‘It definitely will impact us’: Saratoga restaurants to lose outdoor dining

Restaurants in the Saratoga Village will have to pack up their parklets by the end of the year.

The temporary outdoor dining structures that offered local restaurants a way to stay open during the turbulent pandemic era must be gone by Dec. 31, and some restaurant owners are frustrated.

“It definitely will impact us,” Bella Saratoga owner Clyde Zaya said. “It’s really helped us a lot during the summer because we’re in California; obviously, everyone wants to sit outside.“

While several cities have opted to make parklets permanent, the decision to remove them is mostly out of Saratoga’s hands.

The Saratoga Village is located along Big Basin Way, which is a part of state Highway 9. Up until the pandemic, outdoor dining structures were not allowed on the road.

The state made a temporary exception in 2020 to allow restaurants to set up outdoor dining structures during the pandemic by granting the city an encroachment permit.

Saratoga City Council worked with the Chamber of Commerce to apply for the permit with the state, and also purchased $95,000 worth of concrete barriers and ADA structures to create the outdoor dining setup.

That permit expires at the end of the year, and the Chamber of Commerce and city staff are exploring alternatives for downtown restaurants, Chamber president Chuck Page said.

“They’re definitely going away at the end of the year, but we are looking at alternatives to see if there’s an opportunity for us to have them in certain areas in certain places,” Page said. ”That will probably require some amount of participation by the property owners…so we’re working through those details to see what we can do.”

Raj Fhrestha, owner of Mandala Indian Cuisine, said he opened his restaurant in 2021 and the parklets have been essential to his business.

“It’s been helpful; because of the pandemic people don’t want to sit inside,” Fhrestha said. “It’s helped us a lot to bring the people into the restaurant.”

The removal of these structures come as restaurants work to recover from the nearly two years of unpredictable pandemic-era dining protocols.

Zaya said.most Saratoga restaurants can’t afford to lose the parklets. The structures allowed them to hire back employees they had to lay off.

“The ones who made it through COVID, it was really tough on us,” Zaya said.

Page said the parklets were supposed to be temporary, and he hopes the city can replace them with more high-quality structures.