A beloved Valley Armenian restaurant closes abruptly, leaving ‘a hole in our hearts’

Uniquely is a Fresno Bee series that covers the moments, landmarks and personalities that define what makes living in the Fresno area so special.

A siren still wails at noon across downtown Reedley, along with distant church bells, on a recent weekday.

Normally at this time, the double doors to Uncle Harry’s Classic Meals would be swinging open and shut, with a smattering of people inside eating shish kebab and talking about the weather.

But Uncle Harry’s is no more. The restaurant that was a jewel of this small city southeast of Fresno has closed after 34 years.

Uncle Harry’s — not to be confused with the unrelated Uncle Harry’s New York Bagelry & Coffeehouse in Fresno — was a classic Armenian restaurant at G and 12th streets. The 132-year-old building sits on a prime corner on what is essentially Reedley’s Main Street.

It closed suddenly on a Friday in early April, most people discovering it when they tried to eat there and found the door locked.

“It’s kinda left a hole in our hearts,” said Becky Radyko, owner of the Reedley Sandwich Shop. She worked at Uncle Harry’s for 20 years, starting at age 21.

Uncle Harry’s was a place for Armenians and farmers — and Armenian farmers — and everyone else. City business got done at those tables. Aging men met over coffee, the numbers in their 50-cent coffee club shrinking as their names showed up in obituaries. The editor of the Reedley Exponent newspaper — its office across the street — met with people there before the newspaper was subsumed by the Mid Valley Times.

And a classic small-town character, Uncle Harry himself, oversaw it all.

Harry Horasanian founded the restaurant in 1990 after a career in carpentry and cabinetry.

Horasanian died in 2021 at the age of 86, dealing with dementia in the later years of his life, Radyko said. Before his death, the restaurant and the building were sold to a new owner.

The food

Horasanian served Armenian food such as dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) and a popular summer salad served atop pilaf. But the restaurant was also known for its tri-tip and other American foods.

He used many of his mother’s recipes. The others he learned while working as a cook in the Army, Radyko said. His supervisor was Italian and Polish and taught Horasanian how to make tri-tip and spaghetti sauce.

Today, locals miss the restaurant and even its smells, according to the employees at the tractor dealership across the street. In small towns, when workers go to the post office, they walk there, and if it’s near lunchtime, they’re enjoying the scent of roasting meat wafting from the restaurant.

The food and Uncle Harry drew minor celebrities to the restaurant, including the first pilot to break the sound barrier, Chuck Yeager. “Tark the Shark,” aka Jerry Tarkanian, the renowned Fresno State basketball coach, ate there. So did famed hot-rodder Michael “Blackie” Gejeian.

Who was Harry?

Horasanian was the heart and soul of the restaurant.

Daniel Rubio worked across the street from him for 16 years, running Second Chance Thrift Store and often popping over to Uncle Harry’s to say hello between sales of gently used denim.

“It was like the show ‘Cheers,’” Rubio said. “You walk in there and he’s sitting down there.”

Only instead of Norm nursing a beer, it was Harry drinking coffee and dispensing advice. While his workers hustled plates back and forth, Horasanian was advising customers on everything from love to how to season vegetables. He was a huge fan of astrology and hired his employees based on their zodiac signs.

In 2008, former Fresno Bee reporter Diana Marcum, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize at the Los Angeles Times for her profiles of ordinary people during the drought, wrote about Horasanian and his astrology habit.

The story included this tidbit: “’You have to step back and understand she’s fire and you’re earth,”’ (Harry) tells a gloomy, exasperated married man on a recent afternoon. ‘“Just sit here awhile and have a cup of coffee.”’

Horasanian was kind, too.

He let Radyko, the cook and server who now runs her own sandwich shop, bring her young son into the restaurant when she didn’t have childcare. She’d set him up at a corner table with a coloring book. Or, if the tables were full, they’d plunk him under the chef’s prep table in the kitchen and he’d entertain himself there, she said.

Horasanian was also known to occasionally take the employees to Las Vegas for a getaway when the restaurant closed between Christmas and New Year’s.

The staff

The workers also made the place what is was, including longtime cook Genaro Lozano.

He made headlines in 2006 when he wrote a protest song that was an underground hit in Oaxaca, according to Fresno Bee archives. Sung by Carlos Mendoza of Madera, the ballad of Moises Cruz Sanchez was about the assassination of a social activist. It pointedly asked a Mexican governor to do something about a string of slayings under his rule.

