10 months after fire, Fresno restaurant almost open again. How to eat there now
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- Yosemite Falls Cafe closed for nearly 10 months after an Aug. 29 fryer fire.
- Lounge and bar are open with a limited menu prepared at the Clovis location.
- Restaurant awaits final inspections as workers finish hood exhaust corrections.
Yosemite Falls Cafe at Blackstone and Shaw avenues is almost ready to reopen — almost.
The popular restaurant, closed for nearly 10 months after its fryer caught fire, is putting the finishing touches on its kitchen’s hood exhaust system.
Owner Manny Perales is crossing his fingers that the restaurant will open in the next few weeks, pending the few remaining inspections it needs to pass.
“We’re real close,” he said. “They’re making the corrections as we speak and the engineers are engineering as we speak.”
But there is a way you can eat and drink at the restaurant.
While the kitchen and the dining room are not cleared to open just yet, the lounge and bar are. After being closed for so long, Perales wanted to get some income coming in.
So a limited menu of food — prepared at the restaurant’s Clovis location and kept warm or cool — is brought in and served in the lounge. A full bar with cocktails and beer is also available.
Carne asada nachos, Buffalo wings, shrimp cocktail, hot dogs, a tri-tip chili hot dog and rotating salads are on the menu. Menudo is available on Sundays.
Because the kitchen and dishwasher can’t be used yet, they’re using disposable plates and plasticware.
The lounge is open starting at 3 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and at 11 a.m. Sundays until around 11 p.m. each day.
There will be live bands or DJs most nights.
“We’re fortunate to be able to be open and have a little bit of business, but man, I want to get open,” Perales said.
What caused the fire?
On Aug. 29, the pilot light under the fryer was out. A worker lay down on the floor to relight it and, “boom, a burst of fire on the back of the fryer,” Perales said.
The worker was not burned and got the other workers out of the kitchen.
“The fryer damage and the fire was not that bad; it’s just that it’s a 50-year-old building,” he said. “There was a lot of smoke in the ducts. ... They thought there was other fires throughout the walls, so they had to really tear it apart.”
Because the fire was being investigated, the workers were told not to go inside the building.
“The water ran for weeks,” Perales said. “It was a mess, water everywhere. Water almost a foot high in the kitchen.”
The old ducting — all 32 feet of it — had to be replaced. Part of the roof, ceiling, walls, fans, and tiles were ripped out and replaced. The dining room has new tables, carpet and paint, and they did some improvements in the bar, too.
“The restaurant looks beautiful,” he said.
And one behind-the-scenes perk of what is normally a hot and sweaty kitchen? The cooling system now has four fans instead of one.
“The cooks are gonna be: ‘Phew!’” Perales said. “They’re gonna be in heaven.”
Many of the cooks and other workers have stuck with the company through the nearly 10 months since the fire, he said.
“God bless my employees,” he said. “They don’t want to work anywhere else.”
