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Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Rosemary Cabildo-White accepts comfort from a longtime customer who just discovered the Golden Rose was closing.
Popular Chinese restaurant closes
By Kelly Wilkinson
Rosemary Cabildo-White ran a restaurant where she knew her regulars' favorite dishes--and what colleges their children attended.
The Golden Rose restaurant, located on Java Drive, grew from a donut shop that Cabildo-White bought 18 years ago into a well-patronized Chinese restaurant--one of the few in the area. The Golden Rose's trademark was its buffet-style lunch, where customers piled their plates high with egg rolls, potstickers and chicken chow-mein.
On Apr. 3, to the dismay of her regular customers, Cabildo-White closed her restaurant. Steve Noble has worked at a nearby electronics systems company for almost as long as Cabildo-White has been in business and regularly stopped in to meet his wife for lunch, hold business meetings or pick up a quick take-out snack.
"My favorite was the Mongolian beef special," he said. "She had steady, loyal clientele and always took a personal interest in their lives and families."
Cabildo-White shut her doors after the owners of the complex released her from her month-to-month lease. Two weeks ago, she auctioned off her woks, counters, tables, and chairs to make way for the neighboring Internet company to expand into her former space.
Noble said the Golden Rose was so popular during lunch hours that he would wait until the afternoon to stop in for a bite. No matter when he came in, Cabildo-White was almost always there, taking orders and answering the phones, Noble said.
Though she had been planning to sell the restaurant since December 1988, Cabildo-White said she feels the closure is premature. She said she would have stayed until she sold her restaurant had she not been released from her month-to-month lease.
The owners of the Moffett Plaza property said Cabildo-White was a good tenant, but when they found out she was planning on selling they had no choice but to make a sound business decision: to release her from her month-to-month lease when they had an opportunity to make more money in a longer-term arrangement.
"We have to run a business from a business perspective," said John Vidal, representative for the Moffett Plaza complex. "I can understand being hurt and that this did come as a shock, but we offered her a longer lease, which she didn't accept. A month-to-month lease is shaky, and when we were offered a long-term lease, it was a business decision that we needed to make."
Cabildo-White's disappointment came at not being told that she was being released from the lease, or given an opportunity to counter-offer, she said. And Vidal concedes that "maybe one oversight was to not go to her and tell her about the new lease opportunity, but that's hindsight."
Although Cabildo-White recognizes that it was within the owners' legal right to release her from their contractual arrangement, she said she was planning to sell the business within the year to recoup some of her original investment costs, and now she said "all that money has gone down the drain."
"This has been such a shock," Cabildo-White said. "After all these years, I feel like a fixture here."
She agrees that she turned down a longer-term lease because she wasn't interested in keeping the business much longer, but said she still wanted "to be able to walk out on my own terms."
"The restaurant has been like a baby for me," she said. "I gave birth to it and nurtured it, and now it's gone out of my control."
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