In addition to working at Uncle Harry’s six days a week, Lozano ran a radio program on Sundays called “La Hora Mixteca” (the Mixtec Hour) that broadcast the channel, including his song, via satellite to Oaxaca.

He left several years ago, but is still in Reedley, cooking at Yoi Japanese Food.

Waitress Diane Almanzar worked at Uncle Harry’s just shy of 25 years, first for Horasanian and then the new owner.

She liked the work.

“I had the same customers, the same farmers,” she said. “I knew almost everybody’s order.”

She often didn’t remember their names, she joked, but she could remember what a whole family’s order was, including meals for mom, dad, and four or five kids.

“That was my second home,” she said.

Today, she’s job hunting and try ing to relax— she never took a vacation in all the years she worked at Uncle Harry’s — with her four pugs in her home near the river bottom.

The news of the closure hadn’t yet reached longtime customers Eula Bundy and her son, Fred Bundy, Jr., who have been coming to the restaurant for 30 years. The pair have a routine where Bundy picks his mom up at her home in Selma and they hit up fruit stands on the way to Reedley. Then it’s lunch at Uncle Harry’s, and pie down the street at the Main Street Cafe.

Last week, they were standing outside the restaurant dejected after finding the restaurant locked up tight, only a sign with a handwritten “closed” in ink flapping in the breeze.

When asked what she thought when she discovered the restaurant was closed, Eula Bundy said, “You can’t print that.”

But clearly, she was disappointed.

Changes

Horasanian eventually retired and sold the business and the building to Oscar Rubio.

But Uncle Harry’s lived on.

“He kept everything the same because that’s the way Harry wanted it,” Almanzar said of the changeover.

The antiques that Horasanian collected and decorated with are still inside the building.

The building itself needs work, people who have been upstairs say. It may be the oldest structure on the main stretch of G Street, noted local historian Kenneth Zech.

It was originally built as a hotel in 1892 by the Southern Pacific Railroad, just a few years after Reedley was founded.

It looked drastically different, with three stories, balconies wrapping around two floors and a little tower poking up from the corner with a belfry-like top. The unusual bump out of wooden windows on the second floor today made a lot more sense when the building was in its prime in the 1890s.

The third floor was destroyed in a 1929 fire caused by someone using a still to make alcohol during prohibition, Zech said. The man who started it went to jail for a year. As punishment for the business, the hotel portion was padlocked and not allowed to operate for a year.

Why did it close?

But it was likely modern-day challenges that did Uncle Harry’s restaurant in.

The new owner, Rubio, could not be reached for comment.

Almanzar, the longtime waitress, said the COVID-19 pandemic hit the restaurant hard. It survived, but afterward, business dropped. Customers used to come from Kingsburg, Hanford and Lemoore.

“They just all stopped coming,” she said.

And small businesses are facing an avalanche of challenges, said Nicole Zieba, Reedley’s city manager, who said she didn’t have any firsthand knowledge of what closed Uncle Harry’s. The cost of food, employee pay and workers’ compensation insurance are all rising. Scam artists are filing frivolous lawsuits under the Americans With Disabilities Act, she said.

“I think it’s harder for these mom-and-pop restaurants,” she said.

As for the mother-and-son Bundys, they say they spotted signs of decline at Uncle Harry’s years ago. The restaurant had stopped serving certain dishes, and the Armenian cracker bread Eula liked to eat with her salad. So for her last visit she brought a bag of her own — the crispy Armenian crackers made by the 102-year-old Valley Lahvosh Baking Co. in Fresno.

“We kinda saw it coming,” Fred Bundy said.

Still, the closure is not a sign of a dying downtown, Zieba said, who noted that Reedley’s employment rate is rising and its economy is diversified. More like time marching on, whether we like it or not.

“We’ve seen that here in Reedley before, with longstanding restaurants and shops (closing) and new things have taken their place that are just wonderful,” she said.

There are papered-over empty spaces on G Street, to be sure, but they are checkered with thriving businesses.

They include the Reedley Sandwich Shop, where the coffee club has moved, and owner Radyko is once again serving some of the same fellows she served at Uncle Harry’s decades ago.

“The closure of Uncle Harry’s was finally just turning that last page in the book,” Zieba said.