Sonoma restaurants reopen, hoping diners will come

After returning from a week-long vacation in Canada, Cameron Menefee, 6, wears firefighter gear to show support for firefighters at the Swiss Hotel in Sonoma. The hotel’s owner, Hank Marioni, lost his home of 35 years to the fire. less After returning from a week-long vacation in Canada, Cameron Menefee, 6, wears firefighter gear to show support for firefighters at the Swiss Hotel in Sonoma. The hotel’s owner, Hank Marioni, lost his home of ... more Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 64 Caption Close Sonoma restaurants reopen, hoping diners will come 1 / 64 Back to Gallery

This week, with the burnt-log haze beginning to thin, the power came back on in downtown Sonoma, and restaurants began to think about what the weekend might bring.

The selection in the pastry case at Basque Boulangerie on the Sonoma Plaza was sparse on Tuesday, but it was enough to draw a line of women in their 60s, who greeted each other with hugs. Nearby, at Mary’s Pizza Shack, managers from the chain’s other locations converged to help reopen the restaurant, covering for workers who were still out of town.

At the Swiss Hotel, owner Hank Marioni and manager Kristin Schantz straightened tablecloths and chairs while their cooks rushed to get everything prepared for dinner. The cooks had begun the day by throwing out spoiled sauces and retrieving meats they had stored in refrigerators across town where the electricity had stayed on.

The hotel, which has been in the same family for 95 years, had lost many paying customers, but people were starting to come back for dinner. “We’ve had cancellations, but it’s mostly locals who are calling, wanting us to open,” Schantz says.

“It’s a healing process,” Marioni added. “These guys want to work. We want to be around people. We want to serve people like we have for 95 years.”

Marioni lost his home of 35 years late last week, one of many consumed by the Nuns Fire. “I can feel sorry for myself, but when I see what happened in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico and Houston, I’ve dodged a bullet for a lot of years. California has,” he said. His children, he added, were devastated.

Many restaurants had closed after Pacific Gas & Electric Co. shut off power to much of downtown Sonoma on Saturday morning. The lights came back on Monday night. But electricity wasn’t the only factor keeping restaurants closed. Many had been shuttered since Oct. 9, when many staffers had to evacuate, so restaurants didn’t have enough workers.

On Saturday morning, the fire came within three-quarters of a mile of the eastern edge of downtown, spurring a round of evacuations. A handful of homes in the city burned.

As the fires had grown closer, plenty of people left town. Some families, like Dave and Rocal Fuentes, who run a cafe trailer called Coffee + Coco on Napa Street, decamped with their small children to their parents’ home in Napa. The smoke was simply too thick, they felt, for them to work in downtown Sonoma.

Holdouts such as Cafe La Haye, just off the plaza, weathered the loss of workers and power to prepare food for first responders. One night, owner Saul Gropman said, he invited neighbors in for wine, and on the next, he cooked a simple three-course meal at no charge.

Gropman had a generator keeping the refrigerators and freezers from thawing out. Not every business was so fortunate; in nearby Boyes Hot Springs, El Molino Central’s cooks returned to work on Monday and had to throw out a mountain of spoiled food to reopen Tuesday.

The power outages affected an odd patchwork of downtown Sonoma businesses through the weekend. Those on the western side of the Plaza were able to reopen earlier, and locals say the Sonoma Grille and Bar and Steiner’s Tavern were packed with people who had stayed in town.

October is normally the busiest time of year for Sonoma hotels and restaurants because the wine grape harvest is at its peak, according to restaurateurs. Some had been anticipating the best October in years before the fires. “We were on a record-setting pace until this happened,” Marioni said.

Karen Taylor, owner of El Molino Central, said that the restaurant only did 30 percent of its normal business on Tuesday. “I think it’s a good thing to just try to get back to normal if you can,” she said. Even if smoky air prevented people from dining on the patio, they could take food home.

“If it’s a nice weekend and the smoke has been pushed out, I think you’ll get a lot of people coming up from the Bay Area,” Marioni said.

Tourists? Well, that’s another quandary. But the businesses are sure one group of customers will quickly come back: Sonoma residents.

On Wednesday morning, Myra Martinez, manager of Mary’s Pizza Shack, reported that locals had packed her business on Tuesday night, ecstatic to feel a return to normal. “It’s a bad thing we went through,” she said, describing their response. “We’re lucky we are alive and can come in and have dinner.”