"I really feel that people who have never started a business, especially in the food business, there's so much that goes along with it."
Kristi Pearce-Percy said that about opening Heritage Pub and Chop House with her husband Walker and Executive Chef Yvonne Khananis. It's a modest line for what the three of them actually pulled off: they took the second story of the La Cañada Building, the turreted corner spot at Main Street and North Santa Cruz Avenue that's been on the chamber of commerce logo for as long as anyone can remember, and brought it back after seven years of sitting empty. That single reopening tells you something. So does the fact that it's not the only one. Over the past year, downtown Los Gatos has filled in three separate vacancies with three restaurants that don't compete with each other at all. They serve different nights.
If you've lived here a while, you already know downtown turns over. What's easy to miss from inside the loop is that this round of openings didn't just add volume. It split the evening into distinct tiers, and figuring out which one you want has become part of planning a night out.
The Building That Sat Empty for Seven Years
Heritage Pub and Chop House opened to the public on October 10, 2025, in a space that had been dark since Los Gatos Bar and Grill closed. Walker and Kristi Pearce-Percy are both Los Gatos natives. Walker graduated from Los Gatos High School in the class of '97 and now flies C-5 cargo planes as a commercial pilot for United Airlines and a part-time Air Force Reserve officer. Kristi runs Cuschieri Horton Architects and was the one who first got a look at the second-story space years before the restaurant idea existed. Yvonne Khananis, the executive chef, already owns Polenteria in the same building.
The remodel started in August 2024 and took over a year. What came out the other side is a room built to absorb a crowd: a banquet space, a back patio, a game hall with shuffleboard and arcade machines, and enough capacity across the whole floor to seat 180. The menu runs classic pub fare from Ireland, England, and Scotland (fish and chips, shepherd's pie, bangers and mash) alongside American chophouse standards, with a Sunday roast and a standing prime rib night. It's open daily from 11:30 a.m., with Sunday hours starting at 9 a.m. for the brunch crowd, and happy hour runs every day from 3 to 6 p.m.
This is the tier most residents will use most often. It's the room built for a Tuesday dinner with kids, a post-farmers-market lunch, or a walk-in party of six after a concert on the lawn lets out. Heritage isn't trying to be a destination. It's trying to be the place you go without planning ahead.
Two New Ways to Do a Date Night
A few blocks over, the evening-out category got busier in a more specific way. Dar Restaurant and Bar opened this spring, run by brothers Milad and Chef Esam Shaqir, who already operate Tamra Mediterranean Grill in Saratoga. Dar is their more polished version of that concept, drawing from Levantine, Italian, and Moroccan cooking, with a full bar, an indoor dining room, and a patio built around a fireplace. It sits in direct competition with two rooms that have owned this category in Los Gatos for years: Wine Cellar and Gardenia.
At 25 East Main Street, the former home of Sidecar Modern Tavern is becoming something similar in spirit but different on the plate. Chef Coskun Abik, whose résumé includes Blind Butcher SF, Dunya Bistro, and Moka Coffee SF, signed his Los Gatos lease in August 2025 and was still overseeing flooring and construction on a Greek-Anatolian concept as of this spring's reporting. Abik has described his approach as a lighter counterpoint to Dar's, built around Maras pepper and olive oil rather than the heavier spice profile he associates with Arabic cooking traditions. No public opening date has landed yet, but once it does, it will be the second Mediterranean-leaning restaurant to open on this strip within the same year.
A third is on the way, though it isn't open yet. Pergamon Bistro, a Turkish concept from owner Seyyat Zira, is planned for 309 North Santa Cruz Avenue near Oak & Rye and Pedro's. An alcohol license application was on file as of early 2026, but no opening date has been announced. Worth watching if you keep a mental map of this block, but not yet worth planning around.
Three restaurants clustering around the same regional cuisine in the same few blocks isn't a coincidence. It's a signal that this particular category, the dressed-up dinner that isn't a special occasion but isn't a Tuesday either, was underserved here for longer than most people noticed.
The Twelve-Seat Room You Have to Know About in Advance
The third tier is the one you can't stumble into. Vicinity opened in February 2026 inside Tasting House at 368 Village Lane, and it's not really a restaurant so much as a restaurant within a restaurant. Four tables. A maximum of twelve diners a night. Executive Chef Julian Silvera, who came up through Manresa and The Plumed Horse, runs a tasting-menu-only counter here while also handling Tasting House's bistro menu and its champagne bar next door, working with a kitchen staff of five including himself.
Vicinity has already picked up a Michelin recommendation in its first year, and the food leans hard into hyper-local sourcing, plates built around abalone, uni, and ingredients tied to specific Northern California coastline. It sits alongside Forbes Mill Steakhouse as one of the two rooms in town built for the kind of dinner you plan two weeks out, not the kind you decide on at six o'clock.
What this means practically: if Vicinity is on your list for an anniversary or a visiting parent, book it before you book anything else that week. Twelve seats a night doesn't leave room for spontaneity.
What Changed on the Walk You Already Know
None of this changes the shape of the calendar. The Los Gatos Sunday Farmers' Market still runs 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Town Plaza, rain or shine, and Music in the Park's 2026 season wrapped in late August with four closing shows on the Civic Center Lawn, Miko Marks among them. The Los Gatos Art & Wine Festival, which has run under one name or another since the 1970s and now marks its 54th year, takes over that same lawn footprint later this month with roughly 150 artists, food trucks, wine, beer, and live music.
What changed is what's open on the walk between those fixed points. Someone who ran this loop in 2024, market to lawn to dinner, would have landed at different doors than someone running it today. The market still ends before the concert starts and the concert still ends before dinner service peaks. But dinner service itself now branches three ways depending on what the night actually calls for: Heritage if you want a table without a reservation, Dar if you want the dressed-up version of the same evening (with Abik's Greek-Anatolian concept and Pergamon Bistro both queued up to join that tier once they open), and Vicinity if you booked ahead and the occasion earns it.
That's the part worth sitting with. Downtown Los Gatos didn't get more crowded this year so much as it got more legible. The vacancies that used to sit empty for years are filling in with operators who know exactly which slot they're filling, which is a different kind of growth than a town just adding restaurants for the sake of it.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood by what's happening on its Main Street rather than by a median price on a chart, that's the real story here. The block is still Los Gatos. It just knows itself a little better than it did a year ago.
If you already call this stretch of the Peninsula home and a day comes when the conversation turns from where you're eating dinner to what your house is worth or whether it's time to move, Lynn North is a Los Gatos-adjacent, Los Altos-based agent who works this exact corner of Silicon Valley. A free consultation and home valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. It's just a conversation, whenever you're ready to have it.