Chico's owner looks to reopening

MOSES LAKE — Mitch Zornes was having dinner when he got the phone call telling him that his restaurant, Chico’s Pizza, was on fire.

“I didn’t know what to think. It was surreal,” Zornes said as he watched the business that had been in his family for three generations burn.

Chico’s wasn’t just a pizza parlor. It was a local landmark, a beloved institution, the place of many fond memories for a lot of people. For Zornes, it was the family business, one he’d inherited from his grandfather Mel and his father Richard, one he hoped to pass on to his daughter Jennifer. And his grandson Weston.

If all goes well, Zornes hopes to re-open on Monday, Dec. 17.

If all goes well.

“Several inspections are still pending,” he said. “City building department, the health district.”

On that January night, as Chico’s was burning, Zornes said he went around back without thinking and went inside. It might have been on fire, but it was his business, and he’d never felt unsafe inside. Once he was spotted by firefighters, they quickly ushered him out.

And all he was left with were feelings of helplessness.

“I was watching. There was nothing you could do. More fire trucks kept coming, it seemed to be getting worse and worse. It just kept spreading across the front,” Zornes said. “I actually went home. I didn’t know what else to do. I was at a loss.”

And for the first time in his life, as he watched the ruins smolder, he was adrift.

“I felt helpless, just lost. Coming here for so many years, sometimes seven days a week, for so long, to have that not to do, it was just strange,” Zornes said.

Zornes committed early on to rebuilding — he has paid his core staff for nearly the entire year, and hired several more people to fully staff Chico’s in early December — but he’d never had this kind of time on his hands before.

“I found myself looking for a hobby,” he said. “So I took up woodworking.”

Chico’s was started by Zornes’ grandfather Mel, who had a number of businesses in Moses Lake in the 1950s, including a tavern, diner, market and motel. Mel took over what was a failing Shakey’s Pizza and turned it into Chico’s, then a small franchise with restaurants in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, California and Hawaii.

Zornes said he had no idea how tough it would be to rebuild. While he was never in doubt about rebuilding and reopening — he’d hoped to reopen last June — he has found that rebuilding something is a complex process full of details he never had to consider before.

“The contractor has rebuilt the place, but everything in the building — chairs, tables, stools, forks, knives, mixers, a million other things that I didn’t remember we use every day we needed to get,” he said.

It’s taken some time to get the dough right — a change in the water system and new equipment means what was once eyeballed now has to be carefully measured.

“Our first batch of dough is in the dumpster,” Zornes said. “It was just a gooey mess.”

Central to the new Chico’s is its massive new pizza oven, smack in the center of kitchen, which will bake more pizzas faster and also avoids the factors that caused last January’s fire.

“The old oven was flush against the wall, and there was a spot in the back you couldn’t get to for cleaning,” Zornes said. “That oven was put in there in 1974, and there was a buildup of debris. We could put water on it, but clearly we missed something.”

Zornes said he also not worried about the reopening day crowd. Rather, he’s worried about getting things right, that he’ll get that second-day business, that people will come back again and again.

“I know that they’re going to come, but we haven’t worked for a year,” Zornes said. “Seventy percent of businesses that go through this are not around in three years.”

Sitting is his unfinished office — Chico’s employees are still busy putting together shelves and waiting for countertops to install — Zornes is hopeful.

“They’re coming from as far away as Seattle to check to see if we’re open or not, and that gives me hope that we’re going to be here longer than three years,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.