The Return of Restaurant O in the South Bay
A lot of people attempt comebacks. Few have rebounded from the brink quite like Chef Justin Perez.
It’s been a long three years since Perez, a chef known for his bold and sassy creations, was forced to shutter his popular Restaurant O in Campbell.
The ensuing time was not kind, verging on the plot of a crazy Adam Sandler film, in which anything that could go insanely wrong, surely did. Only in real life, there was no laughter — just tears, anger, frustration and mayhem.
In 2005, the chef was relaxing with his family at their San Jose home, when a hysterical woman came running up, screaming that her husband was going to kill her. Perez and his family took her in and called police. This tale of a good Samaritan soon turned horrific, though, when Perez’s house was later fire-bombed and bricks hurled through his front windows. The husband’s brother was later convicted of those crimes, but not before Perez’s wife and their young children were deeply traumatized.
A year later, with his life back to normal again, Perez renovated his restaurant, doing all the work, himself, with the help of a few friends, only to discover that his landlord intended to sell the property for a senior living development instead. On top of that, Perez says he soon discovered that his best friend, who was his former director of operations, had allegedly embezzled about $750,000 from the restaurant.
Perez was adrift with no restaurant, as well as the IRS on his back for business and payroll taxes that his director of operations never paid. He still had his Restaurant O Catering company, which had moved to Los Gatos. But there was no escaping that he was in dire trouble financially and professionally.
Yet, he survived. He climbed his way out of that morass and is embarking on a dream once more — opening a new Restaurant O in the iconic Wilson’s Jewel Bakery site, 1285 Homestead Road in Santa Clara.
The shuttered bakery, which was in business for nearly nine decades, is a location Perez is intimately familiar with. As a young boy, he and his mother would trek from their Sunnyvale house to buy cookies and cakes from Wilson’s every week.
“I grew up going here. It was a ritual for me,” Perez, 39, says. “In the beginning, Wilson’s was the top dog. We want to put the quality back into this spot.”
He calls the demographics a dream, what with the site’s proximity to Santa Clara University, the Santa Clara Courthouse, and middle-income residents. It also provides a central point for his catering business.
Indeed, the huge site — 10,000 square feet on the street level, plus a 3,000-square-foot basement — was far too large for most other businesses to consider. But because Perez plans to operate both a restaurant and his catering company out of the locale, it proved a perfect fit for him.
