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Public View The simple pleasure of sipping from a bustling city sidewalk By Richard von Busack The Shark & Rose 69 N. San Pedro St, San Jose, 408.287.6969 THIS PUB is one of the few places in the Santa Clara Valley where you can sit at café tables and watch people walk by as you have a beer. Drinking beer while the sun is still high is the best and most harmless of all guilty pleasures, and on the edge of midsummer there's still a lot of the day left when 5pm rolls around. The Shark & Rose has not only sidewalk tables but also an interesting street to place them on. The pub is across from a sizable parking garage, so there's an unusual amount of pedestrian traffic for downtown San Jose. In come wiped-out conventioneers, lawyers and clerks from the county courthouse--out of the jailhouse and into the alehouse--locals who pile in for the 4 to 6pm happy hour on weekdays and a supper of the excellent fish and chips. Hockey-heads also pour in on their way to the Arena. Despite the proximity to the Shark Tank, proprietor Rich Bergin gave the pub its name. Bergin was a seafood dealer who used to be a "dock shark" negotiating with the wholesale fishermen at Half Moon Bay; his wife and co-founder, Rose, also lent her name to the pub. On tap are Golden Pacific brews house-branded for the Shark & Rose (Rosy's True Blonde Lager and Rich's Deficit Red Ale). The pub pours Anderson Valley's ESB, likely the best extra-special bitter on the West Coast; Sierra Nevada's India Pale Ale; Anchor's Old Foghorn Barleywine, a sweet, high-octane dessert ale; and two flavors of Chimay from Belgium. The Shark & Rose hasn't been downtown for long, but they run the place so well you'd think it had been an institution for decades. [ Bars & Clubs Index | San Jose | Metroactive Central | Archives ]