Camden/ Tennessee

Cole Slaw

Frank’s Cafe

30 Old Route 1 Road
Camden, Tennessee

1943 – 1986

Frank Bivens could see a good thing coming in 1938 when the Tennessee Valley Authority began building the Kentucky Dam, a mammoth project that would lead, six years later, to the creation of Kentucky Lake, a 160,309-acre reservoir with more than 2,000 miles of cove-studded shoreline. Before long the lake would be luring millions of vacationers and other recreation-minded visitors to the region every year, and Bivens wanted a piece of the action. He decided to build a restaurant on U.S. Route 70, just four miles east of Camden, Tennessee, that tourists in the area heading to and from the lake just couldn’t miss.

Bivens and his wife, Ruth, opened Frank’s Cafe in 1943, and it soon became known for its catfish dinners, served with cole slaw and hush puppies. “The fish served at Frank’s are taken right from the water and popped into the frying pan,” a magazine published by Ford Motor Company noted in 1954.

Ten years later, however, fire claimed the rustic, 250-seat restaurant. Blevins and his wife lived directly across the highway, and Blevins told a reporter for the local newspaper that a passing motorist, spotting flames inside the restaurant, “knocked on my door about 2 a.m. and told me my cafe was on fire.” The firefighters who soon arrived couldn’t save the place. “They did the best they could,” Blevins said,” but it was too far gone when they arrived.”

Even though the loss was only partially covered by insurance, Frank and Ruth Blevins decided to rebuild, and the new restaurant was finished before the year was out. They continued to operate Frank’s Cafe until 1971, when they decided to sell the restaurant and retire. The new owners, Adron M. and Thelma Thompson of Camden, moved the restaurant a bit upscale with fresh flowers in the five dining rooms, candlelight dinners, and organ or piano music on Saturday and Sunday nights, but the catfish dinners were still the big draw, following by barbecue, country ham, and steak dinners. In 1978 the Thompsons opened a 44-room Passport Inn next door. With the opening of Interstate 40, however, business started declining year by year.

When Adron Thompson died unexpectedly in 1986 at age 55, Thelma decided to sell Frank’s Cafe, and the new owners, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Peek, decided to give it a new name: The Manor Restaurant.

Frank Bivens died at age 72 in 1989. Months later an early-morning blaze destroyed the restaurant he had rebuilt in 1964.

May 19, 2023 By
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Marquette/ Michigan

Cheese Nockerln

Roter Adler Restaurant

The Tiroler Hof

Carp River Hill Road
Marquette, Michigan

1966 – 2003

When Sepp and Annemarie Hoedlmoser opened the Tiroler Hof in Marquette, Michigan, in 1966, no one could have blamed them for thinking that they owned a little piece of Heaven on Earth.

Their classic Alps-style chalet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, built directly into a hillside above Lake Superior and surrounded by 12 acres of verdant forest, was designed to offer guests “quietness and privacy.” That it did. There was the cool-running Carp River, filled with trout in the summer and salmon in the fall, snaking around the south side of the property before it emptied into Lake Superior. And there, winding around a rugged landscape of timbered ravines, were miles and miles and miles of moss-covered trails used for hiking, mountain biking, and skiing. And in some places you’d have a postcard-perfect view of the fire-red Marquette Harbor Light Station, one of the nation’s most famous and picturesque lighthouses.

Sepp Hoedlmoser, a onetime member of the Austrian National Ski Team, had originally come to the area with his wife to manage Cliffs Ridge, a downhill ski resort that’s now known as Marquette Mountain. Over time the Hoedlmosers built the Tiroler Hof into a five-building recreational resort that drew guests from all over the world.

In May 2003 the Tiroler Hof property was acquired by a consortium of four local businessmen led by Bob Mahaney, a financial planner, and Dave Ollila, the creator of a high-quality helmet-based camera system and founder of Marquette-based Viosport (now V.I.O., Inc.). They completely renovated the interior spaces of the Tiroler Hof and its Roter Alder (Red Eagle) restaurant, reopening them as the Nordic Bay Lodge and Trailhead Restaurant and Bar. “We are trying to revive their original dream,” Ollila said at the time, referring to the Hoedlmosers.

It wasn’t, however, to be. The new owners closed the Nordic Bay Lodge in the fall of 2007 and announced in June 2008 that the historic property would be demolished to make way for an $18 million, 42-unit luxury condominium development.

