But there are clues to its era:
- Typefaces and the period after "sandwiches" are very typical of signs in local photos from late 1800s and early 1900s.
- For the lettering to've been visible, the buildings nearer to Castro (the ones recently demolished) weren't yet built or expected.
- Through the 1990s, 821 W. ECR housed the 101 Club, a neighborhood bar and restaurant whose own name bespoke some history. Using "101" in the names of roadside hospitality businesses on El Camino was popular during the interval, after 1925 until the Bayshore Freeway's advent in the 1950s, when ECR formed part of the great early north-south auto route from Mexico to Canada, US 101. After the peninsula portion of ECR lost that designation, various "101" establishments along it gradually disappeared. (A local journalist wrote about them several years back.) Predating the 101 Club implies that A&A opened by mid-century or earlier. (It could also have been an earlier name for the 101 Club -- which was still serving sandwiches in the 1990s, I'll attest, though I don't recall if the menu included chili.)
- Revealingly, Mariani's Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink says that "chili" (though it had been known much longer in the Southwest) was popularized nationally under that name in the late 1800s, and "chili parlors" became a fashionable US restaurant genre in the early 1900s. That era would fit both the lettering style and the pre-101 tenancy.
So "chili" had a heyday as a trendy restaurant-industry term -- much as (more recently) Asian-fusion, acai-bowl, and poke have been, in the same neighborhood of Mountain View.
