There Goes the Neighborhood…Again

Last week, locals filled up Rollati Ristorante, a swank Italian restaurant across the street from San Jose City Hall, to celebrate the eatery’s final night after a short two-year run.

Rollati was the result of an all-too-familiar sequence of events. In the early aughts, as City Hall construction began to take shape, the politicos wanted to gentrify the downmarket riffraff across the street, including the legendary dive Lenny’s Cocktails at 171 E. Santa Clara St., plus another dive, the Quality Café. There was also a popular car wash and a few vibrant Vietnamese-owned businesses. In textbook San Jose fashion, the city wiped out the whole block and replaced it with a parking lot that sat empty for years.

In the end, Lenny’s was the bottom of the barrel—in all the right ways—so at Rollati,