to watch.

Recall season 2 ended with a pair of cliffhangers, one for main character Jimmy (pre-changing his name to Saul) and one for Mike. That's one of those points at which viewers might wonder if this Mike should get title billing. In ones cliffhanger, Mike is interrupted from his attempt to kill drug gang boss Hector Salamanca by some unseen person who's tailed him into the desert and rigged his car's horn.

Spy vs. Spy

Season 3 for Mike begins with him trying to track down who's tracking him. He assumes, correctly, that his unseen adversary has placed a tracking device in his car. He literally tears the car apart looking for it, but it eludes all the places that he— as a former career police officer— knows to look for contraband in a car. Just as he's about to give up and leave his torn-up beater at the junkyard, inspiration strikes he finds it, a tiny tracker placed in his gas cap. Being a resourceful person he uses his contacts to buy an identical device and study how it works. Then he puts his tracker in his car's gas cap, runs down the battery on the mystery device to alert its owner, and waits to watch who comes to swap out the tracker on his car for one with a fresh battery.

Sure enough, a person comes by Mike's house late that night to swap the trackers. But the dead tracker is actually hidden nearby and the one in Mike's gas cap is his— meaning the mysterious adversary has just driven off with Mike's tracker, which Mike can follow. Mike, who stayed up all night watching the street from his darkened house, starts to follow.

Mike tails the man with his tracker to an empty industrial site. The man hands off the tracker to another person, who appears to be his boss. Mike tracks the boss as he drives around Albuquerque from the wee hours of the morning through sunrise, picking up packages stashed in out-of-the-way locations. Mike's mysterious adversary is a bag man for a drug gang.

Another Great Minor Character (Re)Appears

The bag man's final stop is a location that's familiar to all us fans of Breaking Bad. It's a Pollos Hermanos restaurant. The bag man leaves his bag— full of money plus Mike's tracker— at one of the restaurants owned by Gus Fring (portrayed by actor Giancarlo Esposito).



It's worth noting that Mike doesn't yet know who Gus Fring is— or that he's a drug lord. For all Mike knows the restaurant is simply a place where the bag man makes a handoff. Though his radio tracker shows him the bag isn't moving, so Mike reasonably knows that someone in the restaurant is high up in hierarchy of this mysterious drug gang.

Trying New Restaurants: Pizza California

I mentioned recently that March 2025 has been a great month for over-achieving my New Year's resolution to try new restaurants in the area. Y'know, that New Year's resolution from... 2023. 🤣

About 10 days ago I was coming home from a client meeting in San Jose and was trying to figure out where to grab lunch. My Plan A had been to get lunch with the customer, or at least with my sales colleagues, but everyone else had places they wanted to get to quickly. And frankly I had to get back in reasonable time, too, as I had a string of afternoon meetings to join. I looked to see what restaurants were along my driving route. I was just about to settle for one of many familiar chain restaurants when I saw another option: a pizzeria that specialized in personal-sized pizzas. I love pizza— I mean, look, I have a tag for pizza, and my Apple News app offers me "Pizza" as a news topic— so I decided to give it a try.



While "Pizza California" sounds like it's another chain restaurant— and the well-branded exterior kind of looks like a chain restaurant, too— it's not a chain. It's a one-off pizzeria that's apparently been in San Jose's Berryessa neighborhod for almost 30 years. While that's not exactly my home turf I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this joint before!

Pizza California is vaguely similar to those Chipotle-style pizza chains that have popped up everywhere in the past 10 years. Y'know, the ones where you specify your pizza one topping at a time while a worker assembles it behind a plexiglass divider. Pizza California is like that except you don't walk down the assembly line watching your burrito pizza get made. You order at the cash register, and someone in the kitchen, out of sight, makes the pizza. Oh, and they have beer. A lot of beer. It was lunchtime, though, so I stuck with a Coke Zero Half-Caf from their Coca-Cola Freestyle machine.



The pizza came out about 10 minutes later looking pretty darn good. I got a combo pizza, a set of about 5 common toppings—or, as New Yorkers would call it, a garbage pie. One thing about a garb—combo pie is that with all those toppings it can be challenging to balance the cooking. Pizza California baked it right. The cheese was properly melted and the toppings were just slight crisped but not charred.

Would I go back? Yes... but I'm not sure when. The pizza was great, and I love being able to get a quality, custom-made pizza in personal size. Plus the selection of a dozen or so beers on tap makes it interesting for an evening visit. But the location is at the edge of how far I'd drive for a casual meal by myself. I'd totally swing by for lunch again next time I visit the customer whose office is nearby. But go out here just for the pizza? Not very often.