The Kenwood brewpub shut after eleven years without giving a reason. Four days before the closure reached print, its owners’ company filed for Chapter 7 liquidation.
For eleven years Palooza Brewery & Gastropub was the place in Kenwood where you could get a hot dog and a pint without an appointment — an unfussy anchor in a valley that increasingly runs on reservations. Sometime in June it closed. Suzette and Jeff Tyler, who built the business up from a hot dog cart in 2010 and opened the restaurant in 2014, signed a letter to friends saying they were closing. They gave no reason.
The reason is a matter of public record. On June 30th their company, Palooza Catering and Events Inc., filed a Chapter 7 petition in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California, case number 26-10512. The debtor is represented by Thomas P. Kelly III of Santa Rosa. The docket identifies the company by its California corporate number, 3545936 — the same number that appears on the pub’s liquor licence, so there is no question of mistaken identity.
Chapter 7 is liquidation, not reorganisation. It is the chapter a business files when it is stopping rather than restructuring: a trustee takes control of whatever assets remain and distributes the proceeds to creditors. The schedules listing who is owed money, and how much, are not yet publicly posted. The Wag will report them when they are.
The timing is tight and slightly sad. The restaurant was still posting cheerfully at the end of May — “the pizza oven is fired up and ready for a beautiful Saturday” on the 30th. The petition followed a month later. When the Sonoma Valley Sun’s Kathleen Hill reported the closure on July 4th, noting that the Tylers had offered no explanation, the filing was already four days old.
There had been a longer squeeze. In January 2021 Suzette Tyler opened a fundraiser titled “Keep Palooza in Kenwood,” which described a business hit by wildfires, power shutoffs and covid closures, and said relief funds “were exhausted last summer and we have been hanging on by a thread since.” It raised $17,375 against a $100,000 goal. That was five years ago, and the filing does not say what happened in between.
The bankruptcy also explains two loose ends. Palooza’s liquor licence — a type 75 brewpub licence, the kind that permits brewing on the premises — is still listed as active and does not expire until August 31st, yet no transfer has been filed and no escrow opened, which is what a sale would require. That is because on the day of filing the licence became property of the bankruptcy estate; it is the trustee’s to deal with, not the Tylers’. And the company still reads as active and in good standing with the Secretary of State, because Chapter 7 does not dissolve a corporation.
As for the room itself, it is on the market. The landlord’s broker, Keegan & Coppin, lists suite 9-C at 3,313 square feet for $3.02 a square foot a month, available immediately and advertised as a full build-out — roughly $10,000 a month for a kitchen someone else has already paid for. The listing was refreshed on July 28th.
Nobody has taken it yet, and the records are unusually clear on this point. No building permit of any kind has been filed on the parcel in 2026. No new licence application has been lodged with the state at that suite. No successor food-facility application has reached the county. A new restaurant would show up in at least one of those three places, and so far none of them has anything.
The rest of Kenwood Village is intact. Kenwood Market, Pillowfight Coffee, the post office and the tasting rooms are all trading, and the shopping centre’s marketing was until recently still describing Palooza as one of its anchors. It is worth saying plainly that this is not a village emptying out: the other closure the valley noticed this year, Café Citti, was an era ending rather than a trend, and several apparent vanishings elsewhere on the highway turn out to be successions — Golden Bear Station in the old Tips Roadside building, Salt & Stone where the Kenwood Restaurant used to be.
The Tylers, meanwhile, appear to be trading in Idaho. Palooza Basecamp & Eatery, a nine-room hotel and restaurant in Cascade, was posting on its Facebook page this week.
Palooza’s website, Facebook page and Instagram account have all been taken down, leaving no public channel through which to reach the Tylers. A bankruptcy is a legal process, not a verdict on anybody’s character, and eleven years of feeding a small town is not undone by how it ended. If the Tylers wish to give their account of it, this paper will print it.