Cook's Seafood has closed its Pleasanton restaurant at Koll Center Plaza, little more than a year after the long-awaited location opened, along with its original Menlo Park shop, the Pleasanton Weekly reports.
A notice posted on the door said the 98-year-old business was closing "all locations" effective Oct. 28 and that "this year has been very difficult for restaurants."
A Menlo Park employee told The Almanac that he received a text at 3 a.m. Thursday from the current owner, Roy Crumrine Jr., telling him not to report to work because both locations had closed the day before.
Calls to the Pleasanton restaurant on Thursday went to voicemail, and the websites for both locations were still up that afternoon with no mention of the closure, according to the Pleasanton Weekly.
A long road to opening
The Menlo Park restaurant first opened in 1928. Its Pleasanton outpost took years to arrive: Cook's first filed for permits in the city in 2017, the project then sat largely idle for close to eight years, and the company eventually applied again. Chef Moises Bucio has attributed the delay to staff turnover at the Menlo Park location, the COVID-19 pandemic and his own health problems.
