Popular Palisades restaurant Cinque Terre is reopening in Venice

The terrace at Venice's Cinque Terre West is small but cozy, with a handful of tables and counter chairs offering a prime view of the busy kitchen. Located on a busy stretch of Rose Avenue, it feels smaller and even livelier than the original Cinque Terre West, a local favorite in the Gardens at Palisades shopping center in the center of town.

But the chef who glides from one end of the kitchen to the other, pan-frying veal chops, draining fresh pasta and filling focaccia pans with wells, is still a smiling Gianbattista “Gianba” Vinzoni.

Vinzoni and his wife Marlo, who lost several businesses in the Palisades fire and whose home was also damaged, once again feel part of a thriving community. In late June, the pair reopened Cinqure Terre West, the restaurant they first introduced at Palisades in 2019, in Venice.

The bright blue facade is a glimmer of hope at a time when many residents and business owners are still dealing with the difficult rebuilding process following the fires.

“Even before we opened, when we were working on the space, people came to welcome us to the neighborhood,” Marlo says. “They said they wanted to help us build a new community here in Venice.”

Gianba, who grew up in the Cinque Terre region of Italy, always dreamed of owning his own restaurant. After running the kitchen at places like Soho House, the Beverly Hilton and Fig and Olive, he and Marlo opened Cinque Terre West with a menu inspired by his family's Ligurian roots. Wine bar Enoteca 5 was added two years later in the same Palisades shopping center, followed by bakery and cafe Deliziozo Cinque in 2023.

The couple was on board the final flight that landed at Los Angeles International Airport on January 7, 2025. They returned from their winter vacation but were unable to return home to their apartment in the Palisades. The next morning, Gianba walked from Santa Monica to the Palisades to find his entire neighborhood burning. His apartment was still standing, but firefighters were working on the roof of the shopping center where his restaurant and wine bar were located.

“There was smoke damage, major damage,” he said. “It was terrible. I went to the back of the building and it was burned down. Everything was gone.”

It is difficult to quantify what was lost in the Palisades and Eaton fires that devastated opposite ends of our city just over a year ago. The fires burned a total of nearly 40,000 hectares and destroyed more than 16,000 buildings. People have lost their homes. Shops are closed forever. And a sense of community that had been built over decades went up in smoke.

“It's a very difficult issue for us because we didn't just have one store in the Palisades. We lived there for 22 years,” Gianba says.

“We raised two children there,” adds Marlo. “Their preschool, their elementary school, the church where they were baptized. We loved it. Everything is gone.”

Like thousands of other fire victims, Gianba and Marlo spent hours turning their lives into inventories of their possessions. How much was her couch worth? The TV? When they left the city before the fire, the windows of their apartment were open. When they returned, everything had to be thrown away.

In addition to the urgent tasks of finding temporary housing and replacing valuable possessions, the couple also had to deal with the uncertain future of their restaurants.

The Vinzoni have built a loyal customer base over the years, and many have reached out to see how they can help. Two months after the fires, someone from the Colony's ghost kitchens offered a space to start cooking again and a discount on the rent. Gianba stopped operating there for a short time, but longed to have his own restaurant again.

“The community even started a GoFundMe for us, which was pretty amazing,” says Gianba. “They managed to raise some money, but one of our customers intervened and said, 'Look, you're such a part of the community, you can't be in business.' ”

Marlo and Gianba moved into the former Bluestone Lane space on Rose Avenue and opened Cinque Terre West on June 23rd. A name can be seen at the top of the building's facade, listing both the Palisades and Venice as locations.

“It's great, but completely different, with a different audience,” says Gianba. “People eat later, so the hours are a little different. It's really a different crowd.”

Breakfast includes puff pastry croissants, poached eggs and omelettes. And for lunch and dinner, fans of the original restaurant can enjoy Gianba's renowned regional cuisine, whose highlights include his grandmother's pesto. It's a sauce he learned to make at his family's home in Bonassola, Italy, where his grandmother did everything by hand or with her feet, including pounding grapes to make wine.

She used to pound fresh basil, pecorino, pine nuts, and olive oil in a mortar and pestle until it formed a deep forest green paste. Gianba uses the wonderfully herby sauce to coat tightly wound spirals of fresh Trofie pasta, then finishes the dish with a handful of cheese.

His pizzas are thin, crispy slices with an amber-colored, bubbly crust and a surface covered with tender artichokes or spicy salami and mushrooms.

On a cool evening in late December, I found comfort and warmth in a bowl of buridda, another of Gianba's signature Ligurian dishes. It's a light tomato broth full of mussels, clams, scallops and shrimp. Large blocks of tomatoes are soft and sweet, nestled in paper-thin “Goodfellas”-style slivers of garlic and wilted basil leaves. It's a bowl I've been craving for the past few weeks, an anchor to something that feels stable, hearty, and grounding.

Marlo and Gianba aren't sure if they'll ever open a restaurant in the Palisades again. But for now, they're focused on rebuilding what they can.

“We see a lot of Palisadians coming here,” Marlo says. “Everyone says the same thing. It feels like a piece of home when we're here with you.”