We noted that The Old Post Office restaurant was hiring back during the last Avenew festival here. An intrepid regular reader has added to the anticipation by getting a couple of photos of the nearly-complete interior–and they are exquisite. Check it out our first peek inside.

I can taste the French 75s and Kir Royales already. Add a strolling violin player and some paté. Voilà.

This is a good time to look back — way back — to 2014 and remember the effort that went into saving a key piece of the old post office. My lovely wife laid it out in an Op Ed for the DJ back on Sept. 25, 2014, here. I’ll repost just one small bit of it:

With the recent sale of the historic downtown Burlingame post office on Park Road, these words from Dr. Gray Brechin, project scholar of The Living New Deal at U.C. Berkeley, come to mind: “Far more than utilitarian containers for conducting business, they are our piazzas — the places we meet one another and in doing so, see our landscapes, history, work and ourselves reflected back from their walls.”

In my mind, 220 Park Road, embodies the spirit of New Deal public works projects built during the lingering poverty following the Great Depression and championed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in hope of rebuilding our nation and its people. Roosevelt, “an avid stamp collector,” per Brechin, “took a keen interest in the postal service” actively overseeing the design of six post offices near his Hyde Park home and believed “they are at once centers of community and symbolic of government’s integrity — and believed they should look it.”

Click through and get the full Op Ed while we await the opening. You can sign up for updates from the restaurant website here.