Adega, which means wine cellar in Portuguese, opened in 2015 in the Alum Rock district's Little Portugal neighborhood. The restaurant offered a tasting menu approach to Portuguese cuisine, elevating traditional dishes with modern technique while maintaining respect for the flavors and ingredients of the Iberian Peninsula. The Michelin star, awarded in the first year that the guide expanded its Bay Area coverage to include San Jose, validated what the restaurant's regulars already knew: that the cooking at Adega was at a level that could compete with any fine dining establishment in the region.

In mid-2023, the owners announced that Adega would close at the end of the year, to be replaced by a second location of Petiscos, a more casual Portuguese restaurant featuring the same chefs. The closure seemed like the end of San Jose's Michelin-star chapter. But the story took another turn when ownership was transferred in October 2024, and the new owners announced that Adega would reopen the following month. The reopening preserved the restaurant's identity while beginning a new chapter under fresh leadership, a trajectory that mirrors the Little Portugal neighborhood itself, a community that has adapted and reinvented while maintaining its cultural roots.

The neighborhood that surrounds Adega tells a larger story about San Jose's immigrant communities. Portuguese settlers, many from the Azores, established themselves in the Alum Rock area beginning in the early twentieth century. The neighborhood developed its own bakeries, markets, social halls, and churches, creating a Portuguese cultural enclave within the larger city. That a Michelin-starred restaurant emerged from this neighborhood was both surprising and entirely logical: the tradition of Portuguese cooking runs deep here, and Adega simply refined what generations of home cooks and neighborhood restaurants had been doing for decades.