SAN MATEO — A Poplar Creek Golf Course restauranter sued the city of San Mateo this week, claiming city officials destroyed her thriving business by leasing a leaky and moldy building to her, then failing to do much about it despite her pleas for help.
Alicia Petrakis — who ran the Par 3 restaurant and Villa Vista banquet hall at the city-owned golf course — claimed the city knew for years that the buildings she leased were prone to flooding, leaks and sewage issues. Still, she said, city officials failed to properly warn her about it, or do much to fix those problems after she repeatedly aired her concerns.
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The business never re-opened, causing more than 61 people to lose their jobs, according to the lawsuit.
To Petrakis, it was “completely avoidable.”
“It’s sad, it’s heartbreaking,” Petrakis told this news organization. “It’s a 30-year career in hospitality and working in my community that had a hard stop. That’s what makes it so hard, is that it was completely unnecessary that we’re all going through this.”
In a statement, city spokesperson Jeanne Sullivan Billeci said the city “respectfully declines to comment, as this is a pending litigation matter, and the city has not yet been formally served.”
“While we are unable to comment on the specifics at this time, we will respond appropriately through the legal process,” Sullivan Billeci said.
Petrakis opened Par 3 and the Villa Vista banquet hall in June 2019, after winning a city application process for the space. Before then, she had been a mainstay in the San Mateo eatery scene, having owned Three Craft Kitchen and Restaurant — previously known as Astaria — for several years, as well as a catering business before that.
Prior to signing her seven-year lease, according to the suit, city officials told Petrakis that the clubhouse had been “completely rebuilt in 2000,” and that roof leaks that had caused staining on the building’s ceiling tiles had been fixed.
Despite her business plan working to “perfection,” she noticed an increasing cascade of problems with the property.
Staff found water pooling in the restaurant and banquet room and did little — if anything — to fix it.
In early 2024, the city told Petrakis that it needed to close the restaurant for a month to conduct repairs. It offered her $300,000 to cover her losses during that stretch, and the two sides settled on a November 2024 monthlong closure, the lawsuit claimed.
Yet Petrakis said the city later appeared to grow reluctant on paying those costs, while also allegedly suggesting repairs would take half as long as originally thought. Rather than address the problems, the lawsuit said, city officials criticized her payroll and management structure.
By May 2024, city officials notified Petrakis that her restaurant would be responsible for $350,000 in water repairs, “despite not knowing where the water was coming from,” the lawsuit said. Petrakis countered that the city had long deferred maintenance on the building, and her lawsuit claimed the water issues predated her arrival.
Petrakis said she returned from a vacation in summer 2024 to find that city workers had created a hole inside one restaurant wall, which revealed mold. Yet, she said, the city did little to cover it up. She said she later commissioned her own mold testing in September 2024, which recommended professional remediation.
Early the following month, city officials recommended air quality tests at Par 3, which Petrakis allowed, the lawsuit said. At 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 11, city officials red-tagged the building and said people could not safely be inside. The decision led to a scene of mass confusion, Petrakis said, during which the restaurant was told to abruptly end dinner service.
“I think my heart stopped — I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Petrakis said.
She said a 275-person memorial service planned for the next day had to be moved overnight to a new location. More than 100 additional events had already been booked at Par 3 and Villa Villa over the next several months — all of which had to be canceled, the lawsuit claimed. Petrakis said she invested a minimum of $500,000 into the property to transform it into Par 3, and lost out on at least a quarter-million dollars in revenue from events that had already been booked through the end of 2024.
“It wasn’t just a restaurant. We were a community hub, a place where people celebrated life. And it took me five-plus years to build that 61-person team into the team they were when the restaurant closed. The amount of effort that goes into that is excruciating,” Petrakis said. “It’s really difficult to even imagine how to recreate what we had again.”
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