Lutticken's Closes After 45 Years the Same Month Downtown Menlo Park Runs Out of Empty Tables
For 45 years, the corner of Alameda de las Pulgas and Gordon Avenue meant one thing in West Menlo Park: Lutticken's. A ham and Swiss sandwich with pineapple salsa, tucked behind the coffee counter of an owner named Bob Lutticken since 1981. On September 30, that ends. Six blocks away, on the opposite side of town, the restaurant map is doing the reverse. Springline just finished filling every seat it has, and a Singapore Kitchen that got pushed out of downtown last year just found its way back in.
Both things are true this month, in the same small city, for almost entirely unrelated reasons. That's the part worth understanding if you already live here and have been wondering why your regular lunch spot feels like it's disappearing even as new restaurants keep opening around you.
Lutticken's Deli and its evening restaurant, After 5, will serve their final meals on September 30, and the closure takes all three locations with it: the flagship on Alameda de las Pulgas, plus satellite counters on the Stanford campus and Sand Hill Road. Manager Judy Congdon, who has worked the register since the deli opened in 1981, put it plainly to local reporters: the business never recovered its pre-pandemic footing.
"Since COVID shut everything down, our business hasn't come back," Congdon said. "It's just not sustainable anymore."
The place had real civic weight for a sandwich shop. Al Gore stopped in for a turkey sandwich while campaigning in 2000. California's Senate District 13 named it Small Business of the Year in 2024, with State Senator Josh Becker presenting Bob Lutticken with a placard in person. After 5, added in 2011, turned the same space into a wine and beer bar with weekly karaoke and a monthly first-Saturday open mic night. None of that history changed the math. A neighborhood deli built on lunchtime foot traffic never got its lunchtime foot traffic back.
Downtown, the Springline development on Oak Grove Avenue has been assembling its restaurant roster for years, and it finished the job this summer. Causwells, an American bistro and bar that first opened in San Francisco in 2014, took over the former Canteen space in early April. The new room is twice the size of the original, a 50-seat art deco space with a garage-style wall that opens to seat 60 more outside, and roughly 75 percent of the menu is new for the move. Co-owner Elmer Mejicanos added a martini cart to work the bigger floor. Two months later, on June 11, Alisios opened as the final tenant: a contemporary Mexican kitchen from Burma Food Group, located next to Barebottle Brewing. Bar director Humberto Galeano summed up the arc himself.
"It's funny because we were the first one, and now we are the last one."
That's not an exaggeration. Burma Food Group opened the first restaurant at Springline years ago and just closed out the roster with the last one, alongside Barebottle Brewing (still the city's only brewery), Che Fico Parco Menlo with its adjoining Mercato gelato window, Andytown Coffee Roasters, and Proper Food.
The more personal story is a few blocks over on Oak Grove Avenue, where Shiok! Singapore Kitchen reopened in April after being forced out of its longtime home at 1137 Chestnut Street when the building sold and the new owner cleared out longtime tenants, Shiok! included, by January 1, 2025. Owner Dennis Lim spent roughly 15 months running the business as a delivery-only ghost kitchen out of Redwood City before finding his way back.
"I drove up and down the Peninsula, but we really wanted to come back to Menlo Park, because of the community," Lim said. "My customers are like family. I watch kids here grow up, go to college, and then come back."
Just down the street from Shiok!'s new address, though, the old Chestnut Street building is still sitting there boarded up. Lim isn't shy about the contrast: he's said he doesn't understand why the space that once housed his restaurant, and other longtime tenants like Gerry's Cakes, remains empty nearly two years later.
| West Menlo Park (Alameda de las Pulgas) | Downtown core (Oak Grove / Santa Cruz Ave) | |
|---|---|---|
| What's leaving | Lutticken's Deli & After 5, all three locations, after 45 years | Nothing comparable this cycle |
| What's arriving | No replacement announced | Causwells, Alisios finish the Springline roster; Shiok! returns to Oak Grove |
| The stated reason | Lunchtime traffic never recovered post-COVID | Multi-city restaurant groups betting on an underserved, high-income market |
| What's still empty | N/A | The old 1137 Chestnut St. building, boarded up since early 2025 |
Here's the part that doesn't show up if you only look at restaurant openings: downtown Menlo Park's overall ground-floor vacancy rate sat at roughly 17 percent as of mid-2025, with city officials counting 17 empty storefronts. That's a retail number, not a restaurant number, and it's exactly why it doesn't contradict what's happening at Springline. The vacancies are concentrated in general retail, the kind of space that used to hold a carpet shop or a stationery store, not in food and beverage, which has been the one category with real, sustained demand. The Menlo Park City Council responded in June 2026 by reforming zoning rules to let non-retail businesses occupy ground-floor space downtown, an acknowledgment that traditional retail wasn't going to fill those storefronts on its own.
So the neighborhood isn't sending one signal. It's sending two, and they're both accurate. Restaurants are thriving because national and San Francisco-based groups have identified Menlo Park as underserved for dining specifically. General retail is still struggling with the same vacancy problem it had a year ago. Lutticken's sits outside that downtown vacancy count entirely, on Alameda de las Pulgas in West Menlo, which means its closure isn't part of the storefront story at all. It's a separate, older problem: a lunch counter that depended on office workers and daily regulars who simply didn't come back in the same numbers after 2020.
Check the downtown Menlo Park events calendar directly for exact times, since a few of these shift seasonally.
If Lutticken's has been your Tuesday lunch for a decade, you have three and a half weeks left to order the Hawaiian sandwich. If you've been avoiding Springline because it felt half-finished, that's no longer accurate. It has a complete lineup now, and the wait for a table at Alisios or Causwells on a Friday night reflects that.
The city's own vacancy numbers say the empty storefronts you've been walking past aren't a food problem. They're a retail problem the council is trying to solve with a zoning change, not a sign that downtown is struggling generally. Two things can be true on the same six blocks. Menlo Park is proving it this month.
If you're the kind of person who pays attention to what's actually changing on the ground here, and not just what a listing photo shows, that's the same instinct that matters when it's time to think about a move in this market. Jerylann Mateo has spent more than 20 years tracking these shifts block by block across Menlo Park and the surrounding Peninsula. Let's Connect when you're ready to talk about what any of this means for you.
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