West Side Market vendors bake, clean to be ready for Monday's reopening

CLEVELAND - West Side Market vendors spent Wednesday cleaning, baking and prepping ahead of the market’s scheduled reopening on Monday.

A fire that started inside one of the booths damaged parts of the historic landmark on Jan. 30 and covered much of the inside with soot.

“Right now, we’re ordering our supplies, making sure we have everything in stock to start re-baking, to start getting everything going again,” said Terry Frick, owner of the family-owned Frickaccio’s, a pizza market and bakery.

Frick spent Thursday morning making her popular garlic pizza dough to sell at her West Side Market booth.

“We’ll be spending the weekend here as well,” said Frick who plans to spend the next few days making her pizza bagels and pepperoni rolls to sell at the market.

Employees at The Olive and The Grape, which also has a booth at the Market, have spent hundreds of hours blending their spices as well as making and bottling their hand-crafted olive oils and vinegars.

“It is a lot of time involved of pouring it, labeling it, cleaning the bottle in case anything spills, capping it, sealing it, putting the label, delivering it,” said Kate Simeone of The Olive and The Grape.

Tony Pinzone, owner of Pinzone’s Meats, spent the day trying to fix his broken credit card machine while his employees cleaned his stall top to bottom.

“One step at a time to get us back to where we were,” Pinzone said.

The vendors said the support of other vendors, their customers and the city of Cleveland has been a key component to getting back up and running so soon.