Sometime in August, someone taped a handwritten note to the window at Perle Bar on Mountain Boulevard. It read, in part, thank you Montclair Village for a wonderful 9 years. If you walked past it on your way to the farmers market or Crogan's, the easy conclusion was obvious: another restaurant gone, another sign that the Village's food scene is thinning out.
That conclusion is wrong, and the reason it's wrong tells you something useful about how this particular commercial strip actually works.
Two food and beverage businesses went through visible upheaval in Montclair Village this year. One closed for good. One went dark, then came back. If you assume both happened for the same reason, or for the reason most people assume drives small business turnover, foot traffic, rent, a saturated market, you'd be wrong on both counts. The actual mechanisms were almost nothing alike, and neither had much to do with whether people still want to eat and drink in the Village.
The Wrong Read on Perle Bar
Perle Bar didn't fail because Montclair stopped showing up. It failed after a pivot that never quite landed.
The space had spent most of its nine years as Perle, a French-Mediterranean bistro and wine bar. About a year before it closed for good, owner Rob Lam retooled the concept into Perle Bar, shifting the menu toward Vietnamese dishes and cocktails. Lam isn't a first-time restaurateur figuring things out. He also owns Lily in San Francisco, ranked No. 42 on the San Francisco Chronicle's Top 100 list, one of the more consistently well-reviewed kitchens in the city. Perle Bar was his secondary project, run at a distance from his primary one.
That distinction matters. A rebrand a year before closing, from an owner whose attention and reputation are anchored somewhere else, reads less like a neighborhood in decline and more like a bet that didn't pay off for its investor. The Village didn't reject Perle Bar. The concept didn't find its footing in the window it had.
What Actually Shut Highwire's Doors in March
If Perle Bar's closure was a business decision made at arm's length, Highwire Coffee's closure on Mountain Boulevard was the opposite kind of story, and one that had nothing to do with coffee sales at all.
On March 2, a note went up at the shop signed by Highwire Coffee Roasters, calling it a difficult decision to temporarily close the Montclair Village cafe. Right next to it hung a Now Hiring flyer, an odd pairing for a shop that was supposedly shutting down. The Highwire Workers Union had a different account: staff at the Montclair location were laid off that same day, which the union said was the same deadline workers had set for the company to respond to demands addressing harassment, transphobia, and favoritism.
Whatever was happening inside Highwire's management structure, it had nothing to do with whether Montclair residents wanted their coffee. By early August, the Montclair location had reopened. The counter that anchors one end of the Village's short walk from the farmers market to the parking garage came back exactly where it left off, because the thing that closed it wasn't a demand problem. It was a labor dispute playing out at one storefront of a multi-location roaster that also has shops in Rockridge, Albany, Walnut Creek, and Oakland's City Center.
Here's the shape of both stories side by side.
| What people assumed | What actually happened | |
|---|---|---|
| Perle Bar | The market got tougher for Village restaurants | An owner based at a separate SF flagship tried a pivot that didn't hold |
| Highwire Coffee | Customers stopped coming | An internal labor dispute closed one location of a multi-city chain, then reopened it |
The Businesses That Never Wavered
Neither Perle Bar nor Highwire is a single-site, owner-on-premises operation. That's not a coincidence when you look at what has stayed rooted in the Village through every cycle of openings and closings.
Kotobuki has been serving sushi and bento boxes at 6111 La Salle Avenue since 1990. It's managed by Jun Liang and family, and it has no second location competing for the same owner's attention. Thirty-five years in the same storefront is a long run for any small business, and it has happened without a rebrand, a labor complaint, or a headline.
The Sunday farmers market runs the same way. Every Sunday, rain or shine, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., vendors set up at La Salle Avenue and Moraga Avenue. It's been the Village's steadiest fixture for years, the kind of thing residents plan a morning around without thinking twice about whether it'll be there.
Neither of these needed a note in the window this year, because neither depends on an owner whose primary business lives somewhere else.
The Pattern, If You're Watching
Put the two storylines together and a pattern emerges that's easy to miss if you only clock the headlines. The businesses that wobbled in Montclair Village this year weren't rejected by the neighborhood. They were pulled at from outside it, by a chef managing two kitchens in two cities, or by a company managing labor relations across half a dozen East Bay storefronts at once. The businesses that didn't wobble are the ones where the person behind the counter is also the person who owns the lease.
That's worth knowing the next time a storefront in the Village goes dark. The Beer, Wine & Music Festival still drew crowds to Antioch Court in June. The Art Walk still lined the sidewalks with more than fifty artists in April. The farmers market hasn't skipped a Sunday. None of that changes because one owner's second project didn't work out, or because a chain roaster had an internal dispute two hundred miles from where its coffee is roasted. The commercial core of Montclair Village is doing what it's always done. What changes is which businesses are structured to weather the parts that have nothing to do with the neighborhood at all.
If you live in Montclair, that distinction is probably more useful than another list of what's open this month. It tells you which closures to actually pay attention to, and which ones are just noise from somewhere else.
Ann Newton Cane keeps a close watch on what's actually changing in Montclair and the rest of the Oakland Hills, not just what's on the surface. If you're ever curious what any of this means for your own corner of the neighborhood, she's easy to reach.
