Pescadero:
Owners and customers deal with the loss of country store in Sunday fire.
The town of Pescadero spent Monday gazing forlornly through a chain-link fence at the blackened remains of the century-old hangout where emanated what some say was the best artichoke pizza in the history of artichoke pizza.
The Pescadero Country Store is no more. It burned to the ground early Sunday, and the pungent aroma of charred disaster lingered in the air above the small San Mateo County coastal town like seagulls circling one of its turkey-and-provolone sandwiches, which were good, too.
“My God, it’s completely gone,” said Greg Timm, the head of the Pescadero History Society. “This is really scary. And they had just spent a lot of money to remodel the bathrooms.”
Townsfolk were doing what people in grief do. They were showing up with flowers and teary eyes. A half dozen bouquets of hydrangeas hung from the hastily erected chain-link fence on Stage Road, outside what used to be the front door. Blackened timbers covered the sidewalk and spilled into the street.
“We love you Cindy & Steve,” read the words on a large heart hanging beside the flowers.
That would be Cindy and Steve Simms, the couple who have owned the store for two decades. They were on a fishing trip on the Klamath River on Sunday when the call came. They
hurried back to what was left of their beloved domain, which wasn’t much.
“It’s hard to explain what’s in your heart at a time like this,” said Cindy Simms, pacing the ground in flip-flops, her hands blackened with soot. “This building has a special meaning for many of us. A lot of us grew up coming in here every day. It’s devastating.’’
She was kept busy attending to the dayafter chores that descend on fire victims. There was an endless stream of insurance adjusters, telephone linemen, hopeful contractors, chain-linkfence installers and fire investigators.
She and her husband even got a visit from a California Lottery representative, who dropped by to issue the couple credit for all the unsold scratcher tickets that burned up before they could be sold and scratched.
Most of the other burned-up items would not be subject to refund, Cindy Simms said. Gone were designer foodstuffs like goat cheese and pesto. Gone were highend wines, blue-ribbon comestibles, gourmet kitchenware and souvenirs.
Spared from the flames was a single refrigerator case full of craft beers. Simms said she could have used one of those, but the insurance adjuster had said not to touch anything. The rules of a fire’s aftermath are such that she was forbidden from taking solace in her own beer.
“Maybe I wouldn’t want to drink it anyway,” she said. “The fire got awful hot.”
Firefighters battling the blaze at 5:30 a.m. found themselves unable to do much but try to prevent it from spreading to nearby businesses, such as the bank next door and famed Duarte’s Tavern across the street. They said they didn’t know where or how it started.
There was plenty of irony lying around. Unburnt was a giant pile of firewood that was intended to be fuel for the store’s landmark brick pizza oven. The oven was all but destroyed.
Cindy Simms began most days mixing up a batch of pizza dough that would be the basis for what many customers said were masterpieces that would emerge from the round pizza oven in the center of the store.
The country store wasn’t so much a store as a restaurant, pizzeria, wine bar, dry-goods emporium and souvenir stand that drew locals and tourists to its artsy interior and its homey garden full of picnic tables. It was a laid-back place, but it was not so laid back that it did not keep a strict eye on its picnickers. (“No food from other establishments allowed,” read a sign that hadn’t burned. “$20 charge.”)
Jessica De Haro, a cashier in the store, gazed through the chain-link fence at the place where the cash register used to be. She had time to ponder, as her job had suffered the same fate as the cash register.
“It was fun working here,” she said. “I actually liked coming to work. The people made it special.”
She remembered ringing up Eddie’s order every morning. Eddie, she said, was a 93-yearold man who came in daily for coffee and exactly two cookies. She didn’t know Eddie’s last name, and she didn’t know where Eddie would be obtaining future coffee and cookies any more than she knew where she herself would be obtaining future paychecks. Her next stop, she surmised, would be the unemployment office.
The Simmses, comforting one another and accepting condolences from neighbors, vowed to rebuild.
“My mind is scrambled right now,” Steve Simms said. “But we’ll be back. We’ll get a move on. This is a bump in the road.”
Cindy Simms said the important thing was that nobody was hurt in the fire.
“It’s a special building, but it’s a building,” she said. “We were lucky. It could have been so much worse.”