Bono's Restaurant and Deli

What is Bono's Restaurant and Deli?

The building is a low restaurant in the Streamline Moderne style, which favored smooth, rounded lines that suggested speed. Red and green stripes on the walls once advertised Italian cooking, and painted grapevines pointed to the wine served inside.

On the same property stands the Big Orange, a citrus stand about 7 feet tall and shaped like the fruit. Stands like it sold juice to drivers passing through orange-grove country on Route 66 in the 1920s and 1930s. This one was brought here from a spot roughly 3 miles to the east.

History of Bono's Restaurant and Deli

The business started in 1936 as a simple produce stand for travelers on the highway. As traffic kept growing, the owners replaced the stand in 1943 with the present building and ran it as a full-service restaurant. In the 1940s, while Fontana's Italian immigrant community was growing, locals came here for Italian foods that had been hard to find in the area.

National Register listing came in 2008. In 2013 Joe Bono was allowed to shift it 20 feet farther from the street. After years of being shut, it reopened in 2019, but the Bono's business later closed for good, and a Peruvian restaurant now occupies the historic building.

Visiting Bono's Restaurant and Deli: tips

The site is well under a mile from the Route 66 line on the map, so it makes a quick photo stop on a drive through Fontana. The striped facade and the Big Orange are both easy to photograph from the public sidewalk. For open space afterward, the Jurupa Mountains and Mount Jurupa are both about 5.3 miles away, and Etiwanda Falls is about 6.3 miles off.