Lip Smacking Foodie Tours introduces its award-winning culinary experience to San Jose’s upscale Santana Row in the heart of Silicon Valley. This open-air, European-style piazza encompassing trendy restaurants, retail shops, tech companies, a boutique hotel, movie theater and luxurious residences, attracts 12 million visitors annually—making it an ideal place to launch the Lip Smacking Foodie Tour experience. The company’s arrival in San Jose marks the first time the innovative tour operator is expanding its reach beyond Las Vegas, where it has risen to rank among the destination’s top tour companies in just four years and maintains a 5.0-rating on TripAdvisor.

“Establishing a presence in the global hub of technology and innovation is a perfect fit for our pioneering company, which disrupted the traditional Las Vegas restaurant scene by creating a genuinely VIP-style dining tourism experience,” says Donald Contursi, founder, Lip Smacking Foodie Tours. “Our tours whisk patrons immediately past lines and velvet ropes to exclusive tables at the most sought-after restaurants, where guests savor a variety of specially presented signature dishes and cocktails for an experience that is as entertaining as it is delectable.”

Each Lip Smacking Foodie Tour includes visits at up to four restaurants, with each restaurant presenting an array of its most distinctive dishes to all guests. Cocktail packages enable guests to indulge in signature cocktails at each stop along the way. The Santana Row experience is enjoyable for everyone from solo travelers who enjoy meeting and dining with new friends to corporate groups of up to 100 participants.

The Santana Row Lip Smacking Foodie Tour visits four different restaurants in one fun-filled outing that includes personalized service without the hassle of making reservations. Restaurants include:

  • LB Steak – The glamorous modern American steakhouse by James Beard Award-winning chef Roland Passot spotlighting Japanese Wagyu, certified prime Angus and sustainable seafood.
  • Left Bank Brasserie– Passot’s bistro serving classic French dishes bringing a taste of Paris to Silicon Valley.
  • Ozumo– The second location of the original San Francisco izakaya founded by New York-native Jeremy Umland who played professional baseball in the Japanese Pacific League, which specializes in contemporary Japanese small plates.
  • EMC Seafood & Raw Bar– Lines here are constant because this wildly popular establishment takes no reservations; diners cannot get enough of the impeccable seafood served in an array of Asian-inflected dishes.

An expert guide leads the tour, offering not only eye-opening details about the restaurants visited, but also enlightening insight into the “hidden’’ art found throughout Santana Row of which even few natives are aware. Points of interest include the Lee de Forest Building honoring the San Jose inventor of the vacuum tube in 1906, which made radio broadcasting, long-distance telephone lines and motion pictures with sound possible. Also a focal point is the art installation “Tabula Selenographica,’’ by French artist Christine Foulche, which can be found in the ceiling of one of the promenades and depicts 28 lunar phases of the moon as viewed through a telescope.