“While we are very respectful of that history, the reality of the situation was these buildings are over 50 years old,” Mahaney explained. “They were never designed to last this long.”

Sepp Hoedlmoser died in 2007 at age 82; Annemarie Hoedlmoser died in 2009 at age 87.

April 8, 2023 By
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Seattle/ Washington

Chicken Livers, Danish Style

Selandia

711 Elliott Avenue West
Seattle, Washington

1948 – 1960

Holger B. Nielsen might have been tempting fate on November 5, 1948, when he opened the Selandia restaurant at 711 Elliott Avenue West in Seattle. Some six years earlier Bill Rose, who billed himself as “Seattle’s most famous sea food chef,” had opened Rose’s Sea Food at the same location, in a modern building overlooking Puget Sound, but his timing was certainly off, what with the nation having just entered World War II. Rose soon abandoned the restaurant business to build homes in Seattle, and in 1944 John B. O’Keefe and his wife, Lois, opened O’Keefe’s Marine Grill in the same space, advertising it as “Seattle’s Distinctive Shore Dinner Rendezvous.”

In 1940 Nielsen, a native of Esbjerg, Denmark, had launched his own brand of Scandinavia’s trademark distilled spirit though the Old Monastery Company of Seattle. It evidently wasn’t a match for its imported rivals, however, and “Nielsen’s Aquavit” soon disappeared from the market. In opening Selandia, which he billed as “Seattle’s New, Unique, Smorgasbord,” Nielsen hoped to succeed where Rose and O’Keefe had failed. To draw attention to his new restaurant, he had a billboard-size sign painted on the side of the building fronting Elliott Avenue that depicted the island of Selandia on a map of Denmark, calling it the “ancestral home of the Nordic Vikings.” (Selandia is the Latin name for Sjaelland, Denmark’s most populous island and home to Copenhagen, its capital city.) And to make sure things ran smoothly, he hired John E. Berglund, who’d formerly managed the Bit of Sweden restaurant in Los Angeles, to Selandia’s its day-to-day operations.

From the beginning, Nielsen’s advertisements for the restaurant described it in glowing terms. “In the course of a scant five months the Selandia has earned itself a reputation seldom attained in less than a period of years,” one ad in the Seattle Times said. “The Viking table’s 72 square feet of surface is laden for your pleasure with not less than 55 varieties of savory taste-thrills.” Other ads went so far as to call Selandia “America’s Finest Smorgasbord.”

In 1949 Nat Lund, a restaurant critic for the Seattle Times, offered his readers this tempting portrait of the fare at Selandia: “In Holger B. Nielsen’s immaculate establishment, the smorgasbord buffet offers between 60 and 70 items, ranging from four varieties of cheese through Waldorf salad, poached salmon, Swedish meat balls and brown beans, shrimp, crab, roast beef, apples baked with cinnamon, devilled eggs and stuffed tomatoes to boiled tongue and grilled meat patties bedecked with butter-fried onions. Mr. Nielsen advises at least three plate-filling junkets around his horn of plenty, and each trip yields some fresh discovery.” One such discovery was “skidden eggs,” which Lund described as “a Nielsen invention made up of hard-boiled eggs buried in a creamy mustards sauce.”

In 1952 Nielsen sold Selandia to Gunnar Hansen and Sigurd E. Jensen, two of his employees, and used the proceeds to buy the El Rancho nightclub at 250th and Aurora Avenue. Hansen, who had started out at Selandia as a busboy in 1949, was still in his mid-20s; Jensen, his cousin, had been the restaurant’s bartender. They added a new cocktail lounge, Viking’s Corner, at the front of the building and also established a catering service, but the main attraction at Selandia remained the smorgasbord.

“Choose Whatever You Wish—Eat as Much as You Wish,” a typical ad for Selandia’s “Smorgasbord Supreme” promised in 1956. “60 Different Dishes–$2.60.”

Those unlimited trips around the restaurant’s “horn of plenty” ended in 1960, however, when Selandia closed without notice.

