Santa Clara County suspended the health permit for Terra, the rooftop restaurant on the third floor of Eataly Silicon Valley in San Jose, on Friday. A building-wide inspection found no rodents and closed only Terra's floor while the rest of the food hall kept serving.

Terra — the rooftop restaurant and bar on the third floor of Eataly Silicon Valley in San Jose — stopped serving Friday after Santa Clara County suspended its health permit for vermin, as first reported by KRON4 (external source, opens in a new tab). Of every tenant inside the Italian food hall at 2855 Stevens Creek Boulevard, Terra is the only one ordered to close.

The sequence is the part worth slowing down on. Per KRON4, a public complaint prompted the county's Department of Environmental Health to inspect the entire Eataly building. Inspectors turned up no evidence of rodents anywhere in the facility. What they documented was vermin confined to the third floor — Terra's floor — and that finding alone triggered the order. Everything beneath it kept running: the marketplace, the counters, the rest of the operation.

A word on sourcing. The county's account of the Terra inspection has reached us only through KRON4's reporting, which credited the Department of Environmental Health without naming an individual spokesperson. To confirm the machinery behind the order, The Dissent went to the county's own enforcement records.

Those records are public. The county's SCCDineOut closure database (external source, opens in a new tab), run out of the Department of Environmental Health at 1555 Berger Drive in San Jose, logs every food-facility closure in the county — 206 in the last six months. A red closure placard is the most severe outcome on the county's scale, reserved for a room an inspector judges an immediate hazard that can't be corrected during the visit; the doors stay shut until a follow-up inspection clears every flagged item. That tracks the path KRON4 reported for Terra: management told inspectors it had already run pest control, was scrubbing and sanitizing the space, and had thrown out food that could have been exposed. No reinspection date had been set as of Friday.

As of the database's latest update — current through Aug. 13, the day before Terra went dark — the restaurant had not yet posted to the closure list, consistent with a Friday suspension. But the pattern around it is written into the county's own records. The database shows a steady run of South Bay closures this summer flagged for contamination from vermin: PF Chang's at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto (closed July 20, reopened July 21), the Olive Garden at Eastridge in San Jose (July 24 to July 27), and four more San Jose rooms — Erawan Thai, Fred's Burger, Round Table Pizza #46 and Tulum Mexican Kitchen — all placarded on Aug. 13 alone. In July, The Dissent documented nine South Bay businesses on the same ledger.

Terra is a different kind of address. It is the marquee seat in the building — a wood-fired grill and cocktail lounge spread across a broad rooftop patio, running brunch, lunch and dinner plus a tableside gelato cart, per the restaurant's own listing (external source, opens in a new tab) and its OpenTable page (external source, opens in a new tab). Pulling its permit means closing the table the whole floor at Westfield Valley Fair is built around. A rooftop lounge is a long way from a corner taqueria, and that is the point: the county closed the best table in the house.