Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Gilley's owner, Petrina Berman, enjoys a lunchtime favorite, the Lite Lunch, a half-sandwich plus soup or salad.

New dishes complement Gilley's traditional menu

By Suzanne Cristallo

Just the name Gilley's connotes something downhome--a place that's been around a while. It is, and it has been.

As far back as most memories around town go, Gilley's in Los Gatos, next to the cinema, was a sweet shop. There's an old green milkshake mixer of 1940s vintage and a nine-pump syrup dispenser still in use that came with the place.

It was called Gilley's when Harvey Lohmeyer--retired some five years ago to Las Vegas--sold his interest to David, Petrina and Andres Berman. David, an IBM public relations executive, is a silent partner, while Petrina runs the place with help from son Andres, who relieves the regular cook on his days off.

It's a place where breakfast fans can order up fried eggs and bacon and watch Bob Jansen, who started at Gilley's as a short-order cook in 1988, flip the over-easies and top the eggs Florentine with his special Hollandaise sauce. It's a place where Jansen, 41, can shoot the breeze with the counter customers--his favorite part of working there.

The coffee shop was the first venture of its kind for Petrina, who came from the city of Basel, Switzerland, and a family who for generations had dealt in fine jewelry.

After getting her degree in fine arts in Munich, Germany, and working with her family awhile, Petrina indulged her curiosity about the United States by coming to Los Angeles in the late 1960s under the sponsorship of a UCLA professor and his wife. It was at a year-end beach party thrown by the university's journalism department that she met David, an aspiring newsman. They were married in 1969.

Petrina took up the familiar work of marketing fine jewelry, eventually becoming a regional manager for a concessionaire in the Emporium stores. She also sold real estate for a while--all of this while handling the demands of her family, which had grown with the adoption of her infant son from El Salvador and, three years later, her baby daughter in Los Angeles.

Longing to escape the corporate world and be her own boss, she was visiting Los Gatos and came into contact with the former Gilley's owner, whose lease was up.

"When he asked me what my experience in the restaurant business was, I said 'none,' and he sat down fast," Petrina recalls with a grin. "But I said, 'I've sold houses, so why shouldn't I be able to sell coffee?' "

Her reasoning evidently was sound. "People still come, and I'm still here," she notes.

It could be the food, the service, the ambiance or all of the above. Petrina considers these to be the base stock of success.

Gilley's food is uncomplicated. Hamburgers and rich, poured-from-tin-shaker milkshakes hark back to earlier days. But newer additions such as curry chicken-melon salad--chunks of chicken breast with cantaloupe, grapes and celery in a curry chutney--tend to go over big with the lunch crowd. Try the soup, too: There's made-from-scratch potato leek or chicken vegetable rice, Jansen says.

Admitting to a mistake sometime back when they tried to stay open for dinner, Petrina says, "When people go out for dinner, they're willing to pay lots more and go somewhere fancy. We've learned to stay with what we're known for and are good at."

Gilley's Coffee Shop, 37 N. Santa Cruz Ave., Los Gatos. Open Mon.-Sat., 6 a.m.- 3 p.m., Sun., 7 a.m.-3 p.m. 354-9710.

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