March 24, 2023 By
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Macatawa/ Michigan

French Silk Chocolate Pie

Point West

2330 South Shore Drive
Macatawa, Michigan

1965 – 1994

In 1964 Richard S. Den Uyl, who’d been managing the world-famous Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona, made some big news in Macatawa, Michigan, a little resort community where L. Frank Baum, of Wizard of Oz fame, once had a summer cottage. (Some people believe that Dorothy Hall, a young girl at Macatawa, was the inspiration for Baum’s heroine.) Den Uyl, whose family had owned and operated the 120-room Hotel Macatawa on the westernmost reaches of Lake Macatawa from the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, announced that he planned to build a year-round motor inn and restaurant on the site of the historic hotel, which had been razed in 1956. In its heyday the majestic old “Mac” was typically filled to capacity with vacationers from Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and other big Midwestern cities, but toward the end of its life it was pretty much a firetrap.

The restaurant, Point West, opened on February 24, 1965. It was all stone, brick, glass, and wood, with exposed-beam ceilings, several large fireplaces, and a lakeside terrace on the lowest of its three levels. Just six miles from Holland, Michigan, Point West was by far the fanciest place in the area, with a reputation for high-end food (Den Uyl brought a chef from the Camelback Inn) and a main dining room that gave patrons a panoramic view of Lake Macatawa. The restaurant, with its two dining rooms and 80-seat cocktail lounge, could accommodate some 300 guests at a time. “It was where you got dressed up to go to dinner,” Randy Vande Water, a local historian, recalled in 2006.

In 1981 the Den Uyl family sold the Point West resort to Kelwin Corporation, which kept Dick Den Uyl on as general manager until 1986, when it sold Point West to Valley Properties, Ltd., of Farmington, Michigan.

In 1994 billionaire Jay Van Andel, the co-founder of Amway Corporation, bought the 4.3-acre property for $4.4 million. Van Andel owned a cottage, complete with its own heliport, on one of the tree-covered sand dunes bordering Point West. At first there was some hope that Van Andel would revive the Point West resort, but within months, when the property’s appliances and furniture were sold at auction, it became apparent that Van Andel was interested in making Macatawa much more of a private enclave. Soon the restaurant was torn down, and in time the motor inn, on the south end of the property, was also demolished.

“You know, looking back now, our family wishes that we hadn’t sold Point West,” Den Uyl told an interviewer for an oral history project at Hope College in 1991. “I did try to get it back a few years ago, but we couldn’t get together on the price.”

Den Uyl, who after selling Point West went on to start more than 20 restaurants and hotels, died in 2011 at age 82.

March 19, 2023 By
0
Jackson/ Wyoming

Guacamole Dressing

Open Range Restaurant

75 North Cache Street
Jackson, Wyoming

1950 – 1985

Jack Moore arrived in Jackson, Wyoming, in the middle of the Great Depression. He and his wife, Berta, had previously owned and operated the Oasis Cafe in Victorville, California, but now, in 1934, he was fortunate to have found a job as the chef of Joe Ruby’s Cafe, the most popular eating and drinking establishment in Jackson.

Just two years later the Moores bought the business from Ruby, renaming it Moore’s Cafe, but sometime in the 1940s the couple decided to go their separate ways. Berta ended up with the café; Jack ended up running the Alpine Restaurant in the Wort Hotel, which had opened in 1941. Both soon remarried—Jack to Helen Robinson, in 1944, and Berta to Harry Clissold, Jackson’s mayor, in 1948. (Berta had sold Moore’s Cafe to Mr. and Mrs. Fred Meister in 1946.)

In 1950 Jack Moore announced his plans to build a brand-new restaurant at 75 North Cache Street, on the site of the old Jackson Hotel. He sponsored a contest to arrive at a suitable name for his new place, the story goes, with “Open Range Restaurant” being the winning entry. Jack and Helen Moore decorated their new restaurant with paintings by an old friend, Archie Boyd Teater, who would go on to create some 4,000 paintings in his lifetime, including one that Moore would use on a postcard for his restaurant.

The Open Range Restaurant was a success from the day it opened for business. Thanks to tourists and other visitors who ate there, its reputation soon spread far beyond Jackson. In 1951, for example, C.J. Ingram, a columnist for a newspaper in Jersey City, New Jersey, offered his readers this glowing report on returning home from a trip to Jackson: “A fellow by the name of Moore operates the Open Range Restaurant, where tourists and ranchers line up on the sidewalk waiting to get a table! The place doesn’t seat more than 50 to 60 diners, but the service, the linen, and the silverware are of the sort one associates with the Waldorf, the Barberry Room [in New York City’s Hotel Berkshire], and such places. Best of all, the food was fully in keeping with the expectations the setup suggests, yet the prices were strictly Jackson, not Park Avenue! Tourists should wear rutted paths to the place. It rates it.”

