Granzella's is reborn

As Jim Granzella strolled through the restaurant bearing the family name, much of it looked familiar.

The building on Sixth Street in Williams was trimmed in green and maroon; inside were the familiar delicatessen case, the sports bar, even the two stuffed polar bears that have adorned the eatery for a quarter-century. Just inside the front door was a wooden sculpture of an Indian — blackened by the fire that gutted the Italian restaurant more than nine months ago.

Starting at 6 a.m. Monday, townspeople and tourists again will walk past the sculpture, refinished but left charred - a reminder of a travelers' landmark destroyed and revived.

"At the time I was told more than once, 'Jim, things like this happen for a reason,'" the 79-year-old Granzella said Friday inside his restaurant's new home. "I couldn't think what possible reason. Now that I've seen this rebuilt, I can see what the reason was."

Housed in an aged wooden lumberyard, Granzella's opened in 1976 as a deli serving the unusual roadside fare of Italian meats and cheeses. Over the next three decades, Jim, his wife Beverly, and later their children and grandchildren added a restaurant, hotel and mail-order olive business as drivers from all over the West Coast flocked to the stopover off Interstate 5.

But on Oct. 11, fire broke out in the kitchen, devastating the century-old building and putting about 150 people out of work. The blaze caused an estimated $1 million in damage, but family members resolved to replace their ruined eatery within hours of the fire. Work on the restaurant's second act began in February as the family ran a deli out of a storefront across the street. (The fire spared Granzella's Inn, a separate building that has stayed open.)

A close copy on the outside of the original wooden structure, the new Granzella's includes more nods to its past in an interior opened wider, to about 15,000 square feet. Roughly near their old spots are the deli, beer section, café, ice cream shop and food shelves - which Granzella family members have spent 14-hour days restocking in the past two weeks.

News of the restaurant's rebirth has reached travelers and newspapers as far afield as San Francisco and Redding — and created almost too much excitement around the building, said Granzella.

"Our biggest problem this week is stopping people from going over the cyclone fence," he said with a slight smile. "It's like they're standing at the starting gate, waiting for the gun to go off."

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Howard Yune at 458-2121 or at hyune@appealdemocrat.com