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LOS GATOS — In a typical year, the owners at the popular Double D’s Sports Grille in Los Gatos would be getting their game plan together for the start of peak season — football.
But not this year.
When the San Francisco 49ers and other National Football League teams open their season on Sunday, the 32 televisions inside the award-winning sports bar at the corner of Hwy. 9 and Santa Cruz Ave. will remain dark because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Double D’s owners — brothers Darin and Dean Devincenzi — have set up a tent in the parking lot for dine-in but say they won’t become a sports grille again until COVID-19 restrictions are completely lifted.
To them, it makes no sense to set up TVs in the parking lot for 18 tables, noting that their revised playbook calls for customers to eat and leave, not sit for three-plus hours watching their favorite NFL teams and players.
“I don’t want to sound like ‘woe is me’ or I am cheap or something,” Dean Devincenzi said this week. “But when you go from 150 seats to 60 seats, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to survive. And, man, we are in major survival mode.”
Normally, the first Sunday of football season and every Sunday that follows through the fall and early winter is festive in the sports bar industry, and the Devincenzi brothers can certainly attest to that. For 16 years in a row, Mercury News readers voted Double D’s the “Best Sports Bar in Silicon Valley.”
“We open the doors at 9;30 and, especially when the 49ers play, the restaurant would be full by 10 o’clock,” Dean Devincenzi said. “And this year, because of the lack of sports, I would guess there’s even a higher anticipation level for football because people are just starting to watch some sports again. We’re going to get a (ton) of phone calls this week about it.”
But the Devincenzi brothers have no plans to change their minds, not when it costs businesses such as Double D’s about $6,500 to buy the DirecTV package to show NFL games being played across the country. They also say they’d have to purchase outdoor TVs and probably a generator to power them up.
“We just have to rely on people who still want to go out and eat, and then go home and watch the 1 o’clock game,” Darin Devincenzi said. “We’ll see how it goes, see if it hurts us. It’s tough enough as it is. But at this point, we just haven’t tried to entertain the cost of what it would take to get TVs out here. It’s just not feasible right now.”
Darin estimated that business is down at least 50 percent since the pandemic exploded in March. But both brothers are pleased with the tent in their parking lot and socially-distanced tables.
“The thing is we still have decent food,” Darin added. “People still want to go out and get a burger and a beer. Of all the options in town, this is probably one of the better, cleaner and most covered setups.”
The brothers opened Double D’s in 1996 and turned it into a go-to spot for sports fans. When former Archbishop Mitty High School basketball star Aaron Gordon was drafted No. 4 overall by the Orlando Magic in 2014, his mom threw a party at Double D’s for Gordon’s friends and family who didn’t accompany him to Brooklyn for the National Basketball Association draft.
But the good times for Double D’s went up in flames in 2016 when a three-alarm fire caused by combustibles being stored in the restaurant’s water heater closet shut down the establishment for 2 ½ years, ending its run as the valley’s top sports bar.
Now, the Devincenzi brothers are doing all they can to survive again, even if it means taking sports out of their playbook.
“It’s not just us; it’s affected everybody,” Dean said about COVID. “It just happened to be a continual run of bad luck for us. Nothing I can do about it. And, quite frankly, renting this tent for Double D’s is the best thing we could have done. It’s created a pretty high level of comfort for people. We’ve got to do whatever we’ve got to do to pay bills
“This is uncharted waters for us. But right now, I say we will not have (sports) programming until we have some semblance of mass order for coming back into the restaurant.“
