Peninsula spot to close — generations grieve
The first urgent text came to Bob McIntyre from his ex-wife in Wyoming at 5 a.m. The second one came from his son in Spain an hour later. Both messages were the same: The Oasis is closing.
By the time McIntyre, 81, could get to “the O,” as the Oasis Beer Garden is known, it was lunchtime. The small parking lot on El Camino Real in Menlo Park was full, and the line of mourners stretched to the door. The bad news had been announced the evening before, and they were here to pay their respects.
“I walked in, and it looked like I’d never left from 1954 or ’55,” said McIntyre, who is Stanford class of ’58, meaning he’d started drinking beer there as a freshman or sophomore, as was tradition. He stayed in Palo Alto and raised five kids on burgers at the O.
“It looked like I’d never left . ... One by one all the old places are going.” Bob McIntyre, Stanford class of 1958 and longtime patron of Menlo Park’s Oasis
“It’s a shame it is closing,” he said. “One by one, all the old places are going.”
The O is going because of a lease dispute between Tougas Enterprises of Sunnyvale, which operates the business, and Dan Beltramo, owner of the building. His father, Alexander, opened the O in 1933, and Tougas bought the business in February 1958. It is a month-to-month deal.
“We have been asking for a longer lease for 60 years,” said Larry LaBarbera, general manager. Declining to go into specifics, he said only that “negotiations to reach a more favorable lease with were unsuccessful.”
Speaking on behalf of her father, Dan Beltramo, Diana Beltramo Hewitt said longer lease options were offered. She expressed regret that terms could not be reached and that the O is folding, especially because her grandfather had opened the place and her father has probably taken more meals there than anyone else over a lifetime. She also said they have already heard from other prospective restaurants interested in taking over the space.
Though they have split into separate entities, brothers Dan and John Beltramo, ages 80 and 83, own other commercial properties in Menlo Park. These include the land under the Dutch Goose in West Menlo, a longtime rival to the O. Beltramo’s, a renowned wine and liquor store on El Camino, closed in 2016 so the brothers could retire from retail. That land, near the Atherton border, is being readied for development. The O is a significant structure, built in 1917 as part of Camp Fremont during World War I. It was purchased by Giovanni Beltramo in 1920 and relocated from Roble Avenue to El Camino after the war. A second story was built, and this was the family’s home while it ran the Oasis downstairs for 10 years before leasing it out.
“Our family has many, many wonderful memories at The Oasis and would imagine we are at least as nostalgically tied to this restaurant as any community member, and it will be missed very much,” Hewitt said in a statement.
Tougas Enterprises runs other restaurants, and LaBarbera said business at the O has never been better. But Tougas gave six weeks’ notice that it will vacate on March 31, taking all the old Stanford football pictures and posters and helmets with it. The wooden booths and tables with all their carvings stay with the building.
March 7 is the last day of burgers and beer at the O, but none of its loyalists was willing to wait. As soon as Mike Duvall got the news, he drove down from his home in the Sierra foothills.
“I felt like someone had died,” said Duvall, 47, who couldn’t make up his mind between a double cheeseburger and a Louisiana hot sausage so he ordered both, figuring he could save one for the long ride home. “I don’t know if I’ll be back,” he said, sadly.
Duvall attended Menlo Atherton High school, which was a major feeder to the O along with Palo Alto High, the long-closed Cubberley High School, and the dorms and fraternities at Stanford.
“It was a ritual to come here,” Roger Smith, Stanford class of ’57 and a member of Delta Upsilon, said as he sat in one of the enclosed booths reminiscing with a foursome that included Don Lathrop, a distant relative of Jane Lathrop Stanford, who co-founded the university in memory of her late son Leland Jr..
Stanford traditionalists have always been partial to the O because it was probably the last place to acknowledge that the school mascot had been changed from the Indian to the Cardinal. It took decades for the O to finally remove the old mascot’s likeness and logo from the walls. It was also probably the last place to add wine to its beer menu and offer french fries instead of chips.
Pizza came later, but the regulars know there is only one order at the O — “DCF,” or double cheeseburger on French roll.
“It’s funky, and the food is good,” said Eleanor Andrews, 92, of Menlo Park. “They used to have peanut shells on the floor until the Fire Department put a stop to that.”
As she waited for her lunch, Andrews was wondering where her son had carved his name. It would take some searching to find, because once the tables were completely covered after people took to notching their Greek letters and class years in the wooden backrests of the booths, on the support beams for the room and even the wooden shutters on the windows.
Attorney Richard Yankwich, Stanford class of ’76, can remember sneaking beer at the Oasis under age. He wanted to mark that occasion with his initials, but “when I got here it was already carved out,” he said, “and that was in the 1970s.”
As he sat at a table on the aggregate patio, waiting for his DCF, Yankwich veered toward melancholy, though he was there to celebrate his 63rd birthday with his girlfriend, Jocelyn Alexander. “All kinds of people come here,” he said, “You can get frat boys, kids coming by themselves, construction workers.”
Sheet metal workers too. One of them, Boris Pleshakov, 67, sat at an adjacent table unscrewing the cap on a quart bottle of Coors. He had walked from his home in Palo Alto, passing other beer and burger joints along the way.
“They don’t have the ambience or the people that the O does,” he said.
It started to rain on the patio, but Pleshakov was too grieved to move. “I’ll be sad if I can’t come here,” he said.
Around 3 p.m., the lunch crowd started to empty out, with people taking a long last look at the wooden booths. McIntyre was headed to San Diego to deliver the bad news in person to his daughter.
“I remember wearing an Oasis T-shirt while traveling in Europe,” he said. “People would come up and ask, ‘Is that place in Menlo Park?’ ”
Most did not know whether they would be back, but John King of San Francisco did.
He pledged to drive down the next day and every day until the O closes, “because I love it so much,” he said.