In June 2000, then-Vice President Al Gore walked into a sandwich shop on the corner of Alameda de las Pulgas and Gordon Avenue, flanked by Secret Service agents who gave the owner about two hours' notice. He ordered a turkey sandwich, shook hands with a room full of surprised Peninsula business owners, and left. The shop was Lutticken's Deli, and the visit became one of those stories a place tells about itself for decades.
On September 30, Lutticken's serves its last sandwich. Manager Judy Congdon, who has worked the counter since the deli opened in 1981, says the business never recovered after the pandemic emptied out its regular lunch crowd. Its two satellite locations, on the Stanford University campus and along Sand Hill Road, close the same month.
Across town, on Santa Cruz Avenue, a different kind of Friday just got louder. A new monthly street festival called Fourth Fridays filled restaurant patios and pulled crowds onto the sidewalk for its second outing on August 28. The two stories are happening in the same town, in the same month, and they are pulling in opposite directions. One corridor is building an evening economy from scratch. The other just lost the anchor that held its lunch hour together for 45 years.
The corner that outlasted three recessions
Bob Lutticken opened his deli in 1981 on the corner it never left, a stretch of West Menlo Park built around daytime foot traffic rather than nightlife. The shop built its name on sandwiches served on Dutch crunch bread and a habit of greeting longtime customers by name before they finished ordering. In 2011, it added Lutticken's After 5, a wine bar and evening restaurant that extended the space's hours past the lunch rush.
State Senator Josh Becker named Lutticken's the Senate District 13 Small Business of the Year in 2024, citing its history of donating food to Street Life Ministries, the St. Francis Center, and the Maple Street Shelter, along with a pandemic-era fundraiser that pulled in more than $6,000 for neighbors in need. That kind of recognition usually signals a business with staying power. It didn't change the math.
"It's just not sustainable anymore," Congdon told The Almanac. "Since COVID shut everything down, our business hasn't come back." The corner Lutticken's occupied for four and a half decades sits in a part of Menlo Park built around office lunch traffic, the kind of corridor that depends on people driving in for a sandwich between meetings. When that traffic thinned out and stayed thin, there was no equivalent effort to pull people back to Alameda de las Pulgas the way Santa Cruz Avenue is now pulling people downtown on Friday nights.
Santa Cruz Avenue found its Friday voice
Fourth Fridays launched on July 24, the first event hosted by the Downtown Menlo Fund, a nonprofit formed in late 2025 specifically to address what its founders saw as a dead zone. LeVant Dessert owner Maya Fezzani put it plainly before the first event: Friday nights downtown were a "ghost town," and the city itself wasn't doing much to change that.
The debut proved the diagnosis right. The Almanac reported that hundreds of residents came out as businesses including Mademoiselle Colette, Feldman's Books, Gallery House, and Gitane stayed open late for free live music from 6 to 9 p.m. Bistro Vida and Bar Loretta owner Ali El Safy said his restaurants saw 40 to 50 more patrons than a typical Friday, a number that turns a vague sense of a livelier night into something an owner can actually put in a ledger.
The event grew between its first two outings. July's lineup ran on two stages. By August 28, organizers had added a third, a new performance corner at the Wells Fargo entrance near Santa Cruz Avenue and Chestnut Street, alongside returning acts like the Dale Nesbitt Jazz Band and a singer-songwriter set at the former Pharmaca storefront. The next Fourth Fridays lands on September 25.
None of this is untested. Downtown Menlo Fund modeled the series on Los Altos First Fridays, a monthly music night that has run in neighboring Los Altos for about 15 years. Co-founder Marnie Foody described the goal in a way that captures why the format works.
"Downtown is at its best when it gives people a reason to linger. You grab dinner, hear a band, and run into three friends on the sidewalk. Fourth Fridays makes that a monthly tradition."
That's a specific bet: that foot traffic downtown responds to a reason to stay out past dinner, not just another restaurant opening.
A second experiment two blocks away
The Portola Art Gallery is running its own version of that bet. On September 4, the gallery at the Historic Allied Arts Guild, 75 Arbor Road, hosts its inaugural First Friday event, a monthly evening where visitors can view work from Bay Area artists in a setting built around gardens and courtyards rather than storefronts. It's a different address and a different crowd than Fourth Fridays draws, but the timing is not a coincidence. Two separate organizers, working independently, landed on the same conclusion this fall: give people a reason to be out on a specific evening, and they will show up.
Put those two launches next to Lutticken's closing and a pattern comes into focus that a single headline wouldn't show. Menlo Park isn't uniformly gaining or losing energy right now. It's redistributing it. The corridors and hours built around evening leisure, Santa Cruz Avenue after 6 p.m. on a Friday, the Allied Arts Guild on a First Friday afternoon, are getting deliberate investment and organizing muscle behind them. The corridor built around the daytime lunch trade, the stretch of Alameda de las Pulgas that depended on office workers driving in for a sandwich, absorbed a pandemic-era drop in that traffic and never got an equivalent campaign to bring it back.
What this means if you split time between the two
If your week runs through both parts of town, September gives you a clear before-and-after. You can catch a set from the Song Gardeners or wander into Gallery House for a glass of wine on a Friday night downtown, and the crowd will be bigger than it would have been a year ago. You can also drive past 3535 Alameda de las Pulgas after the 30th and see a storefront that hosted a sitting vice president, three recessions, and a global pandemic, now empty.
Neither trend is really about Lutticken's or about Fourth Fridays specifically. They're both evidence of the same underlying shift: after five years of uneven recovery, Menlo Park's commercial life is sorting itself by time of day and by street, not healing or declining as a single unit. Understanding which corridor you actually live near, and what kind of foot traffic it depends on, tells you more about its near-term trajectory than any single closing or opening does on its own.
Straser Silicon Valley pays attention to these shifts because they shape how a neighborhood feels day to day, long before they ever show up in a sale price. If you want a team that reads a town's rhythm as carefully as its comps, Straser Silicon Valley is worth a conversation.
