For 50 years, diners in Los Feliz knew they could count on a warm welcome and a hearty meal from Tony Fanara.
The restaurateur, who died on Friday at 79 years old, was known for sending free and discounted pizzas to school and neighborhood groups, giving special attention to police and firefighters and liberally distributing free desserts and mushroom side dishes, especially to new customers and families, at his Italian restaurant Palermo.
Fanara’s death was sudden. The restaurant had closed for a summer hiatus July 1. On Friday, Fanara’s daughter Michelle Fanara said, her father was working on a project at a neighboring property, stepped inside Palermo, lay down to rest and did not get up. A specific cause is unknown, but Fanara had some history of heart trouble.
Born in Sicily to a large family, Fanara moved to the U.S. with his parents as a teenager, served in the U.S. Army from 1967 to 1969 and earned an associate’s degree in electrical engineering from East Los Angeles College in 1971. After working for San Antonio Winery, Fanara opened his first restaurant, an 18-table venture on Hillhurst Avenue, in 1976. He called it Palermo and specialized in Sicilian home-style cuisine.
It was at the first Palermo, Michelle Fanara said, that her parents met. After three dates they got engaged. In 1977 they married. In 1982, with a growing family at home, Fanara moved the restaurant to a larger space on Vermont Avenue.
Before long the dining room had red leather booths, a seaside mural on the wall, a bar in back and sometimes a wandering accordion player. Fanara posted himself at the door, greeting guests. For many years (until local officials objected) he handed out free cups of wine to customers waiting for tables.
“That restaurant — that’s my dad’s first child, his love, his baby,” said Michelle Fanara.
The restaurant grew to 190 seats, its wall of fame featuring signed black-and-white glossies from Pee-wee Herman, Elizabeth Taylor and scores of others.
Toward the back, the walls filled with displays of patches from first-responder agencies worldwide — and in the seats beneath those patches, often, sat police and firefighters, whose company Fanara prized.
One day, Michelle Fanara recalled, someone tried to rob a market down the street “and somebody ran in the restaurant and got the police. And they caught the guy.”
Amid the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and again after the Northridge earthquake of 1994, “Tony opened up and fed first responders and city employees. He came in and had his cooks come in and he wasn’t charging anybody anything,” recalled Sam Salazar, a retired LAPD senior lead officer who knew Fanara for more than 40 years.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Salazar said, Fanara did the same thing. But the gesture that surprised him most, Salazar said, may have been the time that one of Fanara’s cooks couldn’t get to work because his car’s engine blew up.
“Tony drove him over to the Ford dealer in Glendale and bought him a new car,” Salazar said. “I know it’s true because I saw the paperwork.”
“He took care of a lot of people, and pretty much never asked for anything in return,” said Al Polehonki, another retired LAPD officer, who has known Fanara since the early 1980s.
In April 2020, after the pandemic had reduced Palermo’s business to about 5% of what it had been, longtime customer and retired LAPD Sgt. Joe Oliveri started a GoFundMecampaign to support the restaurant and laid-off employees. More than $68,000 came in. Palermo kept going. And though business seldom matched pre-pandemic levels, Fanara kept up his community philanthropy.
He also dipped a toe into politics. Fanara ran for governor in the March 2022 primary election, his “common sense” platform attracting 25,086 votes, about 0.4% of those cast.
Last year, the Franklin Hills Residents Assn., whose block parties have featured Palermo pizzas for years, gave Fanara an honorary lifetime membership.
“He was a huge supporter of the LAFD and just us personally,” said L.A. Fire Department Capt. Mike McIndoe of nearby Station 35. Whether the station was helping fight the fires of 2025 or running a pancake breakfast, McIndoe said, Fanara pitched in, supplying pizzas and sausages, offering pizza-making lessons and refusing payment.
“We knew it was just because he cared,” McIndoe said. And when word of Fanara’s death reached the station, “It hit us hard, I can tell you that,” McIndoe said.
In addition to his daughter, Fanara is survived by his wife, Antoinette Fanara; and children Joseph and Tony Jr. Michelle Fanara said funeral plans are pending and no decisions have been made about the restaurant’s future.
“He always wanted us to have what he never could,” Michelle Fanara said of her father. “My parents’ house has six and a half bathrooms, and it’s because when they came to this country, they didn’t have enough.”