Back in Business but Sadly : Aftermath: Pizzeria Uno staff mourns colleague and quake victim Adam Slotnick.

NORTHRIDGE —  The employees at Pizzeria Uno in Northridge came to work Wednesday and opened the place for business, but it wasn’t for the paycheck.

They did it for Adam Slotnick. In memory of their boss, who died in the quake--and as an unspoken way of getting on with their lives--the employees rallied to become the first shop in the badly damaged Northridge Fashion Center to open since the Jan. 17 temblor. On that wretched morning, part of their mall collapsed for all the world to see, becoming a symbol of the havoc wreaked on the shopper-friendly San Fernando Valley.

Many of the restaurant’s employees are refugees of the Northridge earthquake themselves, with doomed apartments and lost possessions. But they started showing up for cleanup duty the first day, without really saying why.

“Instead of everyone being down, they all came in and volunteered to help,” said general manager Keith Ishibashi. “It’s been a healing process.”

As they work, talk always seems to turn to Slotnick. At 27, he wasn’t the oldest victim of the quake nor the youngest, noteworthy neither for his heroism nor his folly. He was just a nice guy, they say, a recent East Coast transplant trying to make friends and make it up the career ladder at the close-knit restaurant chain.

“For myself, if I dwelled on the loss of a good friend without replacing it with fond memories, it leaves an empty spot and an empty feeling,” Ishibashi said while overseeing the final cleaning and polishing. “When you stay busy at a restaurant where he worked hard, it brings back fond memories.”

“It’s not the money,” he said. “It’s what Adam would want.”

Indeed, if the mall was a focal point of the disaster, Ishibashi and others said, they wanted it to also be a visible sign of the recovery, proving that Angelenos can dust themselves off and get on with it.

Wrapped in their work once again Wednesday, some said they could almost forget the quake and kept expecting to hear Slotnick’s familiar voice. “I’m still feeling that today, waiting for him to come around the corner,” said Lori Rudolph, 27, as she worked the bar. “And it’s just not going to happen.”

After snooping around for an hour Wednesday afternoon, a Fire Department inspector gave the restaurant permission to open, even though a yellow tag remained to tell customers that the mall itself is closed. The inspector warned Ishibashi to keep the looky-loos away from the construction next door, where workers were trying to shore up the damaged Broadway department store. On the other side of Pizzeria Uno is the Bullock’s that all but imploded.

Soon after the doors opened, several customers already were munching on deep-dish pizza or having a midday cocktail. Some were construction workers fixing up the mall, which is expected to reopen in July. For others returning to their favorite lunch haunt, just being able to sit in a familiar Naugahyde booth was a small but welcome consolation in a world of disconsolate changes.

“We’ve lost so much. It’s really comforting that the restaurant is still here,” said Judy Palmer, who works security at the Broadway. “It’s like family. We’re friends with everyone here.”

That closeness, that camaraderie, is the reason the folks at Uno’s have taken Slotnick’s death so hard. He wasn’t just the boss. He was a friend, someone whom Amy Barcellos, 21, and other employees could go to for advice. After work, they often would pal around together.

When Slotnick failed to show up the morning of the quake, some employees rushed to the ill-fated Northridge Meadows complex where he lived in a ground-floor apartment. Barcellos was still there at midnight when firefighters pulled him out of the rubble.

“The fire chief said he died instantly,” Barcellos said, “that he didn’t suffer any pain.”

That pain, Barcellos and others said, was saved for those who worked with Slotnick.

At times, they say, they are overcome by sadness--for themselves, their beleaguered city and their shy friend who worked so hard and worked even harder at making everyone like him.

“We’ve all discussed it. Some days we’re better at it than others,” said hostess Mary LaRouche, 60, who describes herself as the “grandmother” of Uno’s cadre of students and other young people. “Some days, we just hug each other.”

“There’s an unspoken feeling,” said LaRouche, “that even though we’re stronger for going through this together, that Adam isn’t with us anymore. But you have to get back doing something, or you’re scared.”