In 1953 the Moores decided to enlarge the Open Range Restaurant by building an eye-catching new entrance and a sizable lobby. Even with the larger waiting area inside, there always seemed to be a long waiting line for dinner. Jack Moore usually presided over the charcoal broiler in the dining room, a perch that allowed him to get to know most of the regulars at the restaurant by name.

Moore was not content to serve chuckwagon-type fare at his restaurant. This was a “cosmopolitan” restaurant, as Ingram had suggested, with unusual dishes on the menu, from appetizers to dessert. There were celebrities, too, including actor Henry Fonda, who in 1962 took such a liking to Margene Jensen, who had served him cocktails at the Open Range during location shoots for the motion picture Spencer’s Mountain, that she became the “mystery woman” on his arm—and, by some accounts, the recipient of his marriage proposal. (“Margene was working for Pappy Moore at the Open Range restaurant, and she struck up a friendship with the actor,” Jensen’s 2021 obituary noted. “She sat with Fonda on the set of “Spencer’s Mountain,” took him trout fishing on Jackson Lake, posed on the Snow King chairlift with him, and one thing led to another. The Hollywood press asked many of the locals who the stunning brunette was, but no one would reveal her name. Margene kept their secrets, and they kept hers.”

In 1963 the Moores sold the Open Range Restaurant to Gene and Ruth Ridenour. Gene Ridenour had most recently been the sous chef at the Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton Nation al Park and before that the sous chef at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix. The Ridenours remodeled and redecorated the restaurant inside and out, enlarging the building by extending it 25 feet in the back. In 1966 the Ridenours opened the dining room at the Sojourner Inn in Teton Village, and they operated two other businesses—Ridenour’s Pastries and Ridenour’s Sandwich and Pastry Shop—in Jackson.

By 1984 Gene Ridenour was looking to sell the Open Range Restaurant. “I’d like to slow down to an eight-hour day and spend some time with my children before they all go off to college,” he explained to a reporter. “When you’re in the food business, you devote a lot of time to it, birthdays and holidays included. I’ve been in the business since 1943 and I’d just like to slow up to a normal eight-hour day.”

One deal fell through, but in late 1984 Polo Fashions, Inc., approached Ridenour with a proposal to buy the Open Range Restaurant so that it could be converted into a Ralph Lauren factory outlet store. The Ridenours accepted the offer, closed the Open Range Restaurant in 1985, and sold all its equipment and furnishings at auction soon after that.

Jack Moore died in Rancho Bernardo, California, in 1996 at age 86; Helen R. Moore died several months later in Valley Center, California, at age 91.

The Open Range Restaurant property later was home to the Legacy Gallery, which closed its doors in 2019 after 28 years in business. A Five & Dime General Store has occupied the site since then.

March 19, 2023 By
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Lansing/ Michigan

Chop Suey

Pagoda Restaurant

1824 East Michigan Avenue
Lansing, Michigan

1934 – 1968

In 1934 Ida M. Gallagher opened a 12-seat restaurant at 1328 East Michigan Avenue in Lansing, Michigan, with the idea of offering Chinese-style dishes to people interested in something slightly more exotic than the standard fare offered by other tea rooms in the city. She named it the Pagoda Restaurant, and its distinctive roof with turned-up corners and ornamental sign above the front entrance brought in plenty of curiosity-seekers. The food, which was better than anything else in the neighborhood, brought them back, as did the alluring variety of baked goods—including Danish pastries, buttermilk nut bread, cinnamon rolls, coffee cakes, lunch rolls, and vanilla sticks (almond cookies)—that were sold from a counter in the restaurant.

