Stop into Divine Market on Willow Springs Drive on any given evening and you will probably see the same thing: someone grabbing a rotisserie-style pizza slice from the deli case, a contractor picking up a six-pack after a job, a kid deciding between the candy aisle and the ice cream freezer. It has the rhythm of a store that has been there forever. It has not. Divine Market opened in July 2024, and for eight years before that, the building at 20508 Willow Springs Drive sat empty.
What most regulars at the Soulsbyville store may not have connected yet is that the same name now shows up on a beer and wine license application eight miles away, at 736 Mono Way in downtown Sonora. The owner who spent four years getting your neighborhood grocery store back open is now building something new in the space that used to be Pinocchio's. That is not a coincidence. It is a pattern, and understanding it tells you something real about how commercial life actually works in Soulsbyville and Mono Vista.
Eight Years Without A Grocery Store
The old Willow Springs Market closed in 2016. Before that it had been a fixture going back decades, run first by Julius Flores and later by his son Curt Flores, who put it up for sale that year. For the roughly 2,500 people who live in the Willow Springs area, that closure meant no grocery store within easy reach, just the building sitting there as a reminder of what used to be a five-minute errand.
Samir Fadel bought that vacant building in May 2020. He was not new to the area. He had come to Tuolumne County for the skiing and snowboarding and had already opened a handful of restaurants in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties before landing in the Mother Lode. Buying the building was one thing. Reopening it took four more years of planning, permitting, and rebuilding.
What Reopened In 2024 Wasn't The Old Store
When the doors opened in July 2024, Fadel made a point of saying it was not a facelift. The four exterior walls of the roughly 6,000-square-foot building, constructed in 1965, were what stayed. Everything else, plumbing, electrical, equipment, was gutted and replaced. The new Divine Market opened with fresh groceries, a deli, pizza, and a beer and wine selection, and it now runs seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
David Titchenal, president of the Willow Springs Homeowners Association, had been fielding questions about the reopening for years before it happened.
"As president of the Willow Springs HOA, I get asked all the time when he's going to open," Titchenal said. "People were so excited to hear when he bought it more than two years ago."
That is not a small thing in a community where the nearest grocery alternative means a drive into Sonora. A local market reopening after eight years is the kind of local news that actually changes a resident's week, not just a headline.
The Columbia Stop Along The Way
Willow Springs was not Fadel's first project, and it was not his last before Sonora either. In January 2022, while the Soulsbyville building was still mid-renovation, he purchased Claud's Columbia Market in nearby Columbia and reopened it shortly after as Columbia Market & Deli. That one needed a cleanup rather than a gut job, since it had stayed open under the previous owner. It now runs seven days a week with six employees, offering the same convenience-market-plus-made-to-order-food format that would later define Divine Market.
By the time Divine Market opened in Soulsbyville in 2024, Fadel already had two properties running on the same basic model: groceries, sandwiches, pizza, deli staples, all under one roof, aimed at people who need a market close to home rather than a destination grocery trip.
Now It's Downtown Sonora's Turn
In April 2026, Fadel applied for a beer and wine license at 736 Mono Way in Sonora, a storefront that had been home to Pinocchio's, a well-known local Italian restaurant, for years. Pinocchio's had already relocated to a new address at 14619 Mono Way earlier in the year, which is what opened up the downtown space in the first place. Fadel floated a working name for the new concept: Divine Bistro. He told What Now Sacramento he did not yet know what the menu would look like, and that he expected a clearer picture within about a month.
The paperwork moved fast this time. Divine Bistro Inc. was incorporated with the California Secretary of State on March 9, 2026, and the license application was public within weeks. Compare that to the four years Willow Springs Market needed to go from purchase to open doors, and the gap says less about Fadel changing his pace than about what each project actually required. One meant gutting a 1965 building down to its studs. The other means stepping into a space that already had a working kitchen and a built-in following from years as Pinocchio's.
What Three Properties In Six Years Tell You
Line up the dates and the pattern becomes obvious:
- May 2020: Fadel buys the vacant Willow Springs Market building in Soulsbyville.
- January 2022: Fadel buys Claud's Columbia Market and reopens it as Columbia Market & Deli within weeks.
- July 2024: Divine Market opens in Soulsbyville after a full gut renovation.
- March 2026: Divine Bistro Inc. is incorporated for a new concept in the former Pinocchio's space on Mono Way.
Notice what is missing from that list. There is no ground-up construction anywhere in it. Every project is a building that already had a built-in reason to exist: a market with 2,500 nearby residents who had nowhere else to shop, a Columbia storefront with an existing customer base and a fixable business, and a Sonora address that had spent years as a recognized dining destination before Pinocchio's moved on. The Willow Springs project took four years because a full teardown-and-rebuild does. The Sonora project is moving faster because the location does not need reinventing, just a new concept behind an already-known door.
For residents, the takeaway is not abstract. It means the market you already rely on in Soulsbyville is part of something bigger happening around it, and it means the next time you are downtown in Sonora, the storefront that used to say Pinocchio's is worth a glance to see what Divine Bistro has become. Local business news like this rarely announces itself with a ribbon-cutting ahead of time. It shows up first in a license filing, then in a name on a door.
If you are the kind of person who tracks these small shifts the way we do, Willow Springs and the rest of Soulsbyville and Mono Vista are worth watching this year. We will keep noting what opens, what closes, and what it means for daily life out here, because that is the kind of detail that tells you more about a place than any listing photo ever could. If you are curious about the neighborhood itself, or simply want a local read on how these communities are changing, Healy Homes, Inc. keeps close tabs on Soulsbyville, Mono Vista, and the rest of the Sierra Foothills, one storefront at a time.
