Six months after fire closed a popular Quad Cities restaurant, it's re-opened. A ribbon cutting was held Wednesday in Davenport for Lunardi's Italian Restaurant.
The owner, Paul Lunardi, says it took a month after the December fire to inventory all the food, liquor, and equipment that was lost. Then work began to gut the inside, and "re-build" the restaurant.
"We did start to change things and once we changed one thing we had to change 10 other things. And really the only proper way to change things would have been to change the whole layout and it just wasn't cost effective. It wasn't in our budget to do that. It just got astronomical once we started messing around with changing different things."
And he's grateful for all the calls received since the fire - people wanted to know if Lunardi's would re-open and when, and they wanted to make reservations and arrange for catering.
"We're at 30 to 35 employees and that's about where we were. We only lost 3 of our old employees and everybody else stuck around. We're just very lucky and fortunate to have that."
Lunardi's first opened in 1989, at the same location, near NorthPark Mall.
