A Mediterranean Restaurant Brings Spectacle and a Leafy Indoor Canopy to San Jose

One of the most anticipated restaurant openings in San Jose is finally ready to make its debut as of Wednesday, November 20: Step inside the gorgeous, two-story, light-filled space of Eos & Nyx.

Named after the ancient Greek goddesses of day and night, the restaurant and bar is designed to handle the transition from day to night. The space is almost meant to mimic two different spaces, and as such, there will be food and cocktail menus at different times to give Eos & Nyx different feels. Set to open inside a former movie theater, MO Hospitality Group — the team behind popular San Jose spots Paper Planes, Mini Boss, Still OG, and Alter Ego — took the idea and approached design firm Basile Studios to help bring the massive 4,000-square-foot space to life.

It was a huge project, especially given the two-story, box-like place, but the team was able to find untapped potential in the space. “We want to find all the possibilities that the space can offer for design and also for a business model for a restaurant,” says Basile Studio design manager Talita Mathias. The design team made some proposals due to the size and height of the space, such as the addition of a second-floor mezzanine, which wasn’t part of the original plans. Paul Basile always looks for opportunities to expand square footage and the customer experience with design, taking advantage of the space, Matthias says.

The addition of a mezzanine serves a twofold purpose. Not only does it wring out extra space and seating for a secondary bar to join the first-floor bar, it also offers viewpoints of the street outside through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and gives an overhead view of the restaurant below. Adding to the spectacle is the addition of tall, canopy-like trees inside the restaurant, an element that can be enjoyed from either floor, as well as be observed from the outside. This proposed element from the Basile team emphasizes the height of the space with the added bonus of acting as a soft diffuser for the lighting above.

The addition of trees isn’t the only showstopper element at Eos & Nyx. The “double-height liquor carousel” (as the Basile team calls it) adds some motion to the building; liquor shelves move between the two floors, making bottles of alcohol accessible to the business’s dual bars. “That was the key: having something that you could see from the outside and attract people to come in and say, ‘What’s moving? Why is that moving? What’s happening there?’” Basile says. “It also gives people a good reason to go upstairs as well. I think getting people upstairs is really difficult in any project, but having something that kind of drives them there is really fun.”

Accompanying the beautifully dressed space is a crowd-pleasing, Mediterranean menu. The kitchen is led by chef Nicko Moulinos, who hails from Corfu, Greece, and has worked in the kitchens of New York’s Le Bernardin, Kwame Onwuachi’s (now closed) Kith/Kin, and Taverna. Diners can expect a menu using seasonal ingredients, with an open wood-fired grill adding some smoke and char to dishes like the New York strip, served with potato espuma. Shareable dishes easily are group-friendly, while the pasta items like pappardelle with duck and spinach keep things (relatively) lighter. Brunch allows the kitchen to stretch outside of its Mediterranean box, with South Bay favorites like the Vietnamese dish bò né, the sizzling flat iron dish starring steak, eggs, pork pate, and a baguette. The cocktails remain just as considered as MO Hospitality’s other spaces, with playful names such as the Jean Claude Pandan, a tequila-pandan drink with passion fruit, lime, and grapefruit soda.

Eos & Nyx is a place with big design goals, plus food and drink ambitions to match. Together, it creates a moment of play, whether gazing through the canopy of tree leaves or watching liquor bottles spin through two floors. “With a lot of our projects, a big goal is always a sense of discovery,” Basile says. “Every time you go somewhere [we designed], we try to have different types of seating, different areas to enjoy the different experiences.”

Eos & Nyx (201 South Second Street, Suite 120, San Jose) debuts on Wednesday, November 20, and is open from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Brunch hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday.