Wilmington/ Delaware

Pumpkin Chiffon Pie

Hearn’s Restaurant

2008 North Market Street
Wilmington, Delaware

1931 – 1991

In 1931 Robert N. Hearn borrowed $100 from his cousin Stanley, the proprietor of a successful grocery in Wilmington, Delaware, to open a small restaurant in the city with his wife, Edith. This took no small measure of courage, as the nation was in the grip of the Great Depression, and Wilmington, as the industrial hub of the state, was experiencing significant unemployment and economic hardship. A businessman in the city had gone so far as to advise Hearn that his new restaurant would be shuttered within a month.

Undeterred, Hearn forged ahead, and on April 13, 1931, he and Edith opened Hearn’s Restaurant at 2008 Market Street. Under the motto “Good Things to Eat”—twice emblazoned on the sign above its awninged storefront—the restaurant offered home-style meals at modest prices, such as a full-course turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day, including soup and dessert, for just 65 cents. The 31-seat establishment was soon packing them in.

By 1934 Hearn’s Restaurant was doing so well that it took over the building next door and added an entirely new dining room, boosting its seating capacity to 110. That year the Thanksgiving Day special—a full-course dinner featuring “Roast Delaware Turkey with All the Trimmings”—was still just 65 cents.

It was still that way even through the food shortages the nation experienced during World War II and in the years immediately afterward. “You will be amazed when you dine at Hearn’s that such delicious food can be served at such low prices,” the restaurant promised in a 1948 newspaper ad. Its fastidiousness was another selling point. “When you dine at Hearn’s you are assured of cleanliness in every detail,” another of the restaurant’s newspaper ads pledged. “No soap smudges on the silverware, no lipstick marks on glasses, a kitchen that is spotless and waitresses that wear neat, clean, attractive uniforms, waitresses that serve you in a 100% correct manner.”

By 1956, the restaurant’s 25th year in business, Hearn’s had expanded to two large dining rooms (including the Stanley Room, named in honor of Robert’s late brother and early backer) as well as extensive facilities for banquets, wedding receptions, club meetings, and other such functions. The Hearns, who lived in quarters above the restaurant, had also brought their children, Robert C. Hearn and Irene Hambright, into the business.

The 1970s saw Hearn’s Restaurant introducing such popular menu items as jumbo fried oysters, and all meals were still served its renowned cinnamon buns and rolls. In 1977 the Philadelphia Inquirer succinctly summed up the restaurant’s appeal with this teaser: “It’s charming, it’s cheap, it’s good.”

Robert Hearn died in 1979 at age 84. His obituary in the Wilmington News Journal noted that before entering the restaurant business in 1931 Hearn had worked as a printer, bricklayer, carpenter, and stationary engineer. He’d been a merchant seaman during World War I. And even that wasn’t all: He’d also been a drummer with Leo Forbstein’s Warner Brothers Theater orchestra in Hollywood.

Edith Hearn died at age 79 two years later, just three weeks before the restaurant’s 50th anniversary. Five years later, in 1986, Bob Hearn assumed full control of the family restaurant after buying out his sister and brother-in-law.

By 1992, however, he was feeling the squeeze. Brandywine Village, the once-thriving residential/industrial neighborhood that Hearn’s Restaurant had called home for more than a half-century, was experiencing economic, social, and physical decline, and Hearn was struggling just to break even.

Bob Hearn closed Hearn’s Restaurant on September 22, 1991, explaining to a reporter that he was nervous about getting too far in debt to his suppliers. The restaurant filed for bankruptcy three months later after Hearn failed to find someone willing to buy it. An auction was held on February 19, 1993, to liquidate the restaurant’s assets.

As for Hearn, he soon found a job with a fast-food operation but told a reporter he’d rather not name it. “They have a benefit package I’d never even heard of,” he said. “And let’s face it, that’s the future, fast food.”

Bob Hearn died in 2010 at age 80.

December 23, 2024 By
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Somerset/ Kentucky

Kentucky Cream Pie

Hotel Beecher

203 South Main Street
Somerset, Kentucky

1930 – 1972

The Hotel Beecher opened its doors in Somerset, Kentucky, on July 14, 1930, amid a wave of local anticipation and civic pride. Built at the substantial cost of $250,000—an enormous sum at the time—the five-story hotel was seen as the embodiment of symbol of Somerset’s aspirations to become a hub of tourism and commerce in southeastern Kentucky. Named for Beecher Smith, a prominent local entrepreneur who had spearheaded the project, the hotel was erected on land he’d acquired from a local church that had started building on the site but, with the onset of the Great Depression, run out of money.

