JJ’s Restaurant — the new JJ’s — opens tomorrow at 5 p.m.

Jimmy Frantze is overwhelmed with details today — everything from a new computer system to a waiter’s station that doesn’t operate as he wants. (“It’s completely inadequate,” I hear him say.) But nothing is going to stop the veteran restaurateur from opening tomorrow. The new JJ’s Restaurant, at 900 West 48th Place, is finally here. 

“Not a grand opening, mind you,” Frantze says. “We’re just opening.” Still, there will be a ceremony: Mayor Sly James cuts a ribbon at 5 p.m., and then it’s first-come, first-served for patrons wanting a table in the 94-seat dining room. Frantze says he won’t begin taking reservations for the new JJ’s — located on the lobby level of the Plaza Vista building — until sometime next week.

“We’re taking things a little slowly,” he tells me. “We’ll need a couple of weeks to sort out all the kinks.”

Frantze wasn’t sure that he wanted to start over after the original JJ’s Restaurant was destroyed in a disastrous explosion in February 2013. (Various lawsuits are continuing, Frantze says, but he won’t comment on them.) The conflagration decimated his 28-year-old bistro, injured several people and killed a popular waitress, Megan Cramer.

Frantze says the explosion — and the eight years of construction and street closings in front of his original restaurant, prior to the blast — was the most difficult period of his life. “There were times that I would think, How am I ever going to get through this? Can I get through it?”

“Time really does heal a lot of wounds,” Frantze says. “I honestly didn’t think I’d get to this point, but we’ve gathered our restaurant family together — 90 percent of my former staff has returned — and we’re ready to start over.”

One of the returning employees is former JJ’s executive chef Aaron Calovich, who will be working with the restaurant’s new executive chef, T.J. Stack.

The new JJ’s doesn’t try to copy the original venue, but it does evoke the distinctive spirit of that restaurant, with its ochre-plastered walls, dark woodwork and a new collection of Michael Savage paintings. Savage’s work has been a fixture at Frantze’s restaurants since the 1980s. There’s a striking 34-foot mural by him over the new bar, featuring images of the original JJ’s as well as of the Napa Valley.

“We are a wine bar,” Frantze says.

Frantze says he lost 9,000 bottles of wine in the explosion, but he had an additional 25,000 bottles in three different storage locations. All of the stored wine is now at the new restaurant.