Site work has started at the corner of Highway 12 and Warm Springs Road. The county file shows a pizza restaurant, approved in 2022 and held up ever since by its septic plans.
Under a use permit the county approved four years ago, the commercial building at 9580 Highway 12, on the Warm Springs Road corner, is to become a pizza restaurant that serves alcohol. A design review for the conversion was approved this spring.
Use permit UPE22-0037, filed in May 2022, authorizes “a new pizza restaurant serving alcohol in existing commercial building on a 0.58 acre parcel”. It adds 185 square feet for a storage room and an office for the restaurant manager. It also provides for extra parking, exterior lighting and patio seating on the existing deck. Hours are 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week. The restaurant itself is put at 1,561 square feet.
The permit also 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, and the new permit replaces that use.
Held up by septic
The county file points to wastewater as the reason a permit approved in 2022 is still not built. A commercial kitchen on a half-acre parcel is demanding 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 A fresh septic design application went in this May and was withdrawn within weeks, along with its findings report.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. It is marked resubmittal requested, which means the county has sent the plans back. A formal variance was completed in June.
The old well, 143 feet deep with six inches of steel casing, was destroyed on July 24, and that permit is finaled. The design review for the conversion was approved on April 1. The tenant-improvement permit covering heating, equipment, walls and signs is also marked resubmittal requested, so the visible work at the corner is site work, not fit-out.
With two of the permits that matter back with the applicant, the kitchen cannot be signed off until the septic is resolved.
Who is behind it
The county file does not name the operator, and we will not guess at one. The public record does show that Burtech Family Vineyard LLC has a winegrower license 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. It 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 license and a pizza restaurant at the same 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 Sonoma County by a year. We have asked, and will report what we are told.
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 Aug. 6, 2026; the California ABC license 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.