Site work has started at the corner of Highway 12 and Warm Springs Road. The county file says a pizza restaurant — approved in 2022, and held up ever since by the septic system.
The commercial building at 9580 Highway 12, on the corner where Warm Springs Road meets the highway, is to become a pizza restaurant serving beer and wine. That is not a rumour: it is the plain content of a use permit the county approved four years ago, and of a design review approved this spring.
Use permit UPE22-0037, filed in May 2022, authorises “a new pizza restaurant serving alcohol in existing commercial building on a 0.58 acre parcel”, with a 185 square foot addition for a storage room and an office for the restaurant manager. It provides for extra parking, exterior lighting and patio seating on the existing deck, and sets hours of ten in the morning to nine at night, seven days a week. The restaurant itself is put at 1,561 square feet.
The same permit does something else worth noting: it supersedes the entitlement for the existing wine-tasting room, which had run under a use permit from 2011. The building has been a tasting room of one sort or another for most of the past decade. It will not be one again.
Four years, and the reason is septic
A permit approved in 2022 and still not built invites the question of what went wrong, and the file answers it fairly clearly: waste water. A commercial kitchen on a half-acre parcel is a demanding thing to plumb.
The original septic permit, for a subsurface drip system rated at 1,152 gallons a day, was filed in October 2022 and has since expired. A fresh septic design application went in this May and was withdrawn within weeks, along with its findings report. A third attempt — “New Standard System For Pizza Restaurant” — was filed in June and currently sits at resubmittal requested, meaning the county has sent the plans back. A formal variance was completed in June.
Two things have actually happened on the ground. The old well was destroyed on 24 July — six inches of steel casing, 143 feet deep, permit finalled — and the design review for the conversion was approved on 1 April. The tenant-improvement permit covering heating, equipment, walls and signs is also at resubmittal requested. So the visible work at the corner is site work, not fit-out.
Which means this is not about to open. Two of the permits that matter are back with the applicant, and until the septic is resolved the kitchen cannot be signed off.
Who is behind it
The county file does not name the operator, and we are not going to guess at one. What the public record does show is that Burtech Family Vineyard LLC has a winegrower licence application pending at 9580 Sonoma Highway with the state’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Burtech is a San Diego County winery, owned by Dominic and Julie Burtech, which bought a Sonoma vineyard in 2023 and currently pours at Sugarloaf Wine Co. on Cristo Lane near Oakmont — where its tasting room serves a house pizza.
A pending licence at the address and a pizza restaurant at the address are suggestive, but they are two separate records and we have confirmed no link between them. The use permit predates Burtech’s arrival in the county by a year. We have asked, and will report what we are told.
For a valley that lost Palooza in June, a restaurant arriving rather than leaving is a change of direction, even a slow one. Whether Kenwood gets its pizza this year rests on a septic drawing.
Sources: Sonoma County permit records for APN 050-263-050 (UPE22-0037, BLD22-1386, ADR26-0022, BLD26-1655, SEP22-0436, SDA26-0020, SEP26-0169, WVB26-0008, WEL26-0170), retrieved 6 August 2026; California ABC licence lookup; Burtech Family Vineyard’s own website. Every permit above is searchable on our permit database.
Correction, August 16: this article originally said the valley lost Café Citti this spring. In fact Café Citti left Kenwood for Santa Rosa in 2020; it was the Santa Rosa location that closed for good in February. We regret the error.