What are Fresno’s oldest restaurants? Several familiar names are nearly a century old

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The oldest restaurant in Fresno is somewhere around 100 years old.

It’s a topic that comes up in conversation now and then as people tick off the the oldest places they can think of in their heads.

Who is the oldest? Well, that’s a tricky one to answer.

Bakery and dessert shop Kogetsu-Do Confectionary in Chinatown is easily one of the oldest food businesses, opening in 1915. Though with no seating, it’s technically not a restaurant.

There are also hotels with restaurants founded in the early 1900s that are still operating. Often, the hotel and bar started first for boarders and the restaurant came later.

So who’s the oldest depends upon how you slice it.

The truth is, there’s no way to definitively know which restaurant is the oldest — despite scouring newspaper archives going back more than a century and reaching out to the Fresno County Historical Society, the Fresno County Public Library’s The Heritage Center and other sources.

There’s always a chance there’s some little restaurant, perhaps a Mexican taqueria or a Chinese food spot, that is technically the oldest never made it into newspapers or changed its name and moved.

Some restaurants also seem old, but have a gap in their history. HoHo Kafe in downtown Fresno started in the 1980s, but its predecessor goes back to the 1930s — though the building was empty for at least a year, according to city records.

So we’ve compiled the next best thing: Some of the oldest restaurants we could find in Fresno.

There are not many huge names among them. Longtime places that come to mind, such as The Elbow Room and DiCicco’s , opened in the 1950s. And Richard’s Prime Rib & Seafood and Mike’s Pizzeria both started in the 1960s — absolute youngins compared to the businesses that opened in the 1930s and before.

Here’s what we found.

Piemonte’s 1929

Piemonte’s Italian Delicatessen in the Tower District may have the best shot at the title of the oldest restaurant in town. It started in 1929 at B and Fresno streets as Piemonte Market, a deli and sandwich shop. It was on the corner that’s now home to a Foodmaxx, said Nancy Eberwein, who owns the business with her husband Neil.

He remembers going there as a kid. There was sawdust on the floor, she said.

“To keep the kids entertained they gave them a hot dog,” she said. “He was always excited to go with his mom.”

Gino and Olga “Mama” Porasso founded the restaurant and deli, naming it after the region in Italy. The business moved to its current location at 616 E. Olive Ave. in 1966. Their sons Larry and Joe took over before they sold the business to the current owners.

Today, there’s no sawdust on the floor, but the owners didn’t want to change much else.

“Over the years it has become more of a focus on sandwiches,” Eberwein said. “They are definitely the money-maker.”

The Piemonte Special is the most popular, served with two kinds of salami, ham, mortadella and provolone.

The deli still does well, but not like it did in the days before giant supermarkets when you had to go to a deli to buy meat and cheese, she said.

What stands out to Eberwein are the multiple generations of customers who keep coming back.

“There have been times when we’ve had three generations in there,” she said. “It just makes you feel really good when they tell you, ‘Oh, we’re so glad you kept things the same.’”

Cosmopolitan 1904/1933

The Cosmopolitan Tavern & Italian Grill — or simply Cosmo, as many call it — in downtown Fresno is one of the oldest restaurants in Fresno.

It started around 1904 as a boarding house for Italian, German and other immigrants just getting their start in the United States. It had a bar and served boarders three meals a day until they found work at dairy farms or lumber camps in the mountains, according to Fresno Bee archives.

Chef and owner Joseph Lanfranco mostly runs Cosmopolitan today, his semi-retired father Gary still popping in. The younger Lanfranco’s great, great grandfather Edward Lanfranco, his brother, and several other relatives founded Cosmopolitan. The restaurant proper came along in 1933 at Fresno and G Streets (though hotel and saloon previously existed in a building constructed in 1891 before being torn down and rebuilt).

The veal ravioli was on the menu then and still is today (though it may be leaving as soon as next week because the price of veal is skyrocketing).

That building once had two stories, but one was lopped off in the 1970s in the name of revitalization, Lanfranco said. After decades in that spot, it was demolished in 2015 to make way for California’s high-speed rail.

With the city’s help, Cosmo moved to its current location near Selland Arena at Cesar Chavez Boulevard and O Street. Now, instead of new immigrants, it caters to downtown workers for lunch and dinner. Pieces of history still adorn the walls of the restaurant, including the old wooden back bar that was moved from the old place.

A 1942 menu on the wall has a New York steak dinner priced at $2 and a martini costing 50 cents.

A newspaper story from 1928 tells of a raid on the hotel during Prohibition, with several arrested. Cosmo operated as a “soft drink parlor and pool hall” during the era. And the first dollar bill spent after Prohibition ended still hangs above the bar.

“Our family owns the oldest liquor license in the City of Fresno,” Lanfranco said. “It was issued before Prohibition.”

Santa Fe Basque 1927/1950s

The Santa Fe Basque Restaurant and Bar is another business with roots stretching back almost 100 years. It was built as a hotel and boarding house in 1927 at 935 Santa Fe Ave., right across the street from the downtown train station. The building is now home to Shep’s Club at Shepherd’s Inn.

The Santa Fe Basque moved to its current location at Maroa and Shields avenues in 2001.

Casually referred to as “sheep camp,” Santa Fe Basque was where recently immigrated Basque sheepherders would stay when they weren’t sleeping under the stars tending flocks of sheep.

It had a bar and the boarders would sit down together for traditional Basque meals made by cooks from the “old country” (France and Spain and the mountains where the Basque people hailed from), said Manuela Etchechury, who owns the business with husband Jean Pierre Etchechury.

The family-style meals of fried chicken or lamb chops were accompanied by big bowls of sides, lamb or pork stews, and bread and butter.

“Its original purpose has changed drastically,” Etchechury said of the business. “It was a hub for newly arrived immigrants, and the owners of the hotel were responsible for people finding work, helping these people get to the doctor.”

It served as an employment agency, and a place for Basque sheepherders to get mail, with children often boarding there during the school year. Pregnant women living on rural ranches often spent the last days of their pregnancy at the hotel and gave birth there . The wife of the hotel owner acted as a midwife, according to an entry in the National Register of Historic Places.

The downtown hotel was also raided by police during Prohibition — five times in nine months, according to Fresno Bee archives from 1930. The newspaper story called the spot a “notorious bootleg joint” and the owners were jailed at one point for “maintaining a nuisance.” The wife of one of the operators was sent to a psychiatric institution after pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.

Officials vowed to shut down and padlock the business, but there does not appear to be a record of that happening.

The restaurant opened to the public sometime in the 1950s, with the first ad for Basque meals appearing in The Bee in 1956. It still serves family-style meals, and that fried chicken is still popular.

The Etchechurys took over the business in 1990 when the pair was in their 20s. There were still about 15 or 16 retired sheepherders in their 60s living in the boarding house at the time. She remembers them looking after her little daughter when things got busy.

There are no more sheepherders at the business today, the bar and restaurant catering to diners. But the traditional Basque recipes are still going strong and the restaurant gets positive reviews online.

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