Seven Years Empty, the La Cañada Building Is Finally Full Again

Kristi Pearce-Percy has run an architecture firm, not a restaurant. When she and her husband Walker started renovating the vacant second story of the La Cañada Building in August 2024, she said what stopped most people from doing this kind of thing was that they never grasped "how much goes along with it." A year of construction later, that stretch of Main Street is finally about to prove her right.

If you've walked past the La Cañada Building anytime in the last several years, you already know the space. It's the one with the dark windows above street level, the one that used to be Los Gatos Bar & Grill, a nightclub and restaurant everyone in town called LGBG. When LGBG closed, the second story went dark and stayed that way. Seven years is a long time for a storefront to sit empty on one of downtown's most recognizable buildings, in one of the busiest blocks of the Historic Commercial District. This month, it stops being empty. Heritage Pub and Chop House is holding a friends-and-family soft launch in mid-September, with a full public opening before the month is out.

A Slower Kind of Turnover

Most restaurant openings in a town like this happen fast. A concept works somewhere else, a lease gets signed, a space gets a coat of paint, and six months later there's a new sign out front. That is not what happened here.

Kristi and Walker Pearce-Percy are both Los Gatos natives. Almost a decade ago, Kristi was approached about using the second-story space for her architecture firm, Cuschieri Horton Architects. That plan fell through, but it stayed on her radar long enough that when the idea of a restaurant came up with her friend Yvonne Khananis, the space made sense again. Khananis already owns Polenteria, one floor down in the same building, and she's serving as Heritage's executive chef. Banners went up in the windows more than a year before opening. The remodel itself started in August 2024. By the time the doors open this month, the people behind Heritage will have spent longer building the restaurant than most restaurants in this town stay open before their first ownership change.

That timeline matters more than it looks like it does. A space that takes a year of planning and a year of construction to open isn't a placeholder. It's the kind of commitment that tends to explain why certain restaurants in a small downtown last twenty years and others don't make it to their second lease renewal.

The Building Filled In Before the Restaurant Did

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only notice the LGBG space: the rest of the La Cañada Building didn't wait around for Heritage to get its act together. Second Story, a separate business in the building, opened late last year. Petals Creamery moved in this summer, right below it. Add Polenteria, already established on another floor, and Heritage arriving last, and you get a building that's spent the past year quietly reassembling itself piece by piece rather than all at once.

That sequencing tells you something about how commercial space actually turns over in a historic downtown. It rarely happens the way people imagine it, with a landlord flipping a switch and every unit filling on the same afternoon. It happens unit by unit, sometimes over years, and the building doesn't feel "full" again until the last piece, often the hardest one to fill, finally lands.

The La Cañada Building's tenant roster now looks like this:

• Polenteria — Yvonne Khananis's existing restaurant, already open before this wave began
• Second Story — opened late last year
• Petals Creamery — opened this summer, on the floor below Second Story
• Heritage Pub and Chop House — soft launch mid-September 2026, full opening by the end of the month, in the space that sat vacant since LGBG closed

Heritage's menu leans into the pub's namesake with fish and chips, shepherd's pie, bangers and mash, and corned beef and cabbage, alongside American classics, a fitting fit for a building whose owners are trying to make something that feels permanent rather than trendy.

The Same Person, Two Different September Dates

Here's a detail worth sitting with. Walker Pearce-Percy graduated from Los Gatos High School with the class of '97, then went into the military and became a pilot. He left active duty in 2014, transitioned into the Air Force Reserve at Travis Air Force Base flying C-5s, and now also flies commercially for United Airlines. In 2018 he connected with the Veterans Memorial & Support Foundation, the group behind the Flame of Liberty Memorial at the Los Gatos Civic Center. He now sits on that board and serves as the point of contact for the town's annual 9/11 ceremony.

This year that ceremony fell on September 11, marking 25 years since the attacks, held at the Flame of Liberty Memorial on the Civic Center lawn. Three days later, Walker is putting the finishing touches on a restaurant that's been a year and a half in the making. Most Septembers in Los Gatos don't ask one person to organize a solemn civic memorial and open a pub in the same week. This one does, and it's a small reminder that the people filling in this stretch of downtown aren't investors passing through. They're the same neighbors who show up for the town's other obligations too.

A Few Blocks Over, a Different Kind of Fill-In

The La Cañada Building isn't the only downtown address that's changed hands this year. A few blocks away, in a historic Victorian that used to house Palms, Gardenia Los Gatos opened as a coffeehouse and French-Asian fusion restaurant, with a soft opening on July 27 and an official launch on August 2. Co-owner Carol Wang built it around a third-wave coffee concept and a brunch menu from Executive Chef David Intonato. The garden patio sits under redwoods, live music runs Friday and Saturday nights, and the plan, according to Gardenia's own team, is to add dinner service sometime this fall.

That timing lines up with Heritage's opening almost exactly. Two long-vacant or long-underused downtown spaces, on different blocks, both becoming full-service restaurants within weeks of each other, both run by owners who talk about the space in terms of years rather than quarters.

What This Actually Changes About a Walk Downtown This Month

The Los Gatos Art & Wine Festival returns to the Civic Center Lawn on September 26 and 27, its 54th year, still organized by the Kiwanis Club of Los Gatos with proceeds going back into local youth programs. It's the kind of weekend when most of downtown ends up on Main Street at some point anyway.

This year, that walk looks different than it did twelve months ago. Heritage Pub and Chop House will likely be a few weeks into service. Gardenia will be settling into its first fall with dinner on the menu. Second Story and Petals Creamery will no longer be the new additions to the La Cañada Building, just part of what it's become. None of this required a single new building to go up. It required a handful of people who grew up here or built businesses here already to spend a year or more filling in the gaps that had been sitting empty in plain sight.

That's the part that's easy to miss if you only clock the headline that a new restaurant opened. The La Cañada Building didn't get a tenant this month. It got the last piece of a slower, more deliberate fill-in that's been happening under the surface since last year, and the reason it took this long is the same reason it's likely to stick.

If you're watching how downtown Los Gatos is evolving, whether you're already settled here or thinking ahead to a future move in this pocket of the mid-Peninsula, Nisha Sharma tracks these shifts closely as part of her ongoing work in the Los Gatos and Monte Sereno market. Reach out anytime to talk through what's changing in the neighborhoods you care about most.