Metro City Restaurant and Bar ‘built from scratch’
Whether you’re looking for breakfast at 4 p.m., lunch at 9 a.m., a friendly place to catch a ballgame or shoot the breeze over drinks, downtown Sunnyvale’s Metro City Restaurant and Bar will hook you up nicely.
For co-owner and manager Frank Tsaboukas, it’s all about making his customers feel welcome and satisfied no matter what time they come in. “I love doing that,” the 35-year-old says. “I can’t picture doing anything else.”
Perhaps that’s not surprising because Frank and his brother (who co-owns and manages Metro City’s other location, also in Sunnyvale) pretty much grew up in their dad’s diner in Los Gatos.
Shoestring budget
Their father, Frank says, taught his sons a lot about the business but had only a limited ability to pitch in financially to get his sons started in business. So, the brothers hustled and scrimped and founded the restaurant on a shoestring budget.
“I don’t know how my landlord trusted me,” Frank says, referring to how he managed to sign a lease. It had been a high-end karaoke bar until the brothers came in with their plans to gut the place and start over. “I was 31 years old at the time. We built it from scratch, including the plumbing.”
Metro City finally opened in September 2016 after nine months of construction. “I wouldn’t have built it myself if I had known how much work it would be,” Frank says.
What the Tsaboukases came up with is a diner with a modern twist: It offers a fairly standard diner menu but serves it up in a gastropub atmosphere that Frank designed.
Not their dad’s diner
Out front on the sidewalk, there are a handful of tables, where pooches are free to lounge with their owners.
Enter under a stylish black awning featuring a skyline accented with silverware-shaped buildings. Inside, walls of reclaimed-wood, stacked stone tiling and corrugated galvanized sheet metal lends an air of rustic chic.
What you don’t see is the kitschiness you’ll often find in a regular diner, no pop art of burger-serving waitresses on roller skates or posters with cute, puny messages.
Pendant lights hang from the exposed black ceiling, which is crisscrossed by ducting.
In a standard diner, you’d see a counter with swivel seats and a stainless steel-framed cutout behind which you could watch the short-order cook slinging pancakes and hash.
At Metro City, there’s a long counter, all right, but it’s fronted by bar-style seating. And where the cook would be in view in a regular diner rises a large, tastefully lighted bar. (The kitchen is unseen in the back of the house.) A bartender mixes cocktails as patrons chat and watch the three large screen TVs showing sports on this late Friday afternoon happy hour.
Brunch rush
And so, the gastropub impression is complete. But in fact, Metro City’s diner soul is never far away. Breakfast and lunch are available anytime. That’s what makes it a diner, right?
Brunch is hugely popular especially on weekends (call ahead or to check in on the Waitlist Me app). Metro City is also available for rent for company events such as holiday parties, and it even has an upstairs room for a party of 40. Contact Metro City at 408-685-2477 to plan your event.
Metro City is also diner-like in that it opens at 7 a.m. and closes at 10 every night except Friday until midnight. It’s located in the center of Historic Murphy Avenue and offers a hearty happy hour on weekdays.
Come experience the modern diner at Metro City along with families, techies, dates, sports fans, people headed for the nightclubs and others in our diverse downtown Sunnyvale community.