Guadalajara Fiesta Grill to rise from the ashes

Five months after a fire closed his east-side Mexican restaurant, Seth Holzman is ready to rebuild.

And expand.

On Wednesday, he got his demolition permit for Guadalajara Fiesta Grill, 750 N. Kolb Road, which has been shuttered since the July 26 blaze.

Earlier this week, he finalized a deal to take over the old T.G.I. Fridays at 4901 E. Broadway, where he will open his “expansion restaurant,” Guadalajara Mexican Grill.

And on Friday he pulled his new food truck — dubbed Guadalajara Express Grill — outside Fiesta Grill, from which he plans to serve lunch on weekdays and possibly dinner on weekends on the spacious patio and garden area while workers rebuild his restaurant.

“We’ll put up a sign that says ‘We’re back ... sort of’,” Holzman said, as a salvage crew was making plans to go into Fiesta Grill and comb through the debris to see what can be saved.

He is hoping the walls can be salvaged, and the foundation. That would save him money and “really help fast-track the rebuild process” to meet his deadline to reopen by late spring.

“Our intention is to put it back essentially in the exact same footprint as it was,” he said. “So if a wall is good, there’s no reason to take it down and put it back up again.”

Fire investigators in mid-August ruled out arson but listed the cause of the Fiesta Grill fire as undetermined, according to fire reports. Holzman has spent the months since working with his insurance company to get the money needed to rebuild, he said.

He also has been finalizing negotiations to open the Broadway restaurant, a project he has been working on since last May, months before the fire brought everything to a screeching halt.

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“(Broadway) was always intended as an expansion location. We feel that this is a great spot to be. We’re close to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. This is close enough to central and east central … it’s a good market,” he said. “When the fire happened, it looked like everything was off.”

Construction got under way on the Broadway restaurant this week. Holzman thinks he can have it open by mid-February.

“We will get that location up as fast as possible,” he said, ticking off a list of renovations that includes opening up the space and reconsidering the traffic flow inside the dining areas.

“It’s really going to look and feel like they’ve walked straight into the Guadalajara Grill and they can never imagine it was a T.G.I. Fridays,” he said.

While all of the construction is going on, Holzman will roll out the Guadalajara Express Grill food truck.

“I’m really excited about that. We are going to be able to provide about 75 percent of our menu,” he said.

The Broadway restaurant will be the fourth Guadalajara eatery Holzman has been involved in designing and opening. He and his now ex-wife, Emma Vera-Holzman, opened the first Guadalajara Grill on East Prince Road and North Mountain Avenue in 2002. Six years later, they moved it to a bigger building on Prince and North Campbell Avenue; it is now called Guadalajara Original Grill.

The couple opened the Kolb Road restaurant in October 2010. They divorced in 2013, according to court records, and Holzman got the east-side restaurant while Vera-Holzman took over the Prince Road restaurant.

Months before the Fiesta Grill fire, the Original Grill on Prince was engulfed in flames on May 29. Fire officials ruled it an electrical fire and estimated damage at around $200,000, according to fire reports that also listed the fire’s cause as undetermined.

Guadalajara Original Grill reopened on Nov. 21.