Just when we thought things were looking up in downtown San Jose came the news Monday that Mama Kin, the restaurant and music venue in the arty South First Area (SoFA), was shutting its doors after 2½ years in business.

“If there was more I could give there would be no need for this post,” owner Andrew Saman said in an Instagram post. “However, we must face the reality that some things are just out of our control.”

When Saman took over what had been Cafe Stritch in June 2022, he had plans to create a music-driven venue that would also become a dining destination for downtown.

Andrew Saman, co-owner of Mama Kin, on the restaurant and music venue’s first day of operation in downtown San Jose on Friday, June 6, 2022. (Sal Pizarro/Bay Area News Group) 

Over the years, the tunes reverberating against the brick walls hit more genres than you’d think: soul and salsa, R&B and straight-up jazz. There were popular country music nights on Thursdays, and the audience got its chance at the mic on karaoke Wednesdays. The menu leaned on Southern faves like a gooey mac and cheese and shrimp and grits to go with your standard burgers and wings.

It’s a sobering reminder that despite downtown San Jose’s much-ballyhooed nighttime rebound, keeping a bar, restaurant and music venue alive is no sure thing. And losing a place where people can hear or perform live music is a body blow to the vibrancy everyone seems to want downtown. In his very philosophical post, Saman said he hopes the space on South First Street — which has a lineage going back to 1977 as Eulipia restaurant — is not quiet long.

“Hopefully there’s a brave soul willing to continue the fight to keep the Arts alive in this iconic building,” he wrote. “Arts are the true language of an authentic humanity. To the warriors of heart the world needs you now more than ever.”

POETIC MOONSHOOT: If all goes well, former Santa Clara County Poet Laureate Sally Ashton will be able to say her poetry is really out of this world. One of her poems was selected to be part of the Lunar Codex, a project to send cultural artifacts from all over the globe to the moon.

Her contribution will be part of a payload aboard three 2025 flights — with the first scheduled to launch Tuesday night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida — that will spend three days traveling to the moon, then make orbits over several days before attempting a soft lunar landing. Her poem is etched on a nickel-plated nanofiche along with thousands of other works from artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians that are part of the project.

The Lunar Codex was created by Samuel Peralta, a physicist and author, who came up with the idea of sharing our collective creativity with the heavens during the dark days of the pandemic lockdowns. There are seven time capsules with the work of more than 40,000 humans representing 259 countries around the world, and three already have been launched.

Ashton, whose poem was selected via an online contest in 2022, was pinching herself after registering as a virtual guest with NASA to watch the launch and has her fingers crossed for a successful mission. “How crazy is that?” she said.

HELP WANTED: Santa Clara County’s point-in-time count of unhoused residents is scheduled to happen next week — on Wednesday, Jan. 22 and Thursday, Jan. 23 — and county officials are looking for volunteers to help with the effort.

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Volunteers, organized into groups of three to five people with experienced team leaders, will observe and interview unhoused people. You don’t need experience, and training is available. And if you’re a volunteer who has been homeless yourself, you’ll receive a $150 gift card for each day you participate. Sign up at santaclara.pointintime.info, and email any questions to [email protected].

The PIT Count — also known as the Santa Clara County Homeless Census and Survey — is really important because one of the first steps in helping people who are living unsheltered on our streets is to know just how many of those people there are. And since it’s widely believed that these counts are always on the low side, more volunteers should translate to more people being counted accurately.