Chestnut Street's Empty Storefront Has Outlasted Everyone It Displaced

Walk past 1137 Chestnut Street on a weekday afternoon and you'll find plywood where a dining room used to be. No sign, no scaffolding, no permit notice taped to the glass. Just a boarded storefront in the middle of a block that used to feed a good chunk of downtown Menlo Park.

That address belonged to Shiok! Singapore Kitchen, a family-run restaurant that had cooked Singaporean food there since 1999. The building sold in early 2025. The new owner gave tenants, including Shiok! and the longtime bakery Gerry's Cakes, thirty days to leave. That deadline eventually stretched to February 24, but the outcome was the same: a strip of Chestnut Street that had anchored a certain kind of daily errand for two decades went dark within weeks.

What's happened since is the part worth knowing if you live here. Every business that building displaced has spent the past year and a half finding out whether Menlo Park still had room for them. One found a better answer than the building itself has managed.

What Actually Happened in January 2025

Gerry's Cakes had been on Chestnut Street for 33 years, building custom cakes for the kind of birthdays and graduations that make up a neighborhood's memory. Owner Sohrab Molavi told the Almanac he wanted to stay in Menlo Park but wasn't sure he could afford to. "There is a lot of empty space," he said, "but it is hard to afford to move to a new location." He was weighing whether to sell his equipment and close for good.

Shiok! had a longer runway but the same problem. The restaurant actually started in 1999 as a sixteen-seat spot in San Carlos, before demand pushed it into the larger Chestnut Street space it would occupy for the next quarter century. Owner Dennis Lim spent more than a year driving up and down the Peninsula looking for a replacement that fit, running the business as a delivery-only ghost kitchen out of Redwood City in the meantime. It wasn't the same. "You don't have the same connection with customers," he told the Almanac in April.

"We're just wondering why, why is it vacant? We could have been there for a year." — Dennis Lim, owner, Shiok! Singapore Kitchen, on the still-boarded former Chestnut Street building

That quote is the whole story in one sentence. The building that forced everyone out hasn't been re-let to anyone in the year and a half since.

Where the Displaced Landed

Shiok! reopened in April 2026 at 625 Oak Grove Avenue, the former home of Lotus Restaurant, a few blocks from where it started. The buildout ran roughly $100,000 and delivered a 2,700-square-foot space, a bigger dining room and kitchen than the old Chestnut Street shop ever had. Lim rehired his original kitchen staff and several returning servers. He's framed the move less as a new opening and more as a return: "It's always been about the community, the people coming in, introducing them to the flavors."

The restaurant is currently open Tuesday through Thursday for lunch, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and Tuesday through Sunday for dinner, 5 to 8 p.m.

Gerry's Cakes is a murkier case. Online listings still show its original Chestnut Street address, and its website is live, but there's no confirmed public record of the shop having secured a new storefront since Molavi's warning in January 2025. That ambiguity is its own kind of information for a resident wondering whether their go-to birthday cake spot is still in business or quietly wound down. As of this writing, the honest answer is that nobody's said publicly.

Here's the state of things, block by block:

One tenant found a bigger space and a fresh start. The building that pushed everyone out hasn't found anyone at all.

Meanwhile, the Rest of Downtown Kept Moving

That vacancy is more striking against what's happening a few blocks over. The Menlo Park City Council voted on June 23, 2026, to loosen zoning rules on Santa Cruz Avenue, letting spas, salons, and other personal-service businesses open on the ground floor without a conditional use permit. Small-scale recreation uses like gyms and arcades, previously barred outright, can now apply for approval through the Planning Commission. One number in that same decision says a lot about how tight the corridor already is: financial institutions on Santa Cruz Avenue already occupy close to 28,000 square feet, against a new cap of 30,000 square feet for that street. There's room for maybe one more bank branch on all of Santa Cruz Avenue, ever.

The Sunday farmers market, meanwhile, hasn't skipped a beat. It's run year-round since 1992 in the Chestnut Street parking lot between Santa Cruz and Menlo Avenues, sponsored by the Menlo Park Live Oak Lions Club, with leftover produce donated to feed the homeless at the end of each market day. It's a five-minute walk from the boarded storefront and it never noticed the building sale happened.

The city has also kept the 600 block of Santa Cruz Avenue closed to eastbound traffic since 2023, turning that stretch into outdoor dining and communal space for the restaurants along it. None of this required Chestnut Street's cooperation. Downtown Menlo Park's calendar of small, recurring rituals runs on its own clock, independent of whatever is or isn't happening behind that plywood.

What This Actually Means for Your Week

If you're mapping out where things stand right now, here's the practical version:

• Shiok! is back in a bigger space on Oak Grove Avenue, with the same kitchen staff and recipes that built its following on Chestnut Street.
• Gerry's Cakes' status is unconfirmed. If you've been ordering a custom cake from memory of the old location, it's worth calling ahead rather than assuming.
• The Sunday farmers market on Chestnut Street between Santa Cruz and Menlo Avenues runs 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or vacancy.
• The 600 block of Santa Cruz Avenue stays closed to eastbound traffic for outdoor dining, a holdover from a 2023 council decision that shows no sign of reversing.
• Watch Santa Cruz Avenue's ground floors over the next year. The June zoning change opens the door to salons, gyms, and small recreation uses that couldn't have applied before.

The boarded building on Chestnut Street isn't a sign that downtown is struggling. It's the opposite kind of evidence. Every business it forced out found a way to keep serving the same customers, in some cases from a better address than before. The building that displaced them is the only party in this story still standing empty, which says less about Menlo Park's appetite for small local business and more about one owner's decision to sit on a vacant lease while everyone else adapted around it.

That's usually how it goes here. The street outlasts the landlord.

If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of downtown is actually worth, given how the neighborhood keeps reshaping itself around setbacks like this one, the Anagnostou Team can walk you through a current, no-pressure valuation grounded in what's happening on the ground, not just what's on a chart.