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Owners and staff at the more than two dozen restaurants in City Center Bishop Ranch are preparing to highlight their dishes and drinks this month as Taste City Center returns with more offerings than ever.
City Center’s annual restaurant week is expanding into a 10-day extravaganza in 2025, with multiple new tenants seeking to make their mark on new customers and the shopping center’s mainstays seeking to remind diners of what makes them staple destinations.
“It’s been a very wild ride at City Center, and we’re really excited about these events, because I think it makes a lot of sense – it attracts new people, we’re talking customers as well as everyone looking for something new. So I think this restaurant week is going to be very, very exciting,” Social Affair owner Maya Daneshwar said.
While City Center has seen waves of new restaurants with bars over the years, Daneshwar and co-owner Gunjan Madan noted that Social Affair continues to be the primary watering hole of the shopping center, a role it has served for more than five years as one of its original tenants.
Given that, it only makes sense for Social Affair to be spearheading this year’s new cocktail competition on the first Sunday, in which tenants from throughout City Center will send over their top bartenders for what Daneshwar described as a blind competition, in which “you won’t know whose bartender is making what”.
“We’re just thrilled that we’re the ones hosting it, especially since we are the only bar – everyone has a bar, but we are the bar,” Daneshwar said.
For their part, Daneshwar and Mandan said they are already looking toward making the cocktail competition a regular part of the annual event.
“If this works out this year, then we’ve said we should probably make this a yearly affair where we host this and have people come and enjoy the vibe,” Daneshwar said.
While Social Affair has made its mark as one of City Center’s longest-standing tenants, Daneshwar and Madan said that it has been a rocky road given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic that kicked off just a year after the center’s opening – making events such as Taste City Center all the more important.
“It has been a difficult year actually,” Daneshwar said. “The prices have literally gone up almost double for things that we need to run.”
Regardless, Daneshwar said that one type of customer has remained steady over the years, solo women – a testament, she said, to the bar’s efforts to create a comfortable yet classy atmosphere.
While noting that customers might not be aware the Social Affair is one of City Center’s only small, women-owned businesses in addition to being its only official bar, Maneshwar said that factors into the experience that keeps customers coming back.
“They definitely feel it, because when we started this place the whole idea was to extend our living room to everyone, so that’s how people should feel when they come in,” Daneshwar said. “They’re supposed to feel welcome whenever we’re here. We have a ton of people come on their own, come sit with a book.”
With City Center’s roster having grown over the years, Daneshwar said that there will be more offerings than ever for this year’s event.
“We have Mediterranean, we have Indian, we have Italian fusion – so there’s a lot of variety and cultural options that you’ll be able to experience.
Among those dining options is Slanted Door, another original tenant of City Center, with the space designed in partnership by its late chef Charles Phan, whose untimely death at the age of 61 earlier this year left a void in the Bay Area fine dining scene – and sparked a renewed appreciation for his legacy.
“I live in Danville, and I see more and more regulars that are coming into Slanted – more and more people coming out this way,” general manager Bobby Quintong said.
While Slanted Door and Social Affair were both significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic during their first years of operation at City Center, Quintong said he was optimistic about the future and that business overall – and restaurant week in particular – has been improving exponentially over the years.
“Every year it gets better and better and better,” Quintong said. “First restaurant week was OK. After that it was starting to boom, boom, boom.”
Slanted Door is set to offer half-off appetizers for the duration of Taste City Center, making a taste of Phan’s famous Vietnamese-Californian fusion style all the more accessible, even for those who might not typically seek out a fine dining experience.
“It’s Vietnamese food, California-created, local, non-GMO, a lot of our produce is all organic, and once you get that fish sauce and that umami it hooks them in every time,” Quintong said.
In addition to the longstanding offerings at Social Affair and Slanted Door, this year’s Taste City Center is set to serve as an opportunity for its new additions to deepen their connections with local diners. These include the Mediterranean fusion restaurant Alora Social and Indian fusion restaurant Khaki, a more formal reinvention from the owners of Curry Up Now in its former space.
Taste City Center runs from this Friday (Sept. 19) through next Sunday (Sept. 28), with the cocktail competition scheduled for Sunday (Sept. 21) from 5-7 p.m. at Social Affair. The festivities conclude with the wine tasting event September Sips on Sept. 28 from 2-4:30 p.m.
Reservations and more information are available at sr.bishopranch.com.
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