This new Fresno restaurant had a strong start. Then a vandal shut it down for four months

Owners of new restaurants grapple with a lot of challenges in their first few months: Hiring, attracting customers, making sure their food is ready quickly.

But dealing with vandalism that causes a flood, destroys equipment and requires a new floor? Not typically on the list of potential pitfalls.

Downtown Oak has survived it all.

It was still in its infancy when it had to close because of the damage a vandal did. And now, after four months of being closed, it’s back.

The little restaurant opened on Halloween of last year at the corner of L and Kern streets in downtown Fresno. It sold a popular turkey-bacon-avocado sandwich, breakfast burritos and colorful desserts made in house.

It had been ramping up, adding items to the menu as it headed into its sixth month of business. Regular readers may remember The Bee’s story about the restaurant in April, where owner Faviola Avelar met her right-hand man after needing a ride following a car accident.

Readers gave the restaurant a boost in business in the days after the story.

“It was just a beautiful week,” she said. “We were so, so busy.”

Faviola Avelar, owner of Downtown Oak, prepares a sandwich at the shop on the corner of Kern and L streets in downtown in this file photo from April 13, 2023. Avelar called the shop Downtown Oak for her love of oak trees.

Within days, on April 17, a man threw a brick through their glass door. He broke into the business, stole two monitors attached to the cash register system, along with drinks.

He also pushed all the equipment off the counter, breaking much of it.

“He knocked everything down,” she said.

They saw him on security camera, recognizing him as a man who’d been in the restaurant causing trouble before.

The vandalism was a tough break, but survivable. Downtown Oak stayed open. Even without cash registers, they sold sandwiches with cash.

But what they didn’t know at the time was that the destruction had damaged the water line leading to the espresso machine.

It seemed fine at first but later that weekend, when the restaurant was closed, the water line burst. That little line shot water across the restaurant — possibly for days.

“All weekend — by the time we got in, the floor was already coming up off the original floor,” she said. “The floor was just completely damaged and all the equipment got wet.”

The entire floor needed to be either ripped up or replaced.

Even more equipment was destroyed, their electric cords swollen with water and unsafe to use, Avelar said. That included the warmer, the coffee grinder and the smaller espresso machine they bought and hadn’t started using yet to replace the big espresso machine.

Some of the chairs had to go because they had already started molding. They threw out all their food.

“It was so heartbreaking to close,” she said. “It feels like a movie; it just starts with one thing and just comes to another. One thing after another is gone.”

Thousands of dollars of damage was done.

The reopening

A turkey, bacon, avocado sandwich is stacked high at Downtown Oak, which recently reopened in downtown Fresno after vandalism shut it down for four months.

But as of Monday, Downtown Oak is back.

The doors are open and sandwiches on the menu.

Insurance paid for many of the repairs, which is in part, why it took so long.

“Yes, thank you baby Jesus for that one,” Avelar said. “It’s going to help me a lot.”

Not everything is back to normal though.

They still haven’t got the cash registers replaced, so the business is operating with cash or Cash App via customers’ phones.

Some of the employees didn’t come back because they had to find new jobs.

They’re serving the full lunch menu, but baked goods will need to wait until they hire a new baker. The breakfast menu is limited.

For now, Downtown Oak is open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Hours will expand as the business gets on its feet.

During the closure, Avelar got daily phone calls and texts from customers asking when she would reopen.

“To all those people that called every day … thank you for believing in me,” she said.

Elliott Balch, president and CEO at the Downtown Fresno Partnership noted earlier this summer that Downtown Oak has certainly faced from “special challenges.”

“They are such great examples of the willpower of entrepreneurs to get up if they’ve been knocked down — and that’s exactly what they’re doing,” he said. “Thank goodness, because there are so many who enjoy their food.”