San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Beloved restaurant’s closing is a ‘dagger’
Owner of popular Richmond mainstay shutting doors after battle with landlord
It was hours before dinner time, but nearly every table was packed at Salute e Vita Ristorante. The orchids were crisp and white, the servers were dangling baskets of ciabatta bread, and the owner, Menbere Aklilu, was blinking away tears.
In less than a month she will leave the white-shingled building that made her waterfront restaurant a fixture in the East Bay city of Richmond for more than two decades. Families drive in from greater Contra Costa County to eat the pasta and seafood entrees, and refinery workers gather at Salute’s bar after work. Aklilu serves free Thanksgiving dinners to the homeless and teaches etiquette classes to kids. Every Mother’s Day she holds a banquet for single moms.
“Watching this place close, it’s just a dagger to the community’s heart,” said Ken Wohlgeschaffen, a Marina Bay resident who has been dining at Salute for 15 years. He was among many customers who seemed dumbstruck by the closure.
For Aklilu it was a difficult but necessary choice. She has fought for years with her landlord, Richard Poe, who says he’s been unfairly cast as a villain by the restaurant’s devoted fans.
“Bashing landlords is very popular in California,” he said.
Yet the two sides were unable to compromise, following years of drawn-out lease negotiations that went nowhere. Last month, after clashing with Poe over who should pay for an expensive retrofit of Salute’s kitchen and bathroom,
Aklilu gave up. She will shut her doors July 6.
“This stress on me, the stress on my workers — I can’t put them in this situation,” she said. “So I’m leaving. And it breaks my heart.”
Aklilu first crossed the restaurant’s wide portico in 1995, an Ethiopian immigrant who was living with her son in a housing project. Her life to that point had been roiled by hardship.
As a young girl she watched an angry customer shoot and kill her mother, who ran a restaurant in Ethiopia. She was abused by a husband who took her to Italy, promising to help her launch an acting career. She gave birth to their son in a women’s shelter, then took a job as a maid in Rome before immigrating to the U.S., and coming to Richmond.
Aklilu’s life took an abrupt upward turn when she entered Salute e Vita — a sprawling, gabled building that the Poe family had built in 1985 — for the first time shortly after arriving. She came for dinner and dazzled the restaurant’s owner with her culinary tastes, fluent Italian and sharp sense of style.
He hired her that night as a $7-an-hour hostess.
“Seven dollars? It was a lot for me,” she said with a laugh.
Aklilu rose up the ranks, becoming the restaurant’s manager and purchasing the business in 2002. Poe said his family “took a leap of faith” on Aklilu, “that a manager who had never run a restaurant of that size could do it.”
Under Aklilu’s leadership, Salute e Vita became a symbol of what many hoped would be a renaissance for a city once known for blight, violent crime and government corruption. It’s now reinventing itself as a place for businesses to sprout and middle-class families to settle.
Much of Richmond’s new development has clustered around the shoreline, where Salute has anchored a condo neighborhood that bloomed from a former shipyard. It’s served as a much-needed community hub, drawing patrons who came from all over the county for the shrimp pasta, the Ceasar salads, the Cape Cod-style decor and harborside views of sailboats skimming the bay.
Former Police Chief Chris Magnus held his wedding reception at the restaurant in 2014. A framed photograph on the restaurant’s wall shows former Attorney General Loretta Lynch dining there in 2015.
“We’re devastated,” said Sally Pipkin, sitting with her husband Alvin on the restaurant’s sun-dappled veranda while reflecting on the impending closure. The Pipkins live in El Sobrante and have driven to Salute for many an anniversary dinner.
Jeff Beddingfield, who sat at the restaurant’s bar, said he’s been a customer for 15 years. “When I started coming here, you could smoke on the porch,” he said.
Like other patrons, Beddingfield was already feeling separation anxiety weeks ahead of the scheduled closure.
“I won’t believe it until it actually happens,” he said.
One of Aklilu’s fiercest protectors is Richmond Mayor Tom Butt, who is known as a reliable foe of Poe, the landlord.
Two years ago, Butt and other city officials held a news conference outside the restaurant after Poe’s family threatened to evict Aklilu over complaints she had neglected the property and allowed sewage to leak beneath the kitchen and bathroom — claims that Contra Costa County health inspectors disputed. They used the opportunity to criticize Poe, accusing him of trying to close Salute out of spite.
Butt suggested that the eviction was an act of retaliation, because Richmond voters had defeated two ballot measures Poe sponsored in the June 2016 election. One would have granted approval for town houses Poe wanted to build along the Richmond waterfront. The other would have limited the city manager’s salary.
“That’s the theory — that the eviction was something he did, not just to hurt her, but to hurt the community that loves this restaurant and didn’t support his ballot measures,” Butt said.
Such speculation angers Poe. He accused Butt and Aklilu of concocting a dramatic landlord-tenant story, knowing it would grab headlines and elicit sympathy from the public.
“They created a media circus, and that was the best, wildest message that they could come up with — ‘Oh, it’s because of the ballot measures,’ ” he said. His family withdrew the eviction notice shortly after it became a news story.
Poe has no immediate plans for the building, which is being advertised on real estate sites at $36 per square foot per year. It could become a pronounced absence on the shoreline, which is now freckled with wineries, brunch spots and a ferry terminal that’s scheduled to open in October.
Aklilu has received several offers to move to other buildings in Richmond, or relocate Salute e Vita to Oakland. She is biding her time.
A few years ago she bought a house in Point Richmond, and she’s now engaged to French pastry chef Jean-Yves Charon, whose bakery, Galaxy Desserts, is steps away from Salute on Marina Way South.
“This restaurant gave me work, gave me hope, gave me success, gave me a home,” Aklilu said.
She’ll mark Salute e Vita’s closing weekend by serving free meals, and any tips will be split among her staff.