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WALNUT CREEK — The owner of Jade Garden says the shopping center where her Chinese restaurant has done business for 31 years is forcing her out next year because of the terms of a lease the center signed with Whole Foods.

The news has roiled the restaurant’s family operators and angered some longtime customers who question Whole Foods’ motive.

Jade Garden owner Ying Wang says she received a letter earlier this year from the shopping center’s developer and operator, Regency Centers, declaring she will have to vacate Encina Grande shopping center on Ygnacio Valley Road when her lease expires in February 2019.

“The Whole Foods lease limited our square footage of restaurants and it states that your current space cannot be used for a restaurant once your lease expires,” said the letter from Jennifer Hess of Regency Centers, which was sent in February. “I have spent the last few months trying to modify this language, but they will not approve it.”

Hess did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Eric Davidson, a senior communications manager for Regency, said in an emailed statement that “Jade Garden has been at Encina Grande for a long time, but the time has come for us to part ways for what we believe is the right direction for the center and the community it serves.

“We have given them over a year’s notice about the condition of their lease. Reducing restaurant square footage was a Regency decision to provide a better experience overall at the center by helping to reduce congestion. Whole Foods Market did not participate in the decision to terminate Jade Garden’s lease.”

But a letter from Regency Centers to the city of Walnut Creek confirmed the impact of the Whole Foods’ lease on the restaurant, saying that “given restrictions in the Whole Foods lease, the Jade Garden lease cannot be renewed and the space cannot be leased to any type of restaurant.” It said also that because the adjacent UPS store is a “carve out” of the restaurant’s space, it will combine the two into one unit.

Wang’s family has been reeling from the news, she said, adding that when they first received the notice about the lease ending, “we couldn’t sleep.”

“This is my life. I raised my kids here,” she said of the restaurant. “We thought we would retire here. I guess not.”

Wang opened the restaurant in 1987 with her parents and her husband, chef Jeff Wang, when she was 24. Some of her customers have been coming to the restaurant since it first opened, Wang said.

Now, she doesn’t know what to do. She will try to find a small vacant restaurant space to move into because it’s too expensive for her family to build out a restaurant interior from scratch.

The UPS store next door will move into a space across the street, according to a longtime employee.

Residents, too, have expressed frustration with the move.

“For our community members this appears to be a move by Whole Foods and their parent company, Amazon, to increase traffic in their store for prepared foods (they have tables set up in the store to sit and eat) as well as driving people to do their shipping at (Whole Foods), since they have started integrating Amazon shipping services into the stores,” Jason Gordon, a resident of the area, said in an email. “It’s not lost on our community that (Whole Foods) is driving out local businesses that perform similar services.”

Longtime Jade Garden customer Janelle Golphenee said during a recent visit that it’s “a shame” the restaurant is being forced out. “It is a disgrace to small businesses.”

Amazon purchased Whole Foods Market in 2017. Whole Foods representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

According to documents attached to a planning commission meeting agenda, Regency Centers wants to turn the two spaces occupied by Jade Garden and UPS into one space for American Automobile Association (AAA) to use as a service and retail center. The planning commission has to approve plans for AAA to lease the space because putting in a “business and professional office use,” as AAA is designated, requires a conditional use permit.

Whole Foods signed the lease with Regency Centers for the location in 2013, just before the shopping center — formerly anchored by a Safeway — underwent a $18 million renovation that included building out the Whole Foods store, adding some new tenants, sprucing up the buildings’ facades, updating the parking lot and adding an outdoor seating area and fire pit. Whole Foods opened in November 2016.

Ying Wang said the construction hit her business hard, making it too inconvenient for customers to enter the center. Still, her family paid rent for the restaurant space during that period. They were not told before construction that Whole Foods’ arrival meant they would have to depart, she said.

Lease restrictions are not unusual, especially if large anchor tenants such as Whole Foods are involved, but Wang said the news her restaurant must leave stung. Her last lease, signed about four years ago, did not include an option to renew as it usually did, she said. But it was not until she received the February letter from Regency Centers that she realized she couldn’t stay much longer.

Other restaurants in the shopping center include Rocco’s Ristorante Pizzeria, which opened in 1999, longtime tenant Evie’s Hamburgers, Taco Bell, Applebee’s, Bagel Street Cafe and Toyo Sushi. It was unclear whether any of those restaurants will be affected by either the Whole Foods’ lease or the decision to “reduce congestion,” as Davidson stated.

Davidson said in another email “no other restaurants are connected to the current events,” but added that “no further leasing decisions have been finalized at this point.”

Staff photographer Jane Tyska contributed to this report.