The lights are low in the brick-walled speakeasy hidden behind a Japanese-inspired listening bar.

My table is stacked high with pearlescent hamachi crudo in mandarin aguachile, and chubby Hokkaido scallops bathing in shiro dashi and black truffle. I’m greedily polishing off one of the best savory cocktails I’ve had lately—a basil-and-tomato gin drink with parmesan foam they call La Cosa Nostra.

The vibe is cool, the menus are exquisitely designed, the music is pumping—it’s everything you’d hope for in a cocktail lounge in San Francisco or Oakland.

But I’m not in San Francisco or Oakland. This is downtown San Jose.

Every cocktail at Alter Ego comes in its own signature glass(Courtesy of M.O. Hospitality/Alter Ego)

Given its size and accessible location, downtown San Jose’s restaurant and bar scene should rival that of its cousins to the north. It should be edgy and intriguing and dripping with design. That hasn’t happened for this city of over a million. Despite an excellent food scene, the element of style—that thing that makes you want to linger and return again and again—has often been more of an afterthought than an objective.

But the winds of change are blowing—and it’s all the work of M.O. Hospitality.

“We are all homegrown South Bay kids, and for us, we’ve never understood why San Jose can’t step up and be taken seriously as a food and beverage city,” says the group’s co-owner, George Lahlouh. “In recent years, we’ve seen some new concepts come to San Jose that are slowly helping to raise the culinary bar, but unfortunately, not enough to hit critical mass.”

Still O.G., downtown San Jose's Japanese-inspired listening bar(Courtesy of M.O. Hospitality/Still O.G.)

So the hospitality group is stepping up to fill the void. Just within the last year, the creators of the neighborhood’s pioneering cocktail spot Paper Plane (72 1st St.) and the playful, color-popping arcade bar Miniboss (52 E. Santa Clara) have debuted three new spaces that are helping to redefine expectations around the downtown San Jose food and drinks scene.

Each is completely different. There’s the reel-to-reel listening bar Still O.G. (66 1st St.), all sleek minimalism, wood, and records. A portal at its back opens into the sultry speakeasy Alter Ego, with its sophisticated, twilit mid-century interior. Then there’s Eos & Nyx (201 S. 2nd St.), a breezy, foliage-filled restaurant with vibrant coastal Cal-Mediterranean menus and a broad outdoor patio.

If these spots rested solely on their design, they’d hardly survive in the brutal Bay Area resto-bar climate. There’s more going on here than just a vibe: the food and drinks are more elevated, more seasonally inspired, more experimental than nearly any other bar or restaurant in the neighborhood.

At Alter Ego, executive chef Roberto Mendoza is creating dishes that are interesting but approachable—things he craves himself, he says—a kind of mash-up of Latin and Japanese flavors, like Dungeness crab tostadas with yuzu, edamame, and sesame, and octopus with salsa macha, cannellini beans, and garlic confit.

Hamachi crudo at Alter Ego(Courtesy of M.O. Hospitality/Alter Ego)

Alter Ego is the playground where Mendoza gets to push boundaries—to create dishes that can’t be found anywhere else downtown—but it’s not the only mode in which he operates: at Still O.G. and Paper Plane, Mendoza’s crafted more familiar snacks like smash burgers and wings with careful attention to detail and an occasional dalliance with the unexpected (like battering his wings in koji and sweet potato shochu).

We “straddle a line between making people feel comfortable and at home while featuring items that are lesser known, encouraging guests to safely step outside their comfort zones and try something new,” Lahlouh explains.

Drinks similarly explore flavors and spirits in a way that strikes a balance between what locals are used to and what they don’t yet know they love. Alter Ego’s cocktails fall on one side of the scale: gorgeous concoctions with often surprising ingredients both savory and sweet that rival anything you’d find at, say, True Laurel (with whom the speakeasy recently did a pop-up collaboration).

The bar at downtown San Jose's Eos & Nyx(Patricia Chang)

Still O.G. has a more laid-back approach with simpler cocktails ready to go on tap so as not to interrupt the high-quality sound the DJs are spinning with the clinking of ice, while Eos & Nyx approaches cocktails—both at brunch and dinner—through a panoramic, Mediterranean-trained lens like a killer bloody Mary spiced boldly with harissa.

“Our biggest hope is that guests leave feeling like we exceeded their expectations,” says Lahlouh. “We want their first impression to be, ‘Wow, look at this place!’ Then, once they sit down and have a chance to interact with our team, experience our genuine service, [and] taste the food and drinks, that seals the deal. We want our friends and neighbors to enjoy a high level of quality and creativity without needing to take a day trip to San Francisco.”

With new projects slated to open in the South Bay later this year and next, M.O. Hospitality is just getting started—and if their earlier concepts are any indication, whatever comes next will be wholly unique in menu and design.

After all, says Lahlouh, “Why can’t we have nice things right here at home?”

Cal-Mediterranean at Eos & Nyx(Patricia Chang)