Oh, No! Rubio's Closed.

On Sunday Hawk and I had a sad surprise. One of our favorite local casual restaurants, Rubio's, had closed. We found out as we walked up to the door, intending to enjoy lunch there, and saw a sign in the window that they had closed permanently.



"When did this happen?!" we both wondered. We'd eaten there just a week earlier, and there was no sign of anything other than business as usual.

We checked online and found a handful of business articles about the closure. It's not just our restaurant in Sunnyvale. Rubio's, officially called Rubio's Coastal Grill, is a chain of around 130— well, now about 86— fast-casual restaurants in California, Nevada, and Arizona. Effective May 31 the chain made the decision to close 48 "underperforming" California restaurants due to "[T]he rising costs of business in the state." Example coverage: ABC10 (Sacramento) article, NBC San Diego article.

At least one of the news articles I linked above, plus several others I browsed but did not link here, cite California's new $20 fast food minimum wage law as a contributing factor. I note that that was not said by a company spokesperson but by uninvolved "experts" invited to comment for the news article. And here I'm being a bit snide by quoting the term experts because as I noted in my own analysis of the $20 min wage, $20 is little if any increase over what fast food restaurants in many California markets— including my own city— are already having to offer employees. Moreover, it's also worth noting that Rubio's troubles did not suddenly appear in the 2 months since the new minimum wage law took effect. The chain went through bankruptcy in late 2020 due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

Well, this closure has us bummed. Rubio's has been a favorite of ours for many years, a place we've eaten at at least once a week. Things we liked:

• It's California-Mexican food. We like that cuisine.
• It's way better quality than fast-food restaurants.
• Lots of dishes taste great.
• The store in Sunnyvale has a nice, airy indoor dining room and a great, sunny patio outdoors. That outdoor patio helped make it one of the places we returned to earliest and most frequently after the depths of the Covid pandemic.

Post-Apocalyptic Black Sand at Piha Beach

On our last full day in New Zealand we drove out to the coast west of New Zealand to hike some waterfalls and visit the beaches. I posted yesterday how Karekare Beach wasn't that great on a day with crummy weather. Well, the next beach we visited, Piha Beach, was better... about as "better" as can be given it was still cloudy and cool. Oh, and windy. Windy as all hell! But hellish wind actually made it kind of interesting.



From a certain angle Piha Beach looks like a normal beach. There's a grassy sand dune, and beyond it is a sentinel rock rising up at the water's edge.

What's hellish about Piha Beach— well, the first thing that's hellish about it— is the black sand.



Include the black sand in your picture frame and all of a sudden your mind (and camera) can't adjust the colors to look like a normal beach. Now you've got this... emo beach. Or maybe it's a goth beach.

But then the wind blows and it turns into a science fiction beach.

Watch on YouTube

What do I mean, "science fiction beach"? It's a beach that looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with yellowish-brown dust blowing over charred ground. Oh, and the wind's so strong people struggle to stand up straight in it, as you can see with the folks crossing ahead of me in this short video.

In beauty I walk... even when it does look kind of like a post-nuclear holocaust movie.