Busy Pearl restaurant can't meet rent hike
Can Font closes despite packed houses
Owners of Can Font, a fine-dining Spanish cuisine restaurant in the luxury Cosmopolitan tower at Northwest 10th and Northrup, closed recently after eight years at Northwest 10th and Northrup streets.
Although it was apparently successful and had been rated the best restaurant in Portland in 2022 by USA Today, owner/chef Vladimir Zaharchook-Williams said the landlord, Site Centers, found it “cheaper, due to current tax laws, to keep the space empty than to negotiate fair rent with a local, small business.”
Site Centers, a real estate investment trust company based in Ohio, owns 10 buildings in the Pearl District, leasing to 40 retail and service companies. The company did not respond to a request to comment on this story.
Jim Coates, a resident of The Cosmopolitan, found Can Font’s demise puzzling.
“It caught me by complete surprise,” Coates told the NW Examiner. “It seemed full-to-packed all the time.”
If Zaharchook-Williams is right about the tax incentives, this may help explain many other commercial vacancies in Portland’s central city.
i walk past can font on my morning walk every day…and was surprised, as were others, to see it had recently closed. allan: i’d love to see some additional/deeper reporting on the tax environment that the building owners apparently blame for making it more profitable to maintain an empty space than an occupied one. if true…IF true:)…that would be a hella story!
WHAT tax laws? City, county, state, federal? Can you get more specific information about these tax laws?