Dan - you have been an icon in Palo Alto since you were my role model for Blue Chalk Cafe in 1992. We all owe you a ton of thanks for the great times you created, your civic generosity, and leadership. THANK YOU.

Dan, I too have been a fan of yours for >20 years. You have repeatedly 5proven to be successful in a tremendously hard and unforgiving industry.
And, you have always been ahead of the times. Your comments here on the new realities facing restaurant operators foretell a bleak future. I hope you are wrong - I know you are right.

Thank you Dan Gordon for speaking plainly! And thank you for your years of service to all of us. We will miss you. Why is this article not in Palo Alto online? Palo Alto City Council needs to do something to help struggling businesses. Closing streets to cars in some misguided attempt to boost bicycling is a terrible waste of time when the very lifeblood of our community is at risk.

Jonathon:
You’re absolutely correct. The problem seems to be that Palo Alto City Council would rather spend time on issues that play to their base, but which have, at the end of the day, very little impact, such as global warming, no new gas hookups for construction, closing down streets to cars ( for even less traffic and visitors to PA?). Not really solving many local business issues. Reducing minimum wage seems to be pretty critical to get small business going again. The argument has always been that no jobs at $15 or $16 an hour is not as good as a few, or lots of jobs at $10 or $11 an hour. Maybe City Council will wake up one day and figure some of these things out.

Way off base. There isn't going to be _any_ retail commercial real estate value. And that isn't a bad thing. Restaurants and local businesses die from this, but that is no reason to think that a city council in charge of a useless tiny city budget can do a damn thing about it. They don't have such resources. They can't cover rent and payroll bail-out style for businesses for 18 months. That requires printing money. Only the feds can do that.

Too little too late. There will be a ton of cheap space available in the aftermath. Dan will probably slurp some up in a couple years.