Business was so good from the outset that by 1941 Gallagher was able to completely remodel and redecorate her restaurant, complete with new kitchen equipment. Along the way she’d added some classic American dishes to the Pagoda’s menu, and her name—“Mrs. Gallagher”—trumped the restaurant’s in the ads she placed in the Lansing State Journal. She’d also taken on a partner: Frank S. Smith, a furniture dealer in Evart, Michigan,

In 1950 Gallagher bought an old house at 1824 East Michigan Avenue, some six blocks to the blocks, with the idea of expanding it on all four sides, thus incorporating its brick walls into the interior, and turning it into the new home of the Pagoda. She and Smith sank more than $100,000 into renovations, fixtures, furnishings, and equipment. The dining rooms on the main floor could seat more 100 patrons, and the Cedar Room, in the basement, could handle another 100 for banquets and other special occasions. Hanging everywhere, it seemed, were hand-colored stone lithographs of birds by John Gould, a famous English ornithologist and contemporary of John James Audubon, that Smith had recently acquired from the estate of Charles J. Davis, a onetime circus manager, former mayor of Lansing, and prolific amateur taxidermist. (Smith also acquired Davis’s collection of thousands of mounted animals and birds and used it to establish a tourist attraction in Paris, Michigan.)

Eugene J. Wiegers, a talented chef, was in charge of the Pagoda’s kitchen, and in 1956 a reporter for the Lansing State Journal got him to disclose the secret behind his “Chuck Wagon Roast Prime Ribs of Beef,” one of the most restaurant’s most popular menu items. “The primary secret is the size,” Wiegers explained. “It’s difficult to get the flavor and degree of rare doneness needed in a prime rib unless it comes close to 17 to 20 pounds. That’s why the attempt of the young homemaker to fix a roast like a hotel or restaurant serves ends in frustration.”

Then came the recipe, which was presented exactly as follows: “Prepare a prime or choice rib weighing 17 to 22 pounds from which shin and [shoulder] blade bone have been removed and the blade area tied. First rub the roast with a garlic clove and then sprinkle generously with salt. Place the rib ‘bark side up’ in a flat shallow pain. Put in 450-degree oven for 1/2 hour. Reduce heat to 350 degrees and continue roasting for 3 1/2 hours.”

The Pagoda prospered in its new location, and in 1952 Gallagher and Smith took the novel step of adopting a generous profit-sharing plan under which they would get 5 percent of the restaurant’s net profits, with the rest distributed in equal amounts to its 30 or so employees.

In 1959 Smith died at age 67. The following year Gallagher leased the Pagoda to Amel and Ada Dunbar, who had operated the Dunbar Dining Room in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. (Gallagher retained ownership of the restaurant and its real estate, including a parking lot on Regent Street.) But things with the Dunbars, who tried to rename the restaurant, didn’t work out, and by 1962 Ida Gallagher was back in charge at the Pagoda. That same year she introduced a service she called “a la mobile dinners,” where customers could phone in orders and have them delivered at no extra charge, and not long after that she turned the operation of the restaurant over to her son, Charles.

The Pagoda Restaurant closed its doors at the end of 1968, and its contents were sold at auction on January 6, 1969. The building was later occupied by a building salon.

Ida Gallagher died in 1980 at age 86; Charles Gallagher died in 1996 at age 80.

February 20, 2023 By
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New York/ New York

Spaghetti and Clam Sauce Adano

Adano Italian Restaurant

115 West 48th Street
New York, New York

1945 – 1968

Nicholas (Nick) Toce was an experienced hand in the restaurant business by the time he and actor Albert Raymo opened Adano Italian Restaurant in New York City’s theater district in 1945. Through most of the 1930s Toce had owned and operated the Village Brewery, a lively restaurant and nightspot at 186 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village, and in 1938 he’d converted its main dining room into the golf-themed “19th Hole,” with pictures of famous golfers on the walls and an indoor driving range downstairs. in 1942 he’d relocated to Hartford, Connecticut, for a brief stint as the owner of the Colony Restaurant at 506 Farmington Avenue. But in 1945 Toce made his way back to New York City, bought Lorraine’s Restaurant at 115 West 48th Street, and, in partnership with Raymo, turned it into Adano.

Toce and Raymo drew the name for their restaurant from John Hersey’s novel, A Bell for Adano, which had been published in 1944 and made into a Broadway play the same year. It tells the story of an Italian-American officer in Sicily during World War II who wins the respect and admiration of the citizens of the small town of Adano (based on the real town of Licata) by helping them find a replacement for the town bell that Benito Mussolini’s Fascists had melted down for rifle barrels. Hersey’s book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1945 and that year was also made into a major motion picture.

