Lion & Compass was hangout for high-tech hotshots
Silicon Valley eatery closing doors to make way for housing
It’s time to carve out room for a new exhibit on the history of Silicon Valley.
With two objects — a stock ticker tape that highlighted the high-tech industry’s successes and a stained-glass image of a lion holding a compass — you can tell the story of a legendary Sunnyvale restaurant. It’s one that has stood witness to thousands of powerbroker discussions, hiring interviews, IPO parties — and multimillion-dollar deals.
After 35 years, the Lion & Compass will close Friday, and the corner where its dining rooms, imported English bar and tropical garden now sit will become high-density housing.
Many of the biggest names in the technol-
ogy world met here and strategized over Asian-influenced California cuisine: Intel’s Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove and Craig Barrett; industry pioneers Carver Mead and Federico Faggin; Adam Osborne, the portable computer innovator; Jerry Sanders of Advanced Micro Devices; Cypress Semiconductor’s T.J. Rodgers; Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems; Cisco’s John Chambers. And, of course, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, a former co-owner of the restaurant who left this business in the 1990s before moving on to other ventures.
“I would like this to be remembered as a kind of clubhouse for the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s,” said current owner Robert Nino, recalling that a New York Times reporter in 1984 drew an impressive parallel. “The Lion and Compass is to the computer world what Sardi’s is to New York’s theater district.”
Never short on drama
Certainly, this North Fair Oaks Avenue restaurant has seen its share of drama too — especially in the weeks since the shutdown was announced. It’s been so busy that Nino has put on an apron and become the kitchen’s expediter while longtime maitre d’ and manager Kim Martin has taken to consoling diners who’ve just learned the sad news. The bartenders and wait staff are pulling extra shifts.
While the CEO wattage may have dimmed in recent years, the diversity of Lion & Compass customers and the industries they represent has amped up.
On Monday, a wide crosssection of Silicon Valley packed the tables at lunchtime. There were 14 diners from nearby Juniper Networks, and 14 over from Stryker, the Fremont medical devices company. Santa Clara laser developer Coherent filled eight seats, as did Spirent, a San Jose software company. Other large groups came from Enplas, a plastics fabricator in Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale’s Infinera, a telecommunications equipment company.
Behind closed doors, 23 people dined in the restaurant’s wood-paneled library — the stately room imported from a London townhouse where Intel’s board of directors used to meet, but only after their exhaustive security detail scraped the room for listening devices and gave the goahead.
And that was just half the restaurant.
Over at the Synopsys table, the mood suddenly turned reflective when the team from the Mountain View company realized this year-end ritual would be their last at this location.
“I’m stunned to find out that my favorite place is closing,” said Chris Tice, an electronic design automation executive who’s been eating here for 32 years. “This is my group holiday lunch. Now it’s a sad goodbye, and we have to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ”
His colleague Susheel Tadikonda quickly flagged down a waitress to change his order. If this was going to be his last meal here, it wouldn’t be a salad, he said. Instead, it would be the Thai Chicken and Shrimp StirFry he’s been enjoying since
he first came here in 1995 for a job interview over lunch.
In the main dining room, Jamie Trovato, a benefits manager for Fortinet, a Sunnyvale cyber-security firm, networked with Terri Le, a sales rep for BI Worldwide, an employee recognition and engagement specialist. “I’m bummed because it’s a really great place to come for business,” she said.
And one of the restaurant’s devoted non-tech customers, Skip McIntyre, occupied a prime corner spot — his favorite table for 25 years. “I’m here today to honor the people who run this place,” the Palo Alto insurance broker said. “The second time I came in here they remembered my name. It was an ego trip.”
Founded in 1982, the L&C specialized in ego trips. A running stock market ticker tape (now long gone) provided instant gratification, as companies that were going public requested seats in the bar so that executives and employees could watch their stock price. In those days before cellphones, every dining-room table had a phone jack for those can’tmiss business calls.
The art of the deal
“Everything was happening in the valley,” Bushnell said of the heady 1980s. Although he says he doesn’t believe in “living life in the rear-view mirror,” he couldn’t resist a look back this week.
“The day we opened I knew we had the economic model wrong. We should
have given away the food for free and gotten a percentage of the deals that were closed there,” Bushnell said with a laugh.
That Silicon Valley swagger drew headlines for the L&C in Time magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post and beyond. “We developed more of a reputation in the international and national business community while people who lived within five miles had no idea we were here,” Nino said. “They didn’t know it was a restaurant because the signage was so discreet.”
A special club
Beyond the small sign and lush foliage was an unusual restaurant with a blend of British and Caribbean furnishings. Bushnell had imported both the “cool” name, the Lion & Compass, and the facade from a former pub in Halifax, England. A whimsical touch, a game room, reflected the popularity of the flourishing video game industry. But that lasted only a few years before the space was converted into a private dining room.
Privacy became the L&C’s stock-in-trade. Ask any employee about what deals were struck, what business was conducted, and you’d get the same stony-faced response as if you had asked an Apple executive about their next product launch.
Tables spaced well apart from each other lent themselves to discussion — and in recent years set the Lion & Compass apart from its raucous restaurant contemporaries. It was even quiet enough amid Monday’s company gatherings for customer David G. Stork, a Rambus fellow, to write in his notebook and read (Walter Isaacson’s “Leonardo da Vinci”) over lunch.
“There’s nothing like this,” said Bob Emberley, a sales manager with Spirent. “The ambience, the linen tablecloths … ” he said, his voice trailing off.
Where would he and his colleagues dine after the Lion & Compass is gone?
“No idea,” he said wistfully.