|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
When Joanna Martinez first went to Dashi Japanese Restaurant in Menlo Park 21 years ago, it was bustling.
Martinez quickly learned that if she and her co-workers didn’t arrive promptly at 11:30 a.m. from their warehouse around the corner, they would face a 30-minute wait. The restaurant, owned by John Bek, was “always packed, always booked.”
“We looked forward to sitting at the bar because I like talking to John … but everybody was super kind,” Martinez said. What began as a place to grab lunch with her colleagues became Martinez’s venue of choice for special occasions. “That’s where we would celebrate,” she said.
read related articles
Meta halts $3.5B project, leaving Belle Haven empty-handed
Meta’s footprint in Menlo Park is shrinking
The 26-year-old establishment will permanently shut its doors on July 3, two months after Meta’s property management team informed Bek that his lease would be terminated in 60 days.
Dashi sits near the intersection of Willow Road and Hamilton Avenue in a strip mall across the street from Meta’s sprawling corporate headquarters. Aside from national chains Starbucks and Jack in the Box, it is the oldest restaurant in the Meta-owned mall, which the tech company bought to use in the now-halted Willow Village. The shopping plaza also includes restaurants Mi Taqueria, HAJI’S Restaurant, and SAJJ Mediterranean.
Bek, the third owner of Dashi, acquired the restaurant 23 years ago. When he took over, he said he made efforts to talk to his customers and forge personal relationships with them. He felt confident that his approachable personality would set him up for success.
“John tries to make everybody that comes into his restaurant feel like they’re in a friend’s house,” said Rudy Torres, a longtime customer. “He’s always very welcoming to everyone that comes into his restaurant. He knows everybody by first name, even families, fathers, mothers, children.”
Initially, Bek said 70% of his business came from corporate workers at nearby companies like Martinez coming for lunch. But the scene began to change 10 years ago when Meta purchased the complex and properties in its surrounding area.
Martinez said Bek made renovations — fixing the bathroom, upgrading the lighting and removing a divider in the middle of the restaurant — after Meta acquired the strip mall with the expectation that the company’s employees would become part of his clientele.
However, the tech giant’s presence has had the opposite effect. According to resident Chris Andrews, many office parks have been shuttered without being replaced after being bought by Meta. Andrews said that since he moved to the Willows neighborhood in 2010, the area has become less residential in favor of “people hurrying from point A to point B in their cars.” For him, these changes represent a larger trend: the “chain-ification” of Menlo Park that he says is institutionalizing the city and taking away from its “funky local character” as a smaller town in a big-city area.
Meta, then Facebook, relocated its headquarters to the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park from Palo Alto in 2011. Since moving into those 11 buildings — now known as the East campus — the company has had numerous expansions, many of which involved buying office buildings in the area.
“My customers, one by one, said, ‘Hey, well, you know, I can’t see you anymore because we’re not getting a lease renewal from Facebook,’” Bek said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’ but I didn’t notice an immediate impact because it was one company at a time.’”
Bek said even as business began to slow, he held on to hope after Dashi and the other restaurants in the complex were promised a spot in Meta’s Willow Village, an enormous mixed-use redevelopment.
Willow Village, which was first announced in 2017, called for 1.6 million square feet of new office space, over 1,700 housing units and up to 200,000 square feet of retail space. It was approved by the Menlo Park City Council in December 2022 after years and years of negotiations with the city.
On May 1, Meta announced they would be shelving the development indefinitely due to “changing market conditions.” Willow Village was expected to bring in significant revenue for the City along with affordable housing and other amenities to the historically underserved Belle Haven neighborhood.
Two days after Meta pulled the plug on Willow Village, Bek received the letter ending his lease.
Even before the project was suspended, Dashi had been struggling financially. Since 2024, the business has been losing money. In 2023, Bek said he made $13,000 before income tax. Yet he said he has not compromised his employees’s salaries.
“(Meta) did help us quite a bit in small ways, but when you take away 90% of your customers, there’s so little you can do about it,” Bek said.
Adam Alberti, a spokesperson for the Belle Haven Center, which is owned by Meta, said in a statement that the Center has voluntarily provided over $170,000 in financial relief to Dashi in recent years, and forgave lease obligations by allowing the business to remain on a “flexible” month-to-month lease with “discounted terms.”
“Despite the unprecedented financial assistance from the retail center, Dashi chose not to pay rent or meet basic lease obligations for long periods,” Alberti said in a statement. “We respectfully disagree with any characterization that this extensive, multi-year assistance constitutes mistreatment, and we wish Dashi’s and its owner the best in their future endeavors.”
Bek denied that he missed any payments and offered to provide his bank records as proof. “It’s been 100% paid,” he said, although he acknowledged that he sometimes made his payments late. In most of those cases, Bek said, he received permission to pay later.
He also said that CBRE Group Inc., Meta’s real estate partner that oversees his lease, never provided financial aid to him directly and only helped by lowering his rent during the pandemic.
