This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Mountain Charley's: First Days, Early Days

In the early 1970s, my dad and I were driving down Santa Cruz Avenue in Los Gatos and as we turned up Main Street we saw all sorts of activity up on the second story of the Caňada Building, both in the front and in the back. Pa wondered what was going on up there and I told him that I heard someone was opening up a restaurant in the old building. He smirked and said that a restaurant in this broken down, old town had no attraction, and second story restaurants never worked.

My Pa had started working in the high-end restaurant trade back in the 1930s in his home town of Chicago, Illinois, when the supper clubs hosted such big band names as Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw and Cab Calloway. Through the 1950s and 60s, Pa had worked all the classy places in the whole Bay Area. He had more tuxedos in his closet than all the old-time ranchers in the Almaden Valley combined. His restaurant expertise was pretty much indisputable, his judgments were usually right on the money. However, in this case, his prediction could not have been further off the mark.

.

The activity we were observing were the last, finishing touches being applied to the Caňada building in preparation for the opening of Mountain Charley’s Restaurant and Saloon. When it finally did open a few weeks later, I didn’t pay much attention to it as per my father’s prediction: it wasn’t going to last. Why invest in an enterprise that was a failure even before it opened? A couple of months after the opening, I was walking down the sidewalk on Santa Cruz Avenue, right under the windows of Mountain Charley’s, and I ran into a woman, with two kids and a tall husband, who I gone through school with. I hadn’t seen her for a number of years so the kids were a big surprise to me. We did some catching up, there on the sidewalk and then they invited me to lunch, to continue our re-acquaintance. With nothing else to do, I accepted. We went upstairs to Mountain Charley’s for my first lunch there, a place which this couple owned. I had just met Jim Farwell, the great-grandson of one of the founders of Los Gatos, James Lyndon. It was the male half of this couple who had the idea for this unique and original restaurant and bar, on the second story in this broken down, dusty, old town.

Find out what's happening in Los Gatoswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

(to read on, click here)
We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?