Walk to the corner of West Main Street and North Santa Cruz Avenue and look up. For seven years, the arched windows above the old Los Gatos Bar & Grill stayed dark while everything below them kept moving. This month, three separate businesses share that same stretch of the historic La Cañada Building, and a fourth is opening two blocks away in a space that spent most of this year vacant too. If you've walked past this corner regularly, you already sense something has shifted. What's less obvious is who's behind it, and that detail changes how you should read the whole story.
A Building That Doesn't Fill Easily
The La Cañada Building isn't just old, it's the anchor of the town's entire Historic Commercial District. Built in three phases between 1891 and 1905, it started as the Hofstra Block, named for Dutch immigrant Sake Althoons Hofstra, and picked up its current name later when new owners renamed it after the Spanish word for canyon. The circular corner turret with its "witch hat" roof is one of the most photographed features in downtown Los Gatos, so recognizable that the town's Chamber of Commerce still uses a version of it as a logo. The building survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake without much damage, then took a real hit in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, badly enough that roughly thirty businesses had to relocate while it was restored.
That history matters here because a building this central rarely sits vacant for long, which is exactly why the second floor's seven-year gap is worth noticing. When Los Gatos Bar & Grill closed, the upstairs space stayed empty long enough that most people stopped expecting anyone to take it on.
Three Tenants, One Very Patient Building
Someone finally did, and not alone. Second Story opened on the building's second floor late last year, and Petals Creamery took the ground-floor space below it this summer. The last piece of that puzzle, Heritage Pub and Chop House, is doing its soft launch for friends and family in mid-September, with a full public opening by the end of the month, which means it's opening its doors right now.
Heritage Pub and Chop House comes from Walker and Kristi Pearce-Percy, a husband-and-wife pair who both grew up in Los Gatos. Walker graduated from Los Gatos High School in the class of '97 before joining the military, and he now flies for United Airlines while serving in the Air Force Reserve. Kristi runs an architecture firm and was actually approached about using this same building for her office years ago, an idea that eventually turned into the restaurant plan instead, developed with Executive Chef Yvonne Khananis, who owns Polenteria just downstairs. The menu leans into classic pub fare from Ireland, England, and Scotland, fish and chips, shepherd's pie, bangers and mash, alongside American staples, and the space itself is designed around heritage walls where customers can display items connected to the town's history.
| Location | Business | Status |
|---|---|---|
| La Cañada Building, ground floor | Petals Creamery | Opened summer 2026 |
| La Cañada Building, second floor | Second Story | Opened late 2025 |
| La Cañada Building, second floor (former LGBG space) | Heritage Pub and Chop House | Soft launch mid-September 2026, full opening by month's end |
| 25 E. Main St. | New Greek-Anatolian restaurant | Opening this fall in the former Sidecar Modern Tavern space |
| 11 College Ave | Dar Restaurant and Bar | Opened spring 2026 |
The Same Pattern Two Doors Down
The La Cañada Building isn't an isolated case. A few doors away at 25 E. Main Street, chef Coskun Abik is building out a Greek-Anatolian restaurant in the space most recently occupied by Sidecar Modern Tavern. Abik isn't new to the Bay Area food scene: he's the chef behind Blind Butcher SF in the Castro, Dunya Bistro, and Moka Coffee SF, and his lease on the Los Gatos space started in August. It will be the second Mediterranean-focused restaurant to open on that stretch of Main this year, following Dar Restaurant and Bar, opened this spring by brothers Milad and Esam Shaqir near College Avenue.
Abik has described the appeal of the space directly: "It's a great opportunity to bring a couple of my touches." He's also been clear that his concept won't overlap with Dar's despite the shared cuisine category, pointing to the different regional ingredients each kitchen draws from.
What connects Heritage Pub and Chop House to Abik's new spot and to Dar isn't the food, it's who's doing the opening. None of these are outside chains testing the market. They're operators with either deep roots in Los Gatos specifically or years of proven track records in Bay Area kitchens, choosing to put that experience into buildings that had sat empty or changed hands multiple times.
Why That Distinction Matters Here
Los Gatos has a documented preference for exactly this kind of tenant. Mayor Rob Moore has said as much publicly: "Historically, Los Gatos did not let very many chains come into town," a stance he's described as generally a good thing for the character of downtown, even as he acknowledges some larger stores now help draw people back to a Main Street that has to compete with shifting shopping habits. The businesses filling La Cañada's long-empty floor and the Main Street storefront near it fit the pattern the town has favored for decades: known names, family history, and enough runway to commit to a building that already asked a lot of patience from its previous tenants.
For residents, that's the useful signal buried in what looks like a routine string of restaurant openings. A chain filling a vacant storefront tells you the address works financially. A local chef or a family with three decades of history in town choosing that same address tells you something closer to who this street is actually for.
The Weekend to See It Yourself
The timing lines up well if you want to walk the corner in person. Two events are converging on downtown this month:
- Los Gatos Art & Wine Festival (Fiesta de Artes): September 26 and 27, 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., on the Civic Center Lawn. This is the festival's 54th year, put on by the Kiwanis Club of Los Gatos since 1971, and it's free to attend with proceeds going toward local scholarships and youth programs.
- Oktoberfest LG: hosted by KCAT TV and Radio, with the New Museum Los Gatos tabling from noon to 5 p.m. for a community art activity tied to the celebration.
Both events sit within easy walking distance of the La Cañada Building and the Main Street stretch where Abik's restaurant is going in, which makes this a reasonable weekend to combine an afternoon at the festival with a first look at what's opened on the corner you've been walking past for years.
The story here isn't that downtown Los Gatos added a few restaurants this fall. It's that the town's most stubborn vacancy and one of its most visible storefronts both got claimed by people with a real stake in getting it right, which says more about where downtown is headed than any single opening could on its own.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth, or wondering how commercial vacancy patterns like this one tend to ripple into residential demand nearby, that's exactly the kind of neighborhood-level read Michelle Kennedy works through with clients across Santa Clara County every week. Let's talk about your home, schedule a personal consultation whenever you're ready.
