San Jose Tech Museum, Il Fornaio

Sunday was rainy, actually stormy. No birthday parties to entertain our kids. So, my plan was to just laze around the house and endure the kids’ boredom induced whining and bad moods that were sure to occur. However, my husband suggested going to the San Jose Tech Museum. We never usually think of getting our entertainment, culture fix down south; we usually look north to San Francisco. The Tech Museum however made a lot of sense. San Jose is closer than San Francisco for us and the museum is free on second Sundays of the month! Perfect! It just so happened to be the second Sunday.

As soon as we walk into the museum, we notice a lot of activity. There was some sort of Tech Challenge going on downstairs…teams of students attempting to change a battery on a ‘satellite’ with some simple, a few more elaborate homemade contraptions. But the more interesting activity was happening right at the lobby level. There were two teams of high school students, one from Monta Vista and the other from Lynbrook, milling around two rather large robots.

I push the girls toward the high school students. I was more excited than the girls. I figured the girls would be enamored with the high school girls but I think they were a bit overwhelmed. The girls did have fun and enjoyed their chance at controlling the robots. We also got to meet this year’s Intel Science Search second place winner. He was part of the team. I don’t think the girls were impressed…on the other hand, I was. Although I did come away feeling a bit sorry for my girls…the competition is so much more fierce now than when I was a kid. Science competition used to mean a flimsy poster board with explanation on what happens to stale bread…now it requires a working robot that actually does something (in this case a robot that kicks a soccer ball, and a robot that sucks up balls and plops them into garbage cans).

Luckily the rest of the exhibits did not instill too much inferiority complex. We wandered around for another hour or so and decided to break for lunch. The museum does boast a café on the ground floor and looked pleasant enough but it was packed and perusing the tables, french fries seemed to be the dominant food. It did not look appealing to me and again to my surprise, my husband had the second bright idea of the day. He suggested lunch at a nearby restaurant. There are quite a few choices but we decided on Il Fornaio, an Italian chain restaurant in an elegant old hotel, the Sainte Claire.

The hotel is charming and the décor of the restaurant, the large windows and the white jackets of the servers transported you back into the past. The bread was warm, the crust crunchy and our pasta was good. We could have also opted for breakfast fare still being served. I would recommend against ordering from the kids menu. It’s far better to order a regular pasta entrée and split it for the kids. Which is what we ended up doing by default…we ordered the kids menu pasta which our girls refused to eat since they liked the look of their daddy’s pasta better. You never know with kids.

After lunch we went back to the Tech Museum and spent a little more time. It was a great way to spend a stormy Sunday!

http://www.thetech.org/