Prima Ristorante

After 43 years we are sad to announce PRIMA Ristorante has closed. We thank you for your decades of love and support and hope you will continue to support us at PRIMA Vini which continues to live on. Prima Restaurant is a celebration of food and family; both our own family, as well as the friends we choose for ourselves. Prima has been bringing tog... ether family and regional Italian cuisine around the same table for 40 years. Join us at our table, and become part of the Prima family. When Michael and Janet Verlander rented the shoebox-sized storefront at 1522 North Main Street in Walnut Creek in May of 1977, they had no idea that 38 years later, it would have become the East Bays premier wine and food destination. It started as a deli with a cheese counter, a hot plate and a few racks of wine. But these were dynamic times, and Michael, driven by a passion for wine, quickly forged close relationships with some of Californias newest and best names in the wine business. Duckhorn, Silver Oak, Kistler and Au Bon Climat, for example, all sold their first vintages at Walnut Creek Wine & Cheese. Michael still tells of talking Dan Duckhorn out of 14 cases of his first vintage of Three Palms Merlot and selling it for the princely sum of $14 per bottle! Everything changed when the Verlanders, while taking a rare vacation in Italy in the late eighties, had an epiphany while dining at Ristorante Belvedere atop La Morra hill in Barolo. They were so taken by it all that they decided to import their Piemontese experience to Walnut Creek. Walnut Creek Wine & Cheese became successively Prima Café, Prima Trattoria e Negozio di Vini, and finally PRIMA. With the change came expansion. The shoebox doubled in size with the addition of what is now the Caminetto fireplace dining room. When I started at PRIMA as Wine Director in the spring of 1994, what is now our wood-burning oven and Enoteca dining room was a sushi bar, and the space now occupied by PRIMA Vini, our wine shop, was another restaurant. Things grew quickly as both the ...Read More