The Broadway production of A Bell for Adano opened at the Cort Theatre on December 6, 1944. Fredric March was cast in the lead role as Major Victor Joppolo, and Raymo in a minor but important role as Pietro Afronti, a belligerent cart-driver. Adano, appropriately, was right across from the Cort (today the James Earl Jones Theatre) at 138 West 48th, and in all likelihood Raymo, who was also a talented artist, painted the mural-like scenes of Italy that decorated the restaurant’s walls. But Raymo seems to have gone his own way soon after A Bell for Adano closed ion Broadway in October 1945.

Toce, who was not yet even a teenager when he came to the United States from Italy in 1900, had served such distinctly American foods as fried chicken in the restaurants he’d previously owned. But with Adano he finally got the chance to go full-bore Italian. Approached in 1937 by the “Inquiring Photographer” of the New York Daily News, he’d made a case for the superiority of his native cuisine. “Italian food is most appetizing because it is cooked in good oils and is generally a blend of the finest ingredients,” he explained. “In other words, a good Italian cook is a good dietician.”

Toce saw to it that the generous assortment of antipasti awaiting guests as they entered Adano’s dining room—including fried zucchini, stuffed artichokes, stuffed mushrooms, and stuffed peppers—was prepared from scratch each morning. Likewise, he insisted that all the pasta served at the restaurant be made on the premises, and there were lots of pasta dishes to be had, including lasagna, manicotti, and spaghetti with either red or white clam sauce.  Other entrées included such Italian mainstays as Chicken Romano and Veal Rollatini. For dessert the best choice was always the house-made rum cake, an Adano specialty.

In 1951 Toce died at age 63 after what the New York Times described as “a long illness.” At that point his widow, Mamie, took over operations at Adano, backed by Claudio Stagnaro, the restaurant’s Genoa-born head chef.

Adano ambled through the years ahead  quite successfully, but as Mamie turned 70 in the mid-1960s she evidently began to think about retiring. In 1967 Craig Claiborne of the New York Times gave Adano a one-star review, writing that the menu was “by and large standard” and that the food was “prepared and seasoned with a somewhat heavy hand.”

Adano closed the following year, with its fixtures and furnishings sold at auction.

Mamie Toce died in New York City in 1982 at age 88.

February 18, 2023 By
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Lafayette/ Indiana

Refrigerator Rolls

Johnson’s Jiffy Food Shop

2321 Wallace Avenue
Lafayette, Indiana

1949 – 1961

On August 11, 1949, Mr. and Mrs. Carl E. Johnson opened a novel “fast food” operation at 2321 Wallace Avenue in Lafayette, Indiana. This was the perfect location. It was directly across from the 3,152-seat Columbian Park Stadium, which since its construction in 1940 had been home to the city’s semipro baseball team, the Red Sox, and right next door to the Original Frozen Custard, which had been in business there since 1932.

Their idea was to offer all kinds of prepared foods that customers could either take home, eat on the premises in a little coffee shop, or have served to their guests at a catered party or other such event. They named their new business Johnson’s Jiffy Food Shop and came up with a menu that included delicatessen-style salads (potato, bean, or ham), chop suey (chicken or veal), and fried chicken cooked to order, as well as a variety of breads, home-made pies, and snack items. They also came up with a slogan: “Your Taste Will Tell You Why.”

The Johnsons, as it happened, were newlyweds, as they’d just gotten married in 1949. The plan was for Carl to keep his job with the Monon Railroad (also known as the Chicago, Indianapolis, and Louisville Railway), which operated almost entirely within the state of Indiana. He’d been a clerk for the railroad since the mid-1920s, and the position had seen him through the Great Depression and World War II. Marguerite Johnson (née Westfall), his new bride, would be the moving force behind the business.

In 1950 Johnson’s Jiffy Food Shop began advertising that it would deliver, at no extra charge, its “piping hot steak or chicken dinners” to any customer who ordered at least three of them. A couple of years later Marguerite added shrimp baskets and shrimp dinners to the menu , as well as “Spaghetti, Italian Style.” By then the coffee shop had been upgraded to a “dining room,” and the “food shop” to a “delicatessen.”

Marguerite continued to build up the catering side of the business, advertising it as “Lafayette’s Only Complete Catering Service,” and in 1956 she developed a line of fresh “Johnson’s Jiffy Salads” for sale in local grocery stores.

In 1957 the Johnsons decided to sell their business to Robert J. Lannon, who’d previously owned and operated Stauffer’s Drive-In—which he eventually renamed R-J Drive-In—at 249 Main Street Levee (today 249 East State Street) in West Lafayette. Three years later Lannon built the Midtown Plaza shopping center on the site and relocated Johnson’s Jiffy Foods, as it now was known, there. (Lones Music Studio took over the space on Wallace Avenue.)

