A top Fresno restaurateur shares details of new Clovis eatery. What he told us
One of Fresno’s most popular restaurateurs shared details of his next restaurant with The Bee, from intimate dining nooks to lots of pasta.
Jimmy Pardini — founder of restaurants The Annex Kitchen and Annesso Pizzeria — is planning an Italian restaurant in Clovis.
He’s been keeping the details under wraps for months, but opened up this week about the food and the design of the restaurant he designed from the ground up.
“It’s really just inspired by regional Italian cooking,” he said. “It’s going to have a big pasta program, a lot of fresh pasta.”
Willow Osteria will be at the southeast corner of Willow and Shepherd avenues — diagonal across the intersection from restaurant Saizon. It’s in a new shopping center under construction where the Enzo’s Table store used to be (before it moved closer to Saizon) called The Avenue at Heritage Grove.
Pardini is part of the longtime Pardini restaurateur family in Fresno profiled in one of The Bee’s Restaurant Royalty series. He’s also winner of the 2025 Chef of the Year Award from the California Restaurant Association’s Fresno chapter.
If all goes as planned, Willow would open in October. The restaurant is hiring and interested applicants can apply by emailing info@annexkitchenfresno.com.
It will seat more than 200 people and have a patio and a full bar, including cocktails, wine and beer. At 5,600 square feet, it’s slightly smaller than Annesso.
It won’t look like Pardini’s other restaurants.
“The vibe is going to be a little different,” he said. “Since it’s a new building we have an opportunity to have a little fun with the space.”
Instead of one big space, it will be broken up into multiple “experiences.” Customers will enter through the bar. The main dining area will have an open kitchen. The rest will be broken up into small, intimate dining spots.
There will be a wood-fired grill.
“We build a fire, we rake the coals underneath and we grill the proteins,” Pardini said.
The menu is still being developed, but in addition to pasta, it will include steak, seafood, chicken and “maybe a few surprises down the line,” he said.
The food is inspired by Pardini’s travels in Italy and honed by his experience working at restaurants in Southern California.
Pardini — son of Jim and brother to Jeff — left Fresno for 10 years to become a chef. He worked at Osteria Mozza, an award-winning Los Angeles restaurant owned by Nancy Silverton and Mario Batali.
He often visited Italy, and lived there while studying abroad during college.
“I always enjoyed going to the little osteria,” he said.
That’s a type of restaurant (pronounced OSS-tair-ee-uh) that he described as a little upscale, but still casual enough to bring kids. The osterias would often specialize in local menus specific to their region.
He plans to do just that at Willow, using local ingredients grown in the Central Valley.
There will be traditional dishes from various regions of the country too, including Tuscany.
“I ... picked up a lot of inspiration from a lot of restaurants I visited,” he said. “This is my homage to that.”
This story was originally published July 25, 2025 at 11:45 AM.
