PETERBOROUGH — A container of olive oil, a can of Italian tomatoes and a couple of bottles of mineral water in the window of a vacant School Street business offer passersby a clue. A new Italian restaurant will soon be opening up in the restaurant space next to the Community Theater.

Jerry Willis, former owner of the Powder Mill Pond and Red Maples restaurants in Bennington, says his “rustic Italian” establishment, to be called Marzano’s Trattoria, will open for business this fall, some time in the next six to 12 weeks.

“It will depend on how the bureaucracy grinds on,” Willis said Tuesday. “I’m working on getting the food service license, liquor license, state permits. And I’m cleaning up the kitchen.”

The School Street space has housed a number of restaurants over the years, most recently the Old Theater Restaurant, which closed in August after less than a year in business. Willis said the front of the restaurant is in good shape and won’t be changed much. “I may bring in some pictures from our trip to Italy,” he said. But the kitchen could use some updating, including a new stove with plenty of gas burners for sauté work, and a thorough cleaning.

Willis will be the chef as well as the restaurant’s owner. He chose the name Marzano’s in tribute to the popular Italian variety of plum tomatoes.

Willis said the restaurant will offer his interpretation of Italian cooking, which he describes as “getting back to the ‘Mama’ school of cooking.”

“I blame Mario Batali,” he said, referring to the popular television chef and cookbook author. “His concept of simple, rustic food appealed to me. I’ve been working on this idea for five years now.”

The menu is still a work in progress, he said, but in the end, the food will be Italian-American and reasonably priced.

“Nothing will be flown in from overseas,” Willis said.

Willis, who lives in Hancock with his wife, Janet, has been active in the restaurant business for more than 30 years. He took a two-year program at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., in the 1970s. He also took some continuing education programs there in Italian cooking when he owned the Powder Mill Pond restaurant and more recently spent some time at the Italian Culinary Academy in Manhattan.

“I haven’t done Italian before,” he said. “I wanted to know what it was supposed to look like.”

He also learned a lot during a trip to Italy last year with his wife, his sister-in-law and his brother-in-law.

“They’re the true Sicilians in the family,” Willis said.

Willis ran the Powder Mill Pond restaurant, which was located in his grandmother’s family home on Route 202 in Bennington, for about 10 years in the 1980s and early ’90s. After closing that restaurant —”The recession just killed us,” he said — he took over the operation of the Red Maples restaurant in Bennington for several years.

After he sold Red Maples, Willis went to work for the Back Bay Restaurant Group, which operates a number of restaurants in the Boston area and around the country.

“For a while I was one of the chefs at one of their biggest restaurants,” Willis said. “Then the commute got to be too much, and I moved to Nashua to work in one of their restaurants as a sous chef.... But they’d still ship me to where they needed a little trouble shooting.”

He said he was doing quite a bit of supervision and is looking forward to running a smaller operation.

“I want to just cook; that’s what I know,” Willis said.

He said he was planning a trip to Miami to look at mobile kitchens, with the idea of possibly going into the catering business, when he got a call from Bruce Hunter, the owner of the School Street building, about the vacant restaurant space.

“Bruce asked if we’d be interested in the spot,” Willis said. “He’s been very helpful smoothing the way.”

Willis hasn’t hired a staff yet. He expects to employ about a dozen people.

The restaurant has a separate bar area, which Willis said will also be used for meals. He wants to focus on the restaurant side of the business, not the bar atmosphere.

“The TVs will be coming out,” he said.

Seating will continue to be available outside along School Street during the warmer months.

Willis said he’s looking forward to getting the kitchen set up the way he wants it and getting back to cooking.

“We’re coming soon,” he said, “to a theater near you.”

This article appears in the Oct. 20, 2011, issue of the Ledger-Transcript.