.Mother Lode: Mining for Traces of Trine’s Café

When it comes to legacy businesses, the ghost of Trine can be found in the farthest reaches of San Jose, from the South Side to downtown.

Trine first opened a roadside diner in 1970. It looked like an old-school truck stop along Monterey Highway—way, way down there, as the urbanists might say.

That building is gone with the wind, but over the decades, the business grew elsewhere. At one point in the 1990s, there were seven Trine’s Cafes. Now after 55 years, we are down to only two: Trine’s Café #3 at 995 S. First St, and another one at a different “out-there” spot on Monterey Highway, right where Chynoweth becomes Roeder. The empire has dwindled but Trine’s remains a true survivor, even if Trine herself is no longer with us.

I recently slithered into #3 for a plate of food around lunchtime. The music store next door—Trine’s Records and Video—was long gone, but #3 looked similar to what I remembered. The exterior of the building was the same beautifully janky old thing, gray and dated and fading in all the right ways. The sign outside had clearly seen better days, but it was like an old barfly, an old friend I hadn’t seen in years, perhaps decades. You just show up and he’s always there. Fantastic.

Within seconds of me sitting down, the server and I were discussing the long-gone Trine’s Café #2, next door to the Jose Theater, right where the ticket office of The Improv now sits. I remembered it perfectly. There was a bar, a few scattered tables and a few drunks howling along to Vicente Fernandez tracks at 10am. A gorgeous hole in the wall, a living throwback to the old downtown, before $25 cocktails and hipsters with their pants on backwards.

Turned out my server had worked there too.

“I was 14,” she told me. “I went to Peter Burnett Middle School and then I’d walk down Second Street to go to work.”

It went away in the early 2000s. Fat cat landlords were conspiring to destroy half of Second Street, but Mayor Ron Gonzalez and the preservationists helped save the Jose Theater, eventually converting it into The Improv Comedy Club. Which meant Trine’s #2 was doomed.

But that wasn’t the only Trine’s downtown. There was another one around the corner on San Fernando, just to the east of Twice Read Books, whatever decade that was, I’m not exactly sure.

Trine’s #3, though, when I recently slithered in, didn’t look that much different. As I finished my plate, the cheerful old-timer at the corner barstool finished his beer and grabbed his walker to make his way toward the door, right as his friends brought a van outside to pick him up. There was a TV in the corner playing Spanish-language videos. The other employee, remote in hand, then began resetting the playlist. Everyone seemed to know each other.

After my tacos, I became obsessed with the ghosts, as one tended to do around here, so a couple days later, I made it all the way down to the extremities of Monterey Highway to the pleasantly decrepit “Edenvale Shopping Center,” where a faded Catholic church crammed into the corner was the only highlight—one of those “how on earth?” juxtapositions that made one scratch his head. If it wasn’t for the VTA 68, you’d think this stretch of Monterey really was “out there where the buses don’t run.” It had that kind of nowhereland feel to it. 

The diamond in the rough was Trine’s Café #6, the only other one left. It was right there, surrounded by hair salons, a Mexican grocery, a liquor store and an abandoned pho restaurant. Inside, old-school booths hugged the wall. Tables were scattered around the room. A separate party area was in the back. Then, I spotted a masterpiece above the seating: an artist’s mural of the original Trine’s Café, the roadside eatery that started it all in 1970.

The woman said to sit anywhere, so I did, and immediately began asking questions.

“Trine was my mother,” she told me.

At that point, I didn’t even need the church outside. I was already home.