Before receiving the letter on May 3, Bek told this news organization he made numerous attempts to speak with Meta and its real estate partners, including writing a letter to the property management team in March in which he said he would report his situation to the media. He said none of his attempts came to fruition.
“I lost millions and millions of dollars in cash,” Bek said. “We used to average about 200 to 250 transactions a day. (Now,) I’d be lucky if I get … 12.”
Loyal patrons are deeply upset by the loss of Dashi.
“It’s unfair for a small business owner like John to lose his bread and butter because this giant company can do whatever they want just because they’re able to,” said Jason Lee, who has been eating at the restaurant for 23 years.
Upon finding out the news, Martinez said she emailed Meta multiple times and posted on its platforms, Facebook and Instagram, in protest. “I’m disappointed because I feel like Meta has a responsibility to all those businesses there, and they’re not keeping their promise,” Martinez said.
Bek said what he wanted most was for Meta’s executives to hear him out.
“Tell Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Hey, give me one minute,’” Bek said. “I’ve lost everything. I got nothing else to lose at this point.”
Very sad day and news that Dashi is forced to closed its doors. I was customer at first but over the period of next few years became good fiends with a John for 20 years now. Long before Meta/Facebook was there. John is super funny and charismatic personality plus great sushi chef is a perfect recipe for a great dinner at Dashi. He would always go out of his way to treat his customers right and made special dishes that didn’t even exist on the menu. Interestingly on a recent trip to Hawaii I learned that locals and natives aren’t exactly happy Mark Zuckerberg bought a half an island for himself neither. There should be firm regulations in place not permitting these types of actions where super businesses and millionaires owners can simply erase one’s livelihood and change affect people’s life’s for worse. John didn’t deserve this and should have been grandfathered in his lease terms indefinitely.
I am incredibly saddened to hear that Dashi is closing. My family has been coming here for 15 years, and it has been such a special part of our lives— my kids literally grew up eating here. It is heartbreaking to see a local establishment that provided so much warmth and community be forced out by Meta.
Meta’s decision has needlessly destroyed the livelihood of a dedicated local business owner and unfortunately forced hard working staff to lose their jobs as well.
John, thank you for all the wonderful meals and for making us feel like family every time we walked through your doors. You and your team will be truly missed.
It is extremely sad to see this establishment close. We have been associated with Dashi for over 20 years. Three generations have enjoyed and shared with the owners and other customers.
It’s very unfortunate that Meta has decided to cancel the plans and expansions that they sold to the community. What comes next, we do not know. What we know is that we are heartbroken.
John and Sunny, thank you for everything you have done and shared with us. I hope and believe better things will come for you and our community.
We’ve been loyal patrons of Dashi since 2006. My son, who was born in 2004, grew up eating there, and it has always been his favorite Japanese restaurant because it was just a few blocks from our home. Over the last 20 years, we’ve celebrated birthdays, family dinners, and countless ordinary nights there. John has always made everyone feel welcome, and that’s something you can’t replace.
We’ve watched the neighborhood change from the pre-Meta days through all the development. Unfortunately, the promises of revitalization never seemed to benefit the longtime local businesses or many of the residents. Traffic became unbearable, and the character of the neighborhood gradually disappeared. We eventually sold our home in 2024 after living just six blocks away, in large part because the congestion had become so overwhelming.
It’s heartbreaking to see another longtime neighborhood business disappear. Whether or not there were financial challenges on either side, Dashi represented the kind of local, family-owned business that gave Menlo Park its identity. I hope this serves as a reminder that thriving communities need more than large corporate campuses—they also need the small businesses that make people want to call a neighborhood home.
I’ve always been a supporter of Facebook and Meta, but this is an area where they need to do better.
Being a good corporate neighbor means supporting the community that has supported your growth—not unintentionally pushing out the local businesses that give Menlo Park its character. Communities shouldn’t exist to serve Meta. Meta should also be serving the community it calls home.
From the outside, it feels like Meta’s real estate strategy has missed the mark. The integration between the company and the surrounding neighborhood has not produced the vibrant, mutually beneficial community that many hoped for. Perhaps the challenges are greater because the Belle Haven area had long been underserved, even before the days of Sun Microsystems. But that only makes community investment more important, not less.
Meta’s real estate management shouldn’t have complete control without stronger accountability to the surrounding community. There is a difference between acquiring property and building a neighborhood. Companies like Apple in Cupertino and Google in Mountain View have also faced criticism, but there are lessons to be learned from how they have integrated with their local communities while supporting nearby businesses and public spaces.
The closure of Dashi feels like a symptom of a broader problem. A 26-year local institution shouldn’t simply become another casualty of shifting corporate priorities.
Meta has the resources to be a model corporate neighbor. I hope its leadership takes notice, rethinks its approach, and works with—not around—the community. Do better, Meta!