The small sign above the door that reads Original Johnny's will be gone.
In its place will be a sign for the new Main Street Grill, as one local landmark carries on and another heads for the history books.
 Ilva and Steve Evan are closing their landmark Original Johnny's restaurant on Main Street this month. The Main Street Grill, itself a fixture in downtown Half Moon Bay, will be occupying the space beginning in January. |
"He asked me to help him out for four hours a day back in 1990," said Ilva. "It's the family joke now." The Evans were married in May of that year.
Things went much the same for the original Evan, Steve's father, John, when he got the whole thing started. John was from New Jersey and came out west as a sergeant in the Army. Stationed at Fort Ord, he came up to Half Moon Bay to build barracks. He met a local girl at a USO dance and, except for a wartime stint in the Philippines, he never looked back.
Original Johnny's is the fourth and final location for the family. The first was Borden's Creamery, which John ran with his wife and her sisters. The building is now the site of the Half Moon Bay Inn. Several other incarnations followed, all within a few blocks. John Evan died in 1994, but his wife, Fiorina, will continue to own the current building, a fact that suits the new proprietor just fine.
"This whole transaction has been very amicable," said Bill Gevas, the owner of the Main Street Grill. "I'm very glad to have them as a landlord."
Gevas can lay claim to his own slice of local history. "Twenty-three-and-a-half years at that location," he said of his soon-to-be-former haunt at Main Street and Kelly. "Two-hundred-and-eighty-one months."
Gevas grew up at 33rd Street and Third Avenue in New York City. He started cooking at his father's steakhouse in the shadow of the Empire State Building. He came to the region in the 1970s and worked as a chef at San Francisco "prime rib joints" like the Mother Lode on Union Street and the Holding Company on the Embarcadero.
Gevas doesn't plan to make many drastic changes in menu or décor when he moves a block south, and he is glad for the short trip.
"We've been looking to relocate for a while and this is the best location by far," he said. The situation was changing at the original spot, with new development planned, and he would have had to be closed for months if he stayed on property at Main Street and Kelly Avenue currently set for a mixed-use development. Geva's wife, Anne, and granddaughter Kim Messina run the nearby knitting-supply store, Fengari.
One change should strike customers right away, as the Main Street Grill jukebox will make the trip.
While Main Street will still have a traditional American diner, it will be the end of a long run for Steve Evan.
"My father had me working when I was 9," he said of his start in the business. "I have some mixed emotions (about closing) but when the time is right ..."
Ilva Evan said the family would be staying in town, but that there would be no more restaurants. The Evans' plan to close Original Johnny's for good on Dec. 22.
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