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Letter to the editor

Flames take heavy toll on a fixture

The new owners of Four Coins Family Restaurant expect months of repairs.

By ANNE LINDBERG and LARA CERRI, Times Staff Writers
Published November 25, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG - Two months ago, Joseph Vallejo and his daughter Zamira proudly took ownership of the Four Coins Family Restaurant on 34th Street N.

On Saturday, they surveyed its charred remains after a fire the day before caused $1-million in damage.

Repairs will take months, forcing them to lay off employees in the middle of the holidays.

Still, there were bright spots.

They had recently hung paintings of their homeland done by Joseph's father Alfonso and another Peruvian artist. The works showed the Peruvian Andes, Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca.

They're a little smoky but unharmed.

The father-daughter duo also learned how much the eatery meant to the community.

More than 100 cars had driven up to the scene by Saturday to check out the damage and to make sure it would reopen, they said.

Among them, Al Bragg and his wife Jean, who said they have eaten there a couple of times a week for the past 10 years. They even had this year's Thanksgiving meal there.

"That's a shame," he said. "It's a good little restaurant."

It's still unclear what started the fire, but "it doesn't look suspicious," said Lt. Rick Feinberg of St. Petersburg Fire Rescue.

Cook Tomas Dominguez was in the kitchen about 4 p.m. Friday when the fire broke out.

A co-worker asked why it was so smoky.

"It's not in the kitchen," Dominguez replied.

The two went in the back and opened the door of the storage room. Black smoke billowed out. They called 911 and cleared customers out.

About the same time, someone across the street at Maher Chevrolet noticed the black smoke and called 911.

An hour later, the Four Coins was a charred mess.

"It was a shame. It was pretty heart-wrenching to sit there and watch it," said Julie Adams, a Lealman fire commissioner who watched the fire with other Maher employees. "It's sad."

The restaurant, 2700 34th St. N, had been something of a fixture since it was built as a Big Boy, probably in the 1960s.

The restaurant changed hands many times over the years and the smiling, cherub-cheeked Big Boy statue out front disappeared.

But new owners brought new kitsch: a big Betty Boop at the cash register and a guitar-playing Elvis tucked in a corner. Both survived Friday's blaze with minimal damage.

Adams, who first went to the restaurant as a child when it was a Big Boy, took her child and husband for breakfast almost every weekend.

"It's pretty sad for the dealership, too. We're going to miss it," she said. "There's plenty of people at Maher who will be missing the meals over there."

Joseph Vallejo, who paid $1.16-million for the restaurant, told employees it will be five or six months before it can reopen.

Dominguez, the cook, said they asked him to get only a temporary job so he could come back.

"They want everybody back," Dominguez said. "I said, 'Okay, let's see what happens.'"

[Last modified November 24, 2007, 23:50:21]