Glen Park, the sleepy residential enclave southeast of Twin Peaks, seems like a lovely place to raise a family. You could even call it San Francisco’s version of a small village — which in fact is what Glen Park residents label the two-block stretch around Diamond and Chenery streets: The Village. But you should not suggest that it is the coolest neighborhood on the West Coast, as TimeOut did in its annual list (opens in new tab) of the world’s coolest neighborhoods last month.
It’s certainly a charming place. On a recent crisp morning, enjoying an apple-and-cheese crepe at Higher Grounds Café, I gazed out on the picturesque shops and Victorians along Chenery. A great melting pot of white people, ranging from early middle aged to later middle aged, strolled and window-shopped. The sun shone. All seemed well.
But next door to the pleasant creperie was a commercial vacancy that, for years, has threatened to break Glen Park’s spell. The space has been empty since the pandemic forced the closure of beloved French bistro Le P’tit Laurent, which had operated here for 13 years. (It had previously closed in 2019 when its original chef-owner, Laurent Legendre, moved back to France, and reopened only briefly under new ownership.) After five years of watching the primest of prime locations in the Village sit idle, some locals can’t take it anymore.
“You cannot get a cocktail in Glen Park except for at The Station,” fumed resident Nina Willdorf, a marketing consultant. “I know that sounds like first-world problems, but that’s the world we’re living in.”
The main problem, per Willdorf, is that Le P’tit Laurent is one of only two businesses in Glen Park with a full liquor license. The other is Glen Park Station, a dive bar across the street, which is known more for pints of Guinness than Aperol spritzes.
That’s right: In what’s supposed to be one of the coolest neighborhoods in the world, there’s not a single place for thirsty professionals to order a martini with their steak frites after a hard day of sending emails. Instead, they have to order vodka sodas from a place with pinball machines.
The man at least partially responsible for this state of affairs is Manhal Jweinat, 72, who might just be the hardest-working guy in the neighborhood. In addition to owning the former Le P’tit Laurent space, he owns Higher Grounds, where he spends his mornings behind the counter, and the Italian restaurant Manzoni, where he works evening shifts.
Neighbors, including Willdorf, have expressed frustration that Jweinat seems content to let the old L’Petit Laurent molder. Though he runs two other restaurants nearby, he seems to be in no hurry to crown his miniature empire with a third. Willdorf said she has tried to bring it up with him, but he doesn’t want to talk about it.
“You’re not communicating with anyone,” Willdorf said rhetorically about the landlord. “You’re not part of the merchants’ association. It’s so unneighborly. Like, what are you doing?”
Her husband, Michael Endelman, a project manager at Airbnb, echoed her concerns. “I feel like he’s holding it hostage, and it makes the neighborhood look bad,” he said. “It makes it look like it’s a blighted, unsafe neighborhood.”
(Note: Glen Park does not, in any way, resemble an unsafe neighborhood.)
In a brief moment when I was the only customer in Jweinat’s creperie, I beckoned him over to talk. A soft-spoken older gentleman with white hair wrapping around the sides and back of his head, he smiled sadly when I asked him to respond to the charges that the vacant restaurant is a blight, an eyesore, and that his refusal to open, rent, or sell is selfish.
“Time flies when you’re busy,” he said. “You don’t notice the days and years passing by.”
Jweinat explained that he wants his 35-year-old son, Raja, to be involved if and when he does reopen the restaurant. But the son is busy working as a cook at Chez Panisse, and doesn’t yet know whether he wants to commit himself to a new venture, Jweinat said. (The son declined to comment.)
Neighbor Joe Dimento said he often catches the bus outside the empty space where Le P’tit Laurent should be, and wonders why he can’t get a glass of wine there like he used to.
But unlike Willdorf, who is trying to mobilize neighbors against the vacancy — the marketing professional has coined the slogan, “Free Le P’tit Laurent!” — Dimento noted he has not devised any plan for activism.
“Every time I see it, I’m like, ‘Ugh, this thing again!’” Dimento said of the empty restaurant. “And then I walk away and forget about it.”
In Jweinat’s defense, it’s not like he wants it to be vacant, he maintains. He said he paid $37,000 in property tax for the building that houses both Higher Grounds and the Le P’tit Laurent space last year. Ideally, he’d have restaurant revenue to offset those fees. But, in Jweinat’s words, “the restaurant business is hard.”
Willdorf recognizes that her efforts to rile up opposition to Jweinat could seem trivial or cruel: “I don’t want to be the face of a campaign shaming some old man in the neighborhood,” she said.
But she really wants somebody to open something there so she can support it, just as she has the recently opened upscale southern French restaurant La Cigale, three doors up the street from Le P’tit Laurent. She said neighbors are clamoring for more independent local businesses.
Not everybody agrees with her methods.
“I think a campaign to force someone to reopen a restaurant is not particularly nice, fair, or productive,” said another neighbor who asked to remain anonymous for fear of setting off an intra-village squabble.
While the question of Le P’tit Laurent has spun into a minor controversy, some residents are staying out of it. Eric Whittington, 69, owns the book and record shop Bird and Beckett, which gets a shout-out in the TimeOut blurb on Glen Park. He said it would be nice for a business to occupy the space, but that restaurant vacancies plague the whole city. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
Whittington was never much of a Le P’tit Laurent regular anyway: “A restaurant that I couldn’t afford closing makes no difference to me.”