In 1961 Lannon sold Johnson’s Jiffy Foods in anticipation of being appointed by the Lafayette Board of Health to the $3,600-a-year position of city sanitary officer (he assumed the post in January 1962). The new owners of the business, Everett and Frances Goris, converted it into a catering-only operation and three years later sold it to Gerald A. (Jerry) Lemm, who merged it into his own catering firm, Jerry’s and Addie’s Catering.

Carl Johnson retired from his job with the Monon Railroad in 1966. He died in 1977 at age 76. Marguerite, who remarried some years later, died in 2017 in Bloomington, Indiana, at age 100.

February 17, 2023 By
0
/

Soft-Shell Crabs with Amandine Sauce

Bush’s Steak House

100 Riverpark Drive
East St. Louis, Illinois

1946 – 1961

In 1946 Jerry Bush and two partners, Sam Magin and Jack Langer, opened Bush’s Steak House at 100 West Broadway Avenue in East St. Louis, Illinois. The three men were well-known in the area, Bush having been the manager of the clubhouse at Fairmount Race Track in nearby Collinsville and Magin and Langer the operators of the old Mounds Club, a notorious nightclub and casino that was a haven for gamblers and other high rollers in the area. The three men had taken over The Barn, a tavern whose owners had seen their liquor license suspended for serving drinks to two teenage girls, and spent more than $100,000 to turn it into a first-class restaurant with what they would tout as a stainless-steel “Kitchen of Tomorrow.”

In the years immediately after World War II, East St. Louis was home to more than 300 drinking establishments, from hole-in-the-wall joints to proper restaurants, with many of them on Illinois Highway 40 from just over the Eads Bridge—the huge arch bridge over the Mississippi River that connected St. Louis, Missouri, with East St. Louis—all the way to the Fairmount Race Track and beyond. But Bush’s Steak House, even with its three bars, stood out from the moment it opened on November 15, 1941. “This is one place where entertainment takes a back seat to the gustatory pleasures,” a columnist for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat observed a couple of weeks later. “And although the newness of the decorations doesn’t reach the ornate, the place in its surroundings stands out like a diamond in a pile of coal dust.”

In 1947 Bush’s Steak House was advertising lunch from 75 cents to $1.25 and dinner from $1.75 to $2.50, with steaks, chops, lobster, and other seafood heading the menu—all served in “the most sanitary restaurant in the Middle West.” The fact that it was just three minutes from downtown St. Louis over the Eads Bridge was a big boost, not to mention the craps tables and various other accoutrements of a casino tucked away inside. Yet another plus was the presence in the kitchen of German-born chef Joseph Ott, who’d made quite a name for himself from working in hotels and restaurants all over the world. (Ott had once even been the chief steward on John D. Rockefeller’s yacht.)

Within just a few years, however, Bush and his partners apparently were ready to let go of the restaurant. In 1950 they sold Bush’s Steak House to John T. (Jack) English, Sr., the former police commissioner of East St. Louis; his two sons, Edward and Jack Jr.; and Martin Miller, a family friend. They built it into an even more popular late-night hangout for politicians, musicians and other entertainers, and high rollers from the city’s illegal casinos.  “Our bar was open until 6 a.m., so it wasn’t unusual for show-business people to come to Bush’s to have a late dinner and just wind down,” Ed English would recall years later. “One night, the Ritz Brothers came by. At that time they were starring at the Chase Club, in the Hotel Chase. ‘They started clowning. Jimmy Ritz began working behind the bar with my brother, Jack. Harry put a towel over his arm and started waiting tables. Al took the stage as the emcee.”

When John T. English, Sr., died in April 1957, his two sons decided to sell Bush’s Steak House and pursue separate careers.

Sold their interest to Miller for $60,000 but later charged him with reneging on the deal.

 Jack bought the former Sinn’s Inn at 8629 West Main Street in nearby Belleville, Illinois, and renamed it Jack English’s Bar (in 1964 he moved it to 9735 West Main Street). Ed went into the insurance and real estate and becoming the moving force behind Dorchester Village, a sprawling subdivision of single-family homes and apartment buildings in Belleville.

