Ten months after a car tore through the front of Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company, the shop is still not whole. One side has been serving coffee since early December. The other side, the one with the seating and the roasting equipment, is still boarded up on Main Street, waiting on a permit from the Town. Most of the news coverage stopped once the first half reopened. The rest of the story kept going without cameras, and the local paper is the only outlet that kept following it.
The Night Everyone in Town Remembers
Just before midnight on Thanksgiving, a speeding car ran the intersection at University Avenue and Main Street, plowed through the concrete planters out front, and slammed into the shop's cafe section, tearing up the seating and the roasting area. The driver was a 90-year-old man named Karl Klemmer, who lived at the Terraces of Los Gatos senior community. Police suspected alcohol was a factor. Klemmer was seriously hurt in the crash and died on December 7. No one else was injured.
Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company has occupied that corner since 1982, and Teri Hope, its founder, has said the closure that followed was the longest in the shop's history, longer than anything the business went through after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
How Fast Half the Building Came Back
The side of the shop that handles espresso and hosts live music wasn't touched by the crash, and it reopened December 5, just seven days after the accident. Hope told reporters it was running at about half its usual capacity with a smaller staff, but it was open.
The recovery had help. The Los Gatan, the town's local paper, organized a GoFundMe on Hope's behalf, launched with restaurateur Alex Hult, longtime community member Roger Sanford, and Los Gatan publisher Dan Pulcrano. It raised more than $51,000 to help cover the shop's 22 employees through the shutdown and to fill whatever gaps insurance didn't.
"Having to tell customers they couldn't come in is contrary to my reflexes." — Teri Hope
That line, from Hope in the days after the crash, is the closest thing to an explanation of why the reopening mattered as much as it did. The shop has functioned for decades as a stand-in for a town square, a place regulars come every morning to see the same faces.
The Side That's Still Waiting on the Town
The other half of the building never got a comparable news cycle. As of the most recent local reporting this summer, it remained boarded up, and the holdup wasn't money or community will. It was the ordinary pace of a permit review.
Local architect Gary Kohlsaat, whose work has focused on custom home design and Victorian restoration in Los Gatos since 1987, submitted repair plans for the damaged side. By the time the Los Gatan checked in again in early July, those plans had been sitting with the Town for roughly two months, still awaiting approval, with no confirmed date for when construction could start.
One neighbor put it simply after the crash: "There's a warm feeling now, because of how the shop has been able to recover." That was true of the side that reopened in December. It wasn't yet true, ten months later, of the side still sitting behind plywood.
A State Award, and a Storefront Still Under Repair
In late June, State Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, who represents District 28, presented Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company with a Business of the Year award. She handed the certificate to Hope and to operations manager Dylan Phillips inside the shop, on the side that was open to receive her.
Phillips called it humbling, and said the team doesn't look for recognition so much as to keep taking care of customers and stay a fixture in the community. The award is a real marker of how the town sees this business. It also sits at an odd angle next to the fact that half the building it was awarded in still can't legally reopen.
What's Filling the Open Half in the Meantime
The functioning side of the shop hasn't just been treading water. It's currently hosting a rotating art exhibit from Rudy Rucker, a longtime Los Gatos resident who taught computer science at San Jose State University and is regarded as one of the founding figures of the 1980s cyberpunk science fiction movement. Rucker's paintings are hanging on the walls, and he's told Hope that some of his stories were written while he sat in her cafe. The pieces are for sale.
It's a small detail, but it says something about how the shop is used. Even at half capacity, it's still where a working writer sits down to work, and now, apparently, where he shows his paintings.
The Timeline So Far
- Nov. 28, 2025: Car crashes into the cafe and roasting side of the shop just before midnight.
- Dec. 5, 2025: The espresso and live-music side reopens, seven days after the crash.
- Dec. 7, 2025: The driver, Karl Klemmer, dies from injuries sustained in the crash.
- Winter 2025 into 2026: The Los Gatan-organized GoFundMe passes $51,000 for the shop's 22 employees.
- Roughly May 2026: Architect Gary Kohlsaat submits repair plans to the Town for the damaged side.
- June 26, 2026: Assemblymember Gail Pellerin presents the shop with a Business of the Year award.
- July 2026: The damaged side remains boarded up, plans still awaiting Town permit approval, no confirmed reopening date.
What It Means If You Walk Past Main Street
If you've been checking the boarded-up side of the building every few weeks expecting news, the honest answer as of the most recent local reporting is that there wasn't any yet, just a permit sitting in a queue. The espresso side isn't going anywhere. It survived a car crash and an earthquake before that. The other half is waiting on the Town's review of Kohlsaat's repair plans, and the most recent local reporting gave no reopening date.
Hope has spent decades tied into the civic life of this town beyond her own storefront, having helped start the Los Gatos Music in the Park summer series and a holiday horse-drawn carriage program, and she chairs Los Gatos Music & Arts, the nonprofit behind the Jazz on the Plazz concert series. When the second half of the shop does reopen, it will likely be treated as a town occasion rather than a quiet ribbon cutting. Until then, half the building keeps doing what it's done since 1982, and the other half keeps waiting on paperwork.
Stories like this one are why Brian Flack, who grew up in Los Gatos, still walks Main Street enough to notice when the boards finally come down. If you want a read on what's actually happening on the block before you make a move here, that's the kind of local detail worth a conversation.
