Restaurateur Philippe Leroy has a track record of opening French restaurants all over the world, from Palo Alto to Japan, but Los Gatos has brought in a unique traffic that he says he has yet to experience in his history of his culinary craft.
Husband and wife—or, chef and marketing manager—Philippe and Deena Leroy live in Los Gatos and own one of the most popular and central restaurants in the heart of downtown.
And although Chez Philippe normally is closed on Mondays, on July 14, it was open to celebrate Bastille Day with a special dish called a cassoulet. They added live jazz, which customers can normally expect every Thursday from 5:30pm-8pm.
June 28 marked the three-year anniversary of opening Chez Philippe in downtown Los Gatos. “At the time, we were both in the life transition and I had left the corporate world so we both decided to open this place. We wanted something that defined us both, with real French food,” Deena says.
“We wanted to go back to basics that were simple and hardy, as I grew up in Paris, and went to the cooking school in Paris called Ferrandi,” says Philippe, as he laughs and says that The New York Times quoted the school he studied at as the “Harvard School of Cooking.”
The LeRoys opened and owned many French restaurants over the years—one in Japan and La Bohème in Palo Alto, which Philippe eventually sold.
Philippe says he was always the man behind the menu.
“Really, what you see on the menu is always what I had done, which was done traditionally in France when I left there over 40 years ago,” Philippe says, explaining he always wanted a traditional approach.
“The one thing that grounds us both is that we love each other and we treat this thing as our baby,” Deena says. Philippe says their circumstance is extremely rare and they both know their strengths and they both know their weaknesses: Deena is on the marketing and business side, and Philippe is on the creative side.
Philippe says that their connection to French people in the area is strong, and partially due to the nature of France itself. They’ve had elderly people come in who recall how they got married or engaged in France. Once, he says, there was a Vietnamese man who came in and began crying once he ate crème caramel because he said it reminded him of his grandmother.
These are the moments that help Philippe keep going, when he makes food and knows it can make his customers feel happy: “Tonight we have a date that is in France.”
“We wanted to make this place like you walk in our house,” his wife said. “We wanted people to come and feel like they can relax and like they can be transported into somewhere else, considering that all these people work so hard. Los Gatos has been so welcoming to us, and they treat us like we’re their little secret.”
“For me this place is not like a business. It’s a passion and thrives off of giving,” Philippe says.
