Pashote’s Central Market/Kozy Kitchen Restaurant



Earlier than the late 1950s, before the construction of the highway we call Interstate 880, Main Street was known as the Oakland-San Jose Road and was the main route between those cities. The main route west was the Alviso Road (now Serra Street). A few hundred feet north was the intersection of a dusty gravel road called Calaveras Road. Its name came from the Calaveras Valley (meaning "place of skulls" for the many animal bones found there by the Spanish explorers) on the other side of the hills to the east of Milpitas. The road ran along the north side of Los Coches Creek, the source of water for Alviso Adobe. This road was the main route into the mountains and the many farms of the Calaveras Valley beyond. We call that old eastward route Calaveras Road. today. It was around these two important trade route crossroads that Milpitas grew up over the course of a century to provide travelers with the services they needed.

When this building was constructed is uncertain but a Sanborn Fire Insurance map of downtown Milpitas dating from 1893 shows a "Lodge Hall" on this site and the timber construction under the stucco was typical of that of the late nineteenth century. The first owner we have a record of was Joseph Pashote (pronounced Pah-shoat).

The Pashotes were an early Portugese immigrant family descended from Joseph Pashote (in the orginal Portugese it was spelled Peixotto). He came from the Azores Islands in the 1880s to settle in the Warm Springs/Irvington area to the north of Milpitas in the present city of Fremont.

In 1908, Pashote came to Milpitas. He bought a store and a barbershop for his sons, one of whom, Johnny Edward Pashote, enlisted in the US Army in WWI. This young man was one of four brave Milpitas boys who died in the Great War and Pashote Street is named after him.

His brother, Joaquim "Jack" Pashote, opened a meat market at this location. The name of the store, “Central Market”, can be read at the entrance to the building imbedded in the threshhold cement. In the late 1930s, Mamie Moretti moved in for a short time with the first beauty shop in Milpitas. After Mamie moved her business south on Main Street, Magdalina Pashote Carlo (sister of Jack Pashote) and her daughter Mary Carlo Valencia (pronounced Vuh-lench) ran a dressmaker's shop there.

In the early 1940s, Alfred and Josephine Simas Carlo bought the market from Al's uncle Jack Pashote and changed the business into a restaurant to serve the motorists traveling from San Jose to Oakland along Main Street. Al did the cooking and Josie waited upon the customers.

In 1999, the historic restaurant was closed and sold by Jim Carlo, son of Al and Josie. The new owners demolished it in 2000 to make room for new development but the antique neon sign that hung over the entrance for half a century now belongs to the Milpitas Historical Society. Today, the site is still vacant pending development.  For over fifty years, the Kozy Kitchen served meals in the old roadhouse tradition of good food and lots of it. 

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