The Building Los Gatos Watched Sit Empty for Seven Years Just Filled Up With Three Tenants

For seven years, the second story of the La Cañada Building sat vacant. The turret at the corner of West Main and North Santa Cruz Avenue, the one that shows up on Chamber of Commerce letterhead and half the postcards ever sold downtown, kept its shape. Everything below it kept moving. Everything above it stayed dark.

That changed this year, and not by accident. Heritage Pub & Chop House has opened upstairs in the space that last held Los Gatos Bar & Grill, the nightclub known around town as LGBG, vacant for the seven years since it closed. Downstairs in the same building, Second Story opened in late 2025 and Petals Creamery followed this past summer. Three tenants filled one address inside of a year, after seven years of nothing.

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you just count the storefronts: none of the people filling them are strangers to this town. That's the actual story. Downtown Los Gatos isn't being discovered by outside money looking for a wealthy suburb to plant a flag in. It's being refilled by people who already had a stake here, moving one door down from where they started.

The Building Came Back on Its Own Terms

Heritage's owners, Walker and Kristi Pearce-Percy, are both Los Gatos natives. Walker graduated from Los Gatos High in the class of 1997, then went on to the Air Force Academy, flew C-5 cargo planes, and eventually commanded a 155-person squadron before returning to civilian life as a United Airlines pilot who still flies Reserve missions out of Travis Air Force Base. He's also on the board of the Veterans Memorial & Support Foundation, the group working to place a Flame of Liberty Memorial in town, and he's the point of contact for the annual 9/11 ceremony at the Civic Center.

Kristi runs an architecture firm, Cuschieri Horton Architects, and was actually approached about using the La Cañada space for her own office nearly a decade ago. That plan fell through. It resurfaced later as a restaurant idea, built with her friend Yvonne Khananis, the chef who already owns Polenteria one floor down in the same building. A remodel that started in August 2024 turned into a full menu built around fish and chips, shepherd's pie, bangers and mash, and corned beef and cabbage, alongside American chophouse standards. The finished space holds a 96-foot bar, a banquet room, a back patio, and a game hall with shuffleboard and arcade machines, enough capacity for 180 people. The Pearce-Percys have said the goal was to build heritage walls where regulars can display items tied to the town's own history, a nod to the fact that the space itself was once the meeting house for the Odd Fellows Lodge in the early 1800s.

That's not a franchise playbook. That's two people who grew up here putting their own names on a building they walked past their whole lives.

One Block Over, the Same Pattern Repeats

Walk east on Main Street and the pattern holds. Dar Restaurant and Bar opened this spring in a historic downtown building, run by brothers Milad and chef Esam Shaqir, who grew up in the Middle East and had already built a following at their existing restaurant in Saratoga before deciding to bring the concept across the hill. Dar's menu draws from the Levant, Italy, and Morocco, served in a dining room and patio with a fireplace.

A few doors down at 25 East Main Street, the space that most recently held Sidecar Modern Tavern is becoming a Greek-Anatolian restaurant from chef Coskun Abik, whose other Bay Area projects include Blind Butcher SF, Dunya Bistro, and Moka Coffee SF. His lease began in August. He's described his approach as a lighter, olive-oil-and-Maras-pepper take that sits next to Dar's bolder Middle Eastern flavors rather than competing directly with it, the same way regions of Greece and Italy can share a table without repeating each other.

Here's the shape of the last twelve months on those two blocks:

Four addresses, four operators, and every one of them either grew up in Los Gatos, already runs a business one floor away, or had already proven a concept in a neighboring town before bringing it here. That's a different kind of downtown turnover than a national brand signing a fifteen-year lease because a real estate broker flagged the demographics.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

If you've lived here long enough to remember when that second-story window was just a place that collected flyers, the practical read is simple. The town's civic calendar hasn't changed. What's changed is what's open on the walk between one event and the next.

The next few weeks give you a reason to test that theory. Taste of Los Gatos runs Saturday, September 19, from noon to 5 p.m., a downtown food-and-drink event rather than a park event, which fits the direction the whole district has been moving. The Los Gatos Art & Wine Festival, still widely known by its original name, Fiesta de Artes, returns to the Civic Center lawn the last weekend of the month, put on as it has been since 1971 by the Kiwanis Club of Los Gatos, with more than 150 vendors, food, wine, and live music across both days. If you want one more low-key test walk before the season ends, GOLD Thursday, the town's monthly Entertainment Zone activation that lets adults 21 and up carry a drink between participating downtown businesses, runs its final date of the year on the first Thursday of October.

None of that is new information if you've lived here through a full summer. What's new is that a walk between those events now passes a building that spent seven years being the one dark window on an otherwise busy block, and currently doesn't have a vacant storefront in sight on that stretch of Santa Cruz and Main.

The easy version of this story is that Los Gatos has a hot restaurant scene right now. The more useful version, if you're the one living here and deciding where to eat on a Thursday, is that the people filling these spaces aren't hedging a bet on a market they researched from outside. They're finishing something they started years ago, one building over from where they already had a stake.

For more on what's happening in the neighborhoods around Los Gatos, our Los Gatos neighborhood guide covers the areas feeding into this same downtown corridor. If you're weighing whether now's the moment to make a move of your own, whether that's toward this block or away from it, the Bouja & Swenson Group can walk you through what a home near this stretch of downtown is actually worth in the version of Los Gatos that's emerging this fall. Reach out for a free market analysis when you're ready to talk specifics.