In 1959 the new owners of Bush’s Steak House, John K. De Bernardi and Glenn Kennison, completely remodeled and refurbished the restaurant. That year, in keeping with the rough-and-tumble reputation of East St. Louis, one man was killed and another seriously wounded in an early-morning shooting at the restaurant. The following year Bush’s Steak House morphed into a full-fledged nightclub, with Kennison, who’d previously managed the Playdium Lounge in East St. Louis, booking the acts.

In June 1951, Bush’s Steak House closed without notice. On September 10, a fire swept through the 50-by-200-foot building that had been a landmark dining destination in East St. Louis, causing some $50,000 in damage. De Bernardi told officials of the fire department that the structure was not insured.

West Broadway Avenue was renamed Riverpark Drive in the 1990s.

February 17, 2023 By
0
Oakland/ California

Veal Piccata

Diamond Jim’s

245 West MacArthur Boulevard
Oakland, California

1965 – 1971

The city of Oakland, California, was ready to be wowed in a big way when the MacArthur-Broadway Center opened its doors on September 9, 1965. In advance of the opening, full-page newspaper ads breathlessly hyped the “space-age” indoor mall as “a whole century ahead of its time…the most fantastic one-stop shopping and dining extravaganza in the entire universe!”­ It did, in fact, seem like something right out of The Jetsons, the prime-time cartoon sitcom that had debuted on the ABC television network three years earlier. A “Space Ramp” would take customers from the mall to a landing area where “Space Cadets” would help them with their bags and bundles onto an “Astro-Bus” that would take them to the 1,100-car “Space Port” rooftop parking lot on the roof.

The mall’s promoters also promised “a star-studded galaxy” of shops, services, and places to eat, including more than a dozen specialty cafes and such in “The Hamlet,” an early iteration of the food court. But the star dining attraction, opening on the same day as the shopping center, was Diamond Jim’s, the newest of 32 restaurants owned by Associated Hosts, Inc., the Beverly Hills-based restaurant chain that Joseph Bulasky had developed from Coffee Dan’s, his first Los Angeles venture in 1945.

Bulasky’s company reportedly spent $350,000 on the opulent interior of Diamond Jim’s, in keeping with the style of its namesake, Diamond Jim Brady (1856-1917), a millionaire businessman and financier known as much for his appetite as his wealth. Among his many other reported excesses, one story goes, Brady liked to mash a pound of caviar into his baked potatoes. George Rector, the proprietor of one of Brady’s favorite restaurants in New York City and later a famous food columnist and author, once called Brady “the best 25 customers I ever had.”

The Diamond Jim’s at 245 West MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland had all the Victorian trappings of the Gilded Age in which Brady lived: antique brass coach lamps, dark mahogany paneling, deep-red velour wallpaper, crystal chandeliers, leather banquettes, and, on the walls, ornately framed oil paintings of nude women. The restaurant’s cocktail lounge featured a piano bar and nightly entertainment.

Diamond Jim’s was chiefly a steak house, though, in addition to the charcoal-broiled steaks, dishes such as Veal Piccata and Spaghetti Caruso made regular appearances as featured entrées. An unusual touch came toward the end of each meal, when a basket of fresh fruit would be brought to the table along with a wedge of cheese and an assortment of crackers.

For whatever reason, the Diamond Jim’s in Oakland never really caught on. In 1971 Associated Hosts redecorated and rebranded it as the Ponderosa House of Prime Rib, with a menu limited to a full-bone cut of prime rib and four other entrées. But the Ponderosa concept, which had proved successful in the Los Angeles area, didn’t work out so well, either, and Associated Brands soon changed the restaurant back to Diamond Jim’s. In 1972, for what seemed like the blink of an eye, it became the Marquis. Then Maury Bleuel, the owner of the MacArthur-Broadway Center, formed a partnership with restaurateur Jerry Mancus, the owner of Mancuso’s restaurant in Pleasant Hill, to open a second Mancuso’s where Diamond Jim’s had been. But in keeping with the seeming curse on the location, Mancuso’s was put up for sale in 1972 and the following year became The Fox.

In later years the MacArthur-Broadway Center would become a rundown and somewhat scary shadow of its former self, and in 1997 Kaiser Permanente bought the nearly vacant mall with an eye toward converting into an outpatient and walk-in medical center. It demolished the shopping mall in 2009 to make way for a new hospital.

February 12, 2023 By
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