Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Pizza Gang: Staff members like William Lima, kitchen manager; waitress Celida Garcia and assistant manager Debbie Lewis, have helped Willow Street Wood-Fired Pizza reach its 10-year anniversary with quality food and community friendliness.
It's the original: Willow Street Pizza celebrates 10 years in Willow Glen
Restaurant becomes one of the best Willow Glen pizzerias around
By Kate Carter
Ten years later, Willow Street Wood-Fired Pizza continues Willow Glen traditions of quality food and community-friendliness, and it's getting ready to celebrate.
The Willow Glen location--the original--of the Bay Area group of restaurants is acknowledging its 10th anniversary next month with more of what it has offered since it opened Dec. 26, 1991. It's bringing back some popular but retired menu items, it's giving away prizes and just generally celebrating a decade of being a Willow Glen fixture.
But although it has seen changes in Willow Glen, in its menu and in its appearance, some things have stayed the same.
One of those is the restaurant's Willow Glen general manager Shannon Gzsanka, who has worked for Willow Street since it opened and remembers its first days.
"It was pretty rough, the first couple of weeks," she says. "It wasn't a total disaster, but it wasn't very good."
Most of the problems, she says, were concentrated in the kitchen, but after a few weeks the kinks got worked out. And they didn't keep the community from showing up the first day and continuing to show up years later.
Managing partner Ed Rathmann remembers people arriving right when the restaurant opened at 5:30 p.m. that evening. He was cutting pizzas in the middle of a chaotic atmosphere, as green servers maneuvered around tables and handled the surprises of a brand-new restaurant.
He also remembers receiving the business' first $1 bill that evening.
Four locations later, Willow Street is going strong, having expanded on its original menu and even offering its own microbrewed beers. But its philosophy, Gszanka and Rathmann say, remains what it was from the beginning--to respect guests, co-workers, the product and the community.
"We're trying to do a really good job on all levels," Rathmann says. "We're trying not to sacrifice anything to be successful. Business is good. Luckily, we've really been embraced by the community."
Los Gatan Rathmann, who manages the Willow Glen location in conjunction with partners Glenn Thompson of Mill Valley and Miguel Romero of San Jose's Rose Garden neighborhood, has been the driving force in expanding Willow Street from a one-room operation to a multi-facilitied business. He has worked in restaurants most of his professional life--he and some partners opened Eulipia Restaurant in downtown San Jose in 1977.
"I really like food and wine and was drawn to it," says Rathmann, who oversees all of Willow Street's menus. "I see myself as a businessman with a creative bent to food and wine. Menus and restaurants are creative ventures."
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Cozy Ambience: A view of the inside of the Willow Street Wood-Fired Pizza restaurant, which continues its tradition of quality food and community friendliness. The Willow Glen location--the original--of the Bay Area group of restaurants celebrates its 10th anniversary next month.
Toward the end of the 1980s, Romero approached Rathmann with the idea of opening a pizza parlor at 1072 Willow St., where a pizza place had operated since the 1950s and had been empty for several years.
"It was a proven location for pizza, but we wanted to bring in a modern concept," Rathmann says. "We wanted to bring in good food at reasonable prices in a casual atmosphere."
The partners enlisted Thompson and spent about two years turning their idea into reality. When Willow Street first opened, it offered wood-fired pizza as well as pasta and salads, Rathmann says. Wood-fired pizza is baked in an oven heated with wood, which increases the temperature and allows the pizza to bake more quickly than in a conventional pizza oven, he says. He says the wood oven imparts a smoky flavor and a slightly crisper texture to the pizzas.
But what really set the restaurant apart from its predecessors, Rathmann says, were the individual pizzas with gourmet toppings, like the Thai chicken, barbecue chicken, garlic chicken and thin-crust Mediterranean pizzas.
The restaurant's pastas also incorporate creative ingredient combinations: fusilli with chicken and artichoke hearts, fettuccini with tequila chicken and red bell peppers, and penne with ginger prawns are just a few examples.
"We're trying to please every taste out there," Rathmann says. "But we're more than just a restaurant. We try to be involved in the community."
The restaurant sponsors Little League baseball and Pop Warner football teams, offers children's coloring contests and last summer initiated a children's pizza camp, where youth could come for an afternoon and learn the art of creating a great pizza pie.
"We're a family-friendly restaurant," Rathmann says.
The restaurant also engenders a certain loyalty among much of its clientele, with customers getting to know their servers by name, and staff welcoming guests, asking for updates and getting to know the "usuals."
