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At long last, a restaurateur has signed on to open a cafe at the Allied Arts Guild, whose owner has been trying since early this year to find someone to feed guests and tenants at the historic Menlo Park complex.
Nir and Ayellet Perry are hoping to open the Red Currant cafe in late October, according to Vicki Kojola of the Allied Arts Guild.
The cafe will be open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
The Perrys currently have a catering business, Ms. Kojola said.
The restaurant space at Allied Arts has been vacant since the end of February. That’s when the Palo Alto Auxiliary, a nonprofit whose volunteer members ran a restaurant serving lunch there for 75 years, closed because the Guild’s owner wouldn’t renew the lease.
At the time, the Allied Arts Guild owner, the nonprofit Woodside-Atherton Auxiliary, said it was trying to bring in a professional restaurateur to generate more business and be open longer hours.
But the near-deal with local restaurateur Jesse Cool to open a restaurant and move the bulk of her catering business to Allied Arts fell through last spring. Although neither party would elaborate on the reason for the failure to seal a deal, neighbors cited use-permit issues that would have greatly limited what a catering business could do on the premises, and Ms. Cool cited a “misunderstanding in the use permit.”
In keeping with the terms of the auxiliary’s use permit for the complex, the Red Currant won’t be serving dinner.
Both the Palo Alto and the Woodside-Atherton auxiliaries raise money for the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. Allied Arts has generated funds over the years through operation of the restaurant and the Traditional Shop, which also closed in February and was also run by volunteers.
Revenue is also generated by leasing space to small shops and artists, but some fear that the tenants may not survive if the number of visitors to Allied Arts doesn’t increase. Tenants have reported a significant drop in foot traffic and business since the restaurant’s closure.
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