Dear Menlo Park City Council members,
I originally wrote this email and sent it to Vice-Mayor Betsy Nash on
12 November 2021. A number of fellow citizens have urged me to send
it to all the Council members as well, and I’m happy to do so. It’s now
pertinent to Mayor Combs’s remarks about vitalizing downtown, and
his promise of a City Council discussion about this topic on the front
page of yesterday’s Almanac.
I hope you enjoy it, and will also take this opportunity to thank you all
for your service to the community, and wish you a Happy Christmas
and a healthy and productive New Year.
Cordially,
Dr. Morton Grosser
drmort@alum.mit.edu
Hi Betsy,
I was delighted to meet you at Ali’s Bon Marché on Wednesday evening.
After visiting the market, my friend Dr. Divya Railan and I stayed to have
dinner at Bistro Vida, and I wanted to comment to you on the occasion.
Bona fides: I currently lecture at the Stanford BioDesign Institute, am
an active investor, and on the faculty of the Venture Capital Institute
at Emory University in Atlanta. My late wife and I came to Stanford for
PhDs in 1957, and rented a house near the west end of Santa Cruz
Avenue in Menlo Park. After a stint away at UCLA Medical School,
we returned to Menlo Park in 1971 and built a house at 1016 Lemon
Street. I’ve lived there ever since. (My beloved wife Janet died of
cancer in 2004.)
In all those years, you could walk down the middle of Santa Cruz Avenue
on any Wednesday night after 8 pm and never see another person. Last
Wednesday Bistro Vida had 285 covers for dinner, the same as a very good
Saturday night, and unheard of on a week night. And the diners weren’t
acting like a Wednesday night—The ebullient conversation was loud and
full of laughter, and there was a huge amount of table hopping, excited
shopping comparisons, and and—I use the phrase selectively—joie de vivre.
After fifty years of darkened store fronts and bleak, desserted week nights, Ali El
Safy has single-handedly imported the atmosphere of a Parisian arrondissement
to downtown Menlo Park. This is a remarkable sociological accomplishment that
included not only one restaurant, but everything else that stayed open that evening.
It brought dense foot traffic, purchases from other stores, dogs, strollers, little kids,
and a rare aura of cheer and community, more even than our arts festivals.
I hope that other City Council members will experience this and recognize the scarcity
and high value of this interpersonal chemistry to the city. Given the impending opening
of new communities along El Camino, an expansion of Ali's nucleation could give us what
Menlo Park has never had in my long experience of living here: A lively, vital downtown
that is good for commerce, interaction, and the well-being of our population.
Cordially.
Dr. Morton Grosser
drmort@alum.mit.edu