The restaurant also has a long-time crew of employees, most notably Gszanka, who started as a server for Rathmann at Eulipia, became assistant manager at Willow Street when it opened, worked as general manager at the restaurant's second location in Los Gatos and then worked as regional manager for all the restaurant's locations. She's been back as general manager in Willow Glen for about two years, after cutting back a bit to spend more time with her husband, Gene, and her two children, Kyle, 5, and Kaitlin, almost 2.
"Willow Glen especially is very tight-knit, especially as far as the employees--servers stay around for years," Gszanka says. "It's a really good group of people. We all work pretty well together. Restaurants can be a very stressful, especially in management."
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Pizza Passion: Deb Klein (left) and Barbara Spark, of San Jose, enjoy a pasta lunch and gossip at Willow Street Wood-Fired Pizza in Willow Glen.
Gszanka helped hire the restaurant's first servers, many of whom had little to no restaurant experience. But everyone worked out well, she says, and some even stayed on for five or seven years and even became managers. The ones who move on remain regular customers of Willow Street.
"I see them once a week," Gszanka says.
She also says she knows of employees dating and getting married, and even of one waiter who met his wife at the restaurant when she was a regular customer.
"That doesn't happen very often," she says.
There are some memorable moments in Willow Street's Willow Glen past, Gszanka says. She remembers a night when some youths shot off a bottle rocket outside the restaurant and it cracked the front window with a loud report. "Everybody thought it was a shot," she says.
A server called 911 when she saw a man rolling on the floor, Gszanka says, but the man wasn't hurt; he was just trying to avoid broken glass.
"Needless to say, the whole restaurant cleared out after that," she says.
Gszanka says the restaurant's big draws are its good service and good food, which she and her family eat all the time, and which she even served at her children's baptism party.
Over the years, Willow Street's services have expanded to the bulk food orders for large take-outs. The menu has moved beyond its original pizza, pasta and salad basics to include sandwiches, burgers, salmon and rotisserie half-chicken, which is available only in Willow Glen. As it increased locations, adding one in Los Gatos in 1993, another in San Francisco (which has since closed), one in San Rafael in 1996 and another at San Jose's Westgate Plaza, it has added the new menu items. The San Rafael location, which came with a microbrewery, allowed the group to offer its own beers, some of which are available at every location, like the wheat, India pale ale, amber ale and porter offered in Willow Glen.
"The place was on the market and we liked the location," Rathmann says of the San Rafael expansion. "Beer and pizza is kind of a traditional mix. We were successful, and we wanted to grow."
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Customer Service: Waitress Celida Garcia (right) assists Liz Vartanian, of San Jose, with her take-out order. Take-out accounts for a large portion of Willow Street Wood-Fired Pizza's business and Vartanian is no exception, picking up her lunch or dinner from the restaurant at least once a week.
There is also the possibility that Willow Street could add a cafe-type location at Campbell's Pruneyard Shopping Center, in conjunction with a future Camera Cinema there.
"I think it's going to be a great idea," says Gszanka, a Campbell resident herself. "We definitely need a movie theater back there."
The Willow Glen location has recently completed a physical update, too. The restaurant closed for three and a half weeks last fall to undergo an extensive kitchen renovation as well as to redecorate the dining room, improving the bar and adding new lighting throughout, "to keep it fresh and attractive to customers," Rathmann says.
As the business has grown and updated, some things have been left behind, particularly menu items replaced in the interest of keeping things fresh. However, 10 favorites from the menu or past specials will be making a return appearance to Willow Glen starting in February, including a lamb sandwich, a chicken pizza with brie and garlic sauce, a Philly cheesesteak pizza and a fusilli pasta with pancetta and goat cheese, Rathmann says.
"Anytime we change the menu, we get an uproar," Gszanka says.
The restaurant is also finalizing plans for an April party with gifts and prizes, "to give back to the community," Rathmann says.
Gszanka says she's proud to have been a part of Willow Street for 10 years, even though she never expected that once she joined the company, she'd never leave.
"It's a great restaurant. I don't think there's anything in San Jose like it," she says. "We serve food we're proud of. The service is good too--personal and competent. When you don't have good service and you don't have good food, it's not a good place to work."
Rathmann says he's looking forward to continuing to serve Willow Glen and the Bay Area with good food and more, but for the moment he's just happy to have made it this far.
"It feels like an accomplishment to have lasted 10 years," he says.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
