Zanotto's Turned 50 on Naglee Avenue. Why Did the First Store Outlast the Ones Built After It?

Before Naglee Avenue, Andrea and Rosa Zanotto ran a gas station in Scotts Valley. Then they bought a Thrifty Market at Hedding and Springer. According to the Mercury News, it burned down and couldn't be rebuilt. In 1976 they opened a market at 1970 Naglee Ave. in the Rose Garden. That paper called it "the first of several Zanotto's incarnations to come."

Fifty years later, the family held the anniversary party at that first store. The Mercury News reported that the Oct. 10 celebration brought 50 vendors, 50 items at 50% off, a DJ and face painting. The more interesting part of the story is what happened to the stores that came after Naglee. Zanotto's has tried a big downtown market, a cut-down version of it, a sandwich counter, a former supermarket in Sunnyvale and a small store at a transit stop. Two of those formats closed. The original Rose Garden store, roughly the same size as one that failed, is still the place the family chose for its 50th.

The family that built the Naglee store

The company's About page tells the early history briefly. Andrea and Rosa left Italy after World War II with five children and waited in Venezuela for U.S. immigration papers. They arrived in 1955 with 10 children, had three more, and became citizens in 1962. The company says the food business appealed to them because it could employ a large family and also feed it. "Smaller stores led to the establishment of our Naglee Ave. store in 1976."

Rosa ran the business alongside Andrea. In the Mercury News's 2014 profile, her daughter-in-law Debbie Zanotto said she "was totally involved in the business." The same article quoted Troy Tibbils, hired as a produce clerk at the Rose Garden store in 1984. He said the deli was still serving Rosa's Italian recipes. Tibbils met his wife, Patti, at Zanotto's, and their children have also worked at the store. The company's site now calls Troy and Patty Tibbils its partners in the Willow Glen, Express and Sunnyvale locations.

The Naglee store has been the training ground, the deli kitchen and the party venue. Each later expansion tested whether its formula would work somewhere else.

Five formats in four decades

Here is the run of stores, in order, from the reporting on each one.

The Willow Glen store at 1421 Foxworthy is the third in today's lineup. The reporting reviewed here doesn't give its opening year, so it isn't in the table. The Sunnyvale size depends on the year: the 2015 story said 23,000 square feet and the 2018 story said 24,000.

The table shows that size alone didn't decide which stores lasted. Sunnyvale is the largest store and is still open. The 8,000-square-foot Fruitdale store was the smallest and closed. The downtown market started larger than Naglee and closed. Then it shrank to about Naglee's size and closed anyway.

The downtown store that matched Naglee's size

In June 2011, SanJose.com reported that the downtown market would close after a long struggle. The city had subsidized the location, and it had opened in 1996. Tibbils was manager there at the time. He listed the problems as inconvenient parking access, poor visibility in a mid-block spot and a lack of downtown development. A new condo tower, The 88, was supposed to bring in shoppers. Instead it brought a competing grocery into its ground floor.

The family's response says a lot about how it sees the Naglee store. Zanotto's temporarily closed the downtown market and shrank it from 22,000 square feet to 14,000. SanJose.com described the new size as "about the size of the Naglee Avenue location." Even at roughly the Rose Garden store's footprint, "the smaller space just wasn't enough."

Downtown then got a different format. The 2011 plan was a grab-and-go deli called Zanotto's Express in a former pizza parlor nearby, set up to serve "the lunch clientele." Copying Naglee's floor plan downtown hadn't worked, so they built a sandwich counter instead.

The transit store that needed more neighbors

The second test went the other direction. In 2018, Tibbils, then president of Zanotto's and co-owner of its three markets, told SiliconValley.com about an 8,000-square-foot store near Southwest Expressway and Fruitdale Avenue. It would sit inside the Fruitdale Station development, which included a 442-unit apartment complex near a light rail stop. He called it "a best-of version of Zanotto's." The plan was to carry 50 to 60 percent of the big-store inventory, chosen with analytics, because "about 25 percent of our stuff produces 75 percent of our sales." He also explained who it was for: "there are more apartments, cupboards are smaller."

It closed on Dec. 22, 2022. "We gave it our best effort," Fred Zanotto, the chain's semi-retired co-owner, told the Mercury News. "It just didn't work out for us." Hanna Tibbils, the Fruitdale manager and co-owner, told the paper the small-store experiment had been worthwhile and that she appreciated the neighborhood regulars. A commercial real estate partner quoted in the same story pointed to the pandemic and the location. He said a grab-and-go store needs a lot of housing nearby and probably needed more foot traffic than it got. Fruitdale employees who wanted to stay were offered transfers to "the Foxworthy and Rose Garden ones in San Jose and the Sunnyvale location."

Put the two closures side by side. Downtown, a Naglee-sized store failed for lack of the households a full grocery needs. At Fruitdale, a store designed for small apartment kitchens closed after about four years. The store that is still open sells to people buying for full meals, and that comes down to the blocks around 1970 Naglee Ave. rather than the building.

What the original counter offers for the holidays

The 2015 coverage of the Sunnyvale opening listed what Zanotto's carries. It included soups, sandwiches, deli meats, seafood, more than 30 handmade salads, a wide selection of beer and wine, and Piedmontese beef. The Rose Garden catering menu, marked "Edited 6.2026," lists lasagna, ravioli, tortellini, antipasto italiano, grilled Italian sausage and deli sandwich trays.

The three stores have different catering terms, and Naglee's are the shortest:

1. Notice. The Rose Garden catering menu asks for 48 hours' notice on all catering. The Willow Glen and Sunnyvale menus, posted on the catering page as June 2026 versions, ask for 72 hours.
2. Pickup. All orders are available for pickup at the store.
3. Delivery. Orders under $500 can't be delivered. Deliveries carry a 10% service charge, plus $40 more for Sunday deliveries after 3:00. The menu says delivery policies vary by location and may not be available.
4. Sushi trays. Order 24 to 48 hours ahead at any of the three markets.
5. Custom orders. The catering page says the stores can customize the current menu and asks customers to call the store they'll pick up from and ask for the catering specialist.

Naglee's catering line is 408-294-9151, and its catering email is [email protected]. Thanksgiving falls on Nov. 26 this year. These terms come from the standard June menu. The store's website doesn't yet show a separate holiday schedule, so check holiday cutoffs and hours with the store. Regular hours at Naglee are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily.

The company's About page says three generations of Zanotto's now work in the business. The store where Tibbils started stocking produce in 1984 now handles a Rose Garden catering order with two days' notice. The Willow Glen and Sunnyvale stores need three.

At SweatBros, Andy Sweat grew up in the Rose Garden, and he watches what keeps its long-running businesses open as closely as he watches comparable sales. If you'd like to know how the blocks around Naglee Avenue and The Alameda affect what your home is worth, get your instant home valuation and we'll go through the numbers with you.