This week Art Boutiki will be soft-opening our new Beer Garden, or whatever you want to call it on Thursday July 2. We will be starting our takeout days back up, but with the added incentive that you can come down and have a seat in our outdoor patio and enjoy some of the coolest looking peeling paint this side of downtown.
Soft-open means we are still figuring things out, so your feedback is more than welcome/needed/appreciated. As the space evolves we are hoping we can bring some of our lower key events like the Drink and Draw and perhaps the Open Mic as well as movie nights and some other stuff.
Takeout on Thursday starts at 4:00, the beer garden opens at 6:00. Capacity of the patio is about 28 people more or less but we hope to get as many of you in as possible. We will be open until 9:00 and will be serving almost everything on our menu. We are out of a few of our beers but we are hoping to have our stock fully replenished next week. We also hope to have the Beer Garden open for regular hours next week.
No new Art Boutiki merch this week, but we do have a Futurama Bowl Tribute shirt which is so freaking cool words fail me. Well, I guess they didn’t since I just said it was freaking cool.
On a down note it’s looking more and more that we may not be able to reopen at all for a few months, so we would appreciate any help from you guys be it a food order, t-shirt purchase or just a straight up donation.
The still unamed Beer Garden at night.
If you want to donate on Patreon click HERE.
One of THE most iconic signs in all of San Jose was the one for Futurama Bowl on Stevens Creek Blvd. An excellent example of Googie style design, this sign marked the presence of Futurama Bowl as “Newest and Finest Bowling Alley”. The modern look of the sign was no doubt meant to express the futuristic bowling technology of the time.
This is a tribute to the old bowling alley designed by Matt Leiker and made available for our use by Heather David. Only 50 of these will be available for sale, so order now and order often!
Printed in-house on 100% cotton t-shirt. As usual please order one size up from your normal shirt.
Dick’s Dragon was once billed as the largest Chinese restaurant in the world, and at 20,000 square feet it may well have been. Sitting on Bascom Ave in San Jose for years the building was eventually turned into Zorba The Greek Restaurant. We’re not sure why.
This was sort of a holy grail-like quest for us since I have a recollection of having been in the building as a Chinese restaurant. I also vaguely hearing my dad refer to Dick’s Chinese A-Go-Go as a nightclub so it’s possible the place became a club before turning into Zorba’sI don’t know, I would be happy to hear from anyone who maybe knows for sure.
Redrawn and slightly redesigned by us to look good on a shirt. 100% cotton, please order one size larger.
Most people don’t even know San Jose had a race track. San Jose Speedway can trace its origins to an oval dirt track on the outskirts of town where people flocked to see stock car races. The grandstands burned down there but San Jose Speedway returned in the form of a paved track near the Reid_hillview airport. The track closed, eventually making way for Eastridge Shopping center. It resurfaced in a form at the Fairgrounds but that track closed in 1999.
This is a reproduction of one of the shirts made popular by the track in the Fairgrounds years we believe. It is actually a sort of clip-art master class as every element in this design could be found in clipart books of the day. It also is an example of when something is greater than the sum of its parts.
We redrew this image from an old shirt and are now putting it in our vintage San Jose collection.
100% Athletic Heather t-shirt. Please order one size larger than your normal shirt.