More than three months since the Palisades fire ravaged the coastal Los Angeles area, surviving businesses are slowly beginning to reopen their doors.
A few restaurants and a hardware store are among the businesses that had locations make it through the blaze and have been able to return, though it is not quite business as usual.
Janne Peifer, the catering director at Palisades restaurant Prima Cantina, was excited to be standing in the open restaurant again.
Prima Cantina reopened on Thursday, April 24, shifting its hours to an earlier opening time so workers in the area can stop by for breakfast and try their new menu items, breakfast burritos and tortas.
The community has continued to support the restaurant at its Santa Monica location, though Peifer says many patrons expressed wanting to come back to the Palisades spot, where they feel like it is home. Peifer herself has worked with the restaurant’s owners for over a decade and has been a part of the Pacific Palisades location since day one.
“They want to support us to make sure we survive, until things go back more to normal,” she said. “I talk to people, I encourage them, tell them that we’ll be back and supporting them as well.”
The restaurant will host a grand reopening on May 5, hoping to draw a Cinco de Mayo crowd to officially celebrate being back in business.
Reopening while the fire zone is still closed to the general public has not been easy, but Peifer is grateful for a staff that stuck by the restaurant’s side, though many who also worked at another nearby restaurant got “double hit” with loss of work after the fire.
“I’m super happy that all my team remained and nobody left,” she said.
Prima Cantina kept staff as busy as possible during the closure by offering shifts at the Santa Monica location and catering events.
Anawalt Palisades Hardware store has been open since February, a month post-fire, but has not seen a return to regular levels of business – though the staff remains hopeful that the transition from debris removal to construction, which is just beginning, will provide a boost in customers.
General manager Rosie Maravilla has been with the store since it opened under the Anawalt name in 2020, though the location was another hardware store from 1925 to 2018.
Maravilla and her employees have been adjusting to the new demands of a clientele that is now largely workers, rather than homeowners.
“We’re just playing it day by day and seeing what they need and trying to keep enough inventory to satisfy the needs. We are thinking hopefully before the building process starts, we want to be able to carry more lumber,” she said.
The law-enforcement-staffed checkpoints have posed issues as well, lengthening delivery times and employees’ drives into the Palisades.
Currently, the store has been selling a lot of plastic tarps, plumbing supplies and machinery oil as the debris removal process ramps up, but Maravilla anticipates that when more homes begin construction, business will pick up.
Some of Anawalt’s staff lost their homes in the fire, which has been an emotional situation for the staff.
“It’s been emotionally difficult for all of us,” Maravilla said. “It’s definitely picking up where we’re starting to see some of our old customers come in and they come in and first thing they explain is or they share with us is that they enjoy seeing some form of normalcy after what they’ve gone through and what we’ve gone through.
“And they’re just happy for us that our stores survived, and we just try to be as supportive to them and let them know that we’re here and at the end of the day, they are part of our community and we are part of theirs.”
Ramis Sadrieh, chairman of the Palibu (Palisades and Malibu) Chamber of Commerce and a local business owner himself, has seen business owners deal with the aftermath using a variety of methods to keep their businesses afloat.
While his IT company previously had many clients in the Pacific Palisades, he now drives farther out around Southern California, while other business owners he knows have moved to nearby Santa Monica or are running their businesses out of their homes after losing storefronts.
The Palibu Chamber of Commerce has been working to celebrate any of its members as they reopen their businesses by publicizing reopening dates and going out to support them.
“As a chamber of commerce, we’ve been trying to seek sponsorships so that we can distribute money to some of the small businesses,” Sadrieh said.
The extended closure of Pacific Coast Highway, the oceanside traffic artery that connects Malibu to the Palisades and eventually to Santa Monica and out into Los Angeles, has also been a blow to many business owners in Malibu.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has promised to work to support a faster paced reopening of the highway, anticipating general traffic to return to a fully reopened highway by the end of May.
When PCH reopens, the chamber is planning to host a festival in Malibu, commemorating this important step in recovery and seeking a boost for businesses in the area that have been dealing with a limited customer flow.
“We understand how essential this route is for daily life and local businesses. Reopening PCH is a top priority, and we are going all-in to get this done,” Newsom said in a release.
U.S Sen. Alex Padilla also acknowledged the role business owners play in the recovery, noting that those he has met have inspired his legislative work in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires.
“Through the various tours, I’ve met with various residents and small businesses and they’d give anything to turn back the hands of time…the small business owners who have seen their American dream, investment in their business and the jobs they created [lost], that was my inspiration for convening colleagues on both sides of the aisle,” Padilla said as he toured the Palisades on April 24.