Walk in the side entrance off 6th Street in Williams and the first thing you notice is not the smell of fresh bread from the bakery case or the hiss of the espresso machine. It is the wall. Dozens of mounted animals, some of them African game that never set a hoof anywhere near the Sacramento Valley, staring down at you while you try to decide between a muffuletta and a tri-tip sandwich.
Most people who see that wall for the first time assume it is a bit. A roadside gimmick built for travelers pulling off I-5, the kind of manufactured quirk that gives a highway stop something to post about. It is not. The real story is smaller and stranger than that, and it tells you more about how Williams actually works than any list of its restaurants ever could.
The Animals Were Never the Point
Jim Granzella, who opened the place with his wife Beverly, was not a hunter. His friends were. Co-owner Dino McCarty, Jim's grandson, has said the African animals on the wall mostly came from one friend in particular, Joe Vaiano, who shot them decades ago, back in the 1950s and 60s. McCarty has said he has never actually counted how many mounts are up there. When asked how they all ended up on his family's walls, his answer was simple: they pretty much all came from friends.
That distinction matters. A curated collection is decoration. A wall built from what your friends happened to bring back from their own trips is something else entirely, a record of who knew whom, who went where, and what a small Colusa County town looked like two and three generations before Yelp reviews and Food Network cameras ever found it. Williams already has an official keeper of that kind of history a few blocks away at the Sacramento Valley Museum on E Street. Granzella's has the unofficial version, and it happens to hang over the salad bar.
A Deli Counter That Grew Sideways
The business itself started small. Jim and Beverly Granzella opened Granzella's Deli in January 1976, a counter operation built around lunch meats, imported cheeses and the olive mix that would eventually become the restaurant's signature. It grew the way family businesses in small towns tend to grow, not through a master plan but through adding whatever the town seemed to need next. By 1984 the deli had expanded into a full restaurant and pizza parlor.
What sits at 451 6th Street today is less a restaurant than a small commercial district that happens to share one roof and one family's last name:
- A deli counter with prime lunch meats, imported cheeses and house-made olive mixes
- A full-service restaurant and pizza parlor
- A bakery and Italian gelato counter
- A gift shop stocked with jarred olives, sauces and dry goods
- A sports lounge poured for game days, with a house-brewed Granzella IPA on tap
- An attached inn for anyone who needs a bed instead of just a booth
That kind of consolidation usually only happens in places too small to support five separate businesses but with enough traffic passing through, in this case the old US 99W alignment that still carries local traffic as the I-5 Business Loop through town, to support one business doing the work of five.
The Fire That Didn't End It
None of this happened in a straight line. Much of the original building was destroyed by a fire in October 2007. A business with less standing in its own town might have taken the insurance money and let the lot sit empty, or sold out to someone with a different name for the sign. Granzella's rebuilt instead, on the same site, under the same family.
That detail is easy to miss if you only know the place from the Food Network version of its story. But it is the detail that separates a genuine small-town institution from a business that merely lasts a long time. Institutions get tested. What makes them institutions is what the family does the year after the test, not the year everything was fine.
Why the Food Network Version Isn't the Local Version
Granzella's has been featured on Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, in the Triple D Nation series with Guy Fieri, who has said his own family used to stop at the deli on road trips when he was a kid, drawn by the muffuletta the same way travelers still are. That kind of national attention is real, and it is not nothing for a town the size of Williams.
But that is the postcard version, built for someone passing through on I-5 with twenty minutes to spare. The local version runs on a different clock. It is the version where you know which booth Jim Granzella himself used to sit in for breakfast. It is the version where the sports lounge fills up on a Friday night after the Yellowjackets play, not because anyone marketed it that way but because there has never been a better television in town. Dino McCarty put it plainly when asked what the place means to Williams: "we are the place in town to be." He was not talking to a food critic when he said it. He was just answering a question honestly.
That is the thing worth sitting with if you already live here. A town this size does not usually get to keep an institution across three generations of the same family, through a fire, through the arrival of a national television audience, without losing what made it a hometown fixture in the first place. Williams has. It is on 6th Street, it has a wall full of somebody's old hunting trips, and it never had to try very hard to stay exactly what it always was.
If you have questions about property, land, or what is actually changing in Colusa County towns like Williams, Arbuckle, Maxwell or Colusa itself, Amber W. Torres has been working these markets long enough to know which stories matter and which are just noise. Reach out anytime to talk through what you are seeing on the ground here, whether that is a home, a parcel, or just a question about the town.