The Hotel Beecher welcomed its first guests with considerable fanfare, with Woodson Moss, a seasoned hotelier with experience in Nashville and Winchester, Tennessee, taking the reins as its first manager. Just days after it opened, the hotel hosted the Kentucky Press Association for a three-day convention, and one newspaper in the state declared the Beecher to be “the finest hotel between Lexington and Chattanooga,” marveling at its grandeur and architectural sophistication. The Colonial Revival-style building, which was designed by the architectural firm of Frankel and Curtis in Lexington (best known for its work on motion picture theaters), featured a limestone façade, Palladian windows, and elegant Tuscan-columned portico.

The Beecher thrived during its early years, leveraging its proximity to Lake Cumberland—“Kentucky’s Newest Resort and Fishing Paradise,” as postcards for the hotel described it—and the burgeoning tourism industry around nearby Cumberland Falls. Its Crystal Ballroom, adorned with glittering chandeliers, became Somerset’s social epicenter, hosting such functions as banquets, weddings, dances, and civic events. The Beecher’s ground-floor dining room and coffee shop offered travelers and locals alike a taste of refinement.

In future years the Beecher would weather several shifts in ownership and management, with each bringing new ambitions for its future. In 1941 Harry H. Humbert, a hotel operator from Indiana, took over the management of the Beecher under a 10-year lease, promising to remodel and redecorate it. But just a year later the 80-room hotel was sold to Victor G. Williams, and C.W. Lampkin, the operator of three hotels in Bowling Green, Kentucky, took over its management. Around that time Edwin Roberts took over the day-to-day operation of the hotel, and over the next 30 years he would become the face of the Hotel Beecher.

By the mid-1960s, however, the Hotel Beecher had begun to lose some of its luster, as interstate highways and modern motels drew travelers away from downtown Somerset. In 1967 the hotel was put up for sale, and over the next few years its fortunes—and condition—would continue to decline.

In 1972, when he was interviewed by a reporter for the Lake Cumberland Bugle, Roberts readily admitted that the Beecher was a relic of a bygone era. “We’re living in the past—no doubt about it,” he told the newspaper. The old hotels are closing every day all over the country. Even here in Kentucky, in Bowling Green, Louisville, Paducah, and Lexington, most of the downtown hotels are gone or almost gone.”

Then, reflecting on the Beecher’s early days, Roberts added: “This hotel was the civic and cultural center of this region of the state. There was no bypass then and no lake and all the traffic on [U.S. Route] 27 went past those doors over there. Why, our grand ballroom, the largest between Lexington and Chattanooga, has had as many as 412 people served in it.”

A few months later in 1972, the Beecher’s furniture, furnishings, and fixtures were sold at auction, signaling the end of its tenure as a traditional hotel.

In 1974 a new owner rebranded the Beecher as the Carriage Inn, and Edwin Roberts died the following year at age 64. In the late 1970s, with financing from the Kentucky Housing Corporation, the building was converted into subsidized rental apartments for the elderly and disabled. A $4.5 million overhaul completed in 2020 restored the façade of the building, now known as the Beecher House, to its original grandeur and recreated, on a smaller scale, its magnificent Crystal Ballroom. In an interview with a reporter for the local newspaper, the architect whose design firm spearheaded the renovation project acknowledged the sorry condition of the once-grand hotel. “Honestly,” he said, “I don’t think the building would have stood another year.”

December 22, 2024 By
0
New York/ New York

Calf’s Brains au Plat au Beurre Noir
(Calf’s Brains with Black Butter Sauce)

Chez Cardinal

14 East 52nd Street
New York, New York

1950 – 1955

John “Nino” Cardinali was well-schooled in the restaurant trade by the time he opened his eponymous Chez Cardinal on East 52nd Street in 1950 with a partner, Joseph Zazzi. Both were veterans of The Colony, long the vaunted headquarters of café society in New York City, and both adhered to the philosophy that a restaurant’s chief mission is to please its patrons.

Though he’d never actually worked in a restaurant before coming to the United States in the early 1920s, Cardinali, born in Rome, had attended restaurant schools in Italy, France, and England. He did so well in his chosen profession that by 1947 he was able to take over the ownership of Chez Jean, at 11 East 60th Street, renaming it Nino’s Chez Jean. (It became Le Monseigneur when Cardinali and Zazzi opened Chez Cardinal.)

By 1954 Cardinali was ready for yet another move, this time to the historic hamlet of Bedford Village in Westchester County, where, on Route 121, he opened Nino’s, with his Milan-born brother-in-law, Giuseppe “Peppy” Tirloni, as chef. Zazzi proceeded to bring on two new partners: Angelo Ferrero, the veteran head captain of the Barberry Room at the Hotel Berkshire, and Remo “Ray” Corti, formerly of Al Schact’s, the popular Manhattan steakhouse. Toward the end of 1955, however the three partners sold Chez Cardinal to Abraham “Peppy” De Albrew, a onetime professional dancer known as “The Argentine Sheik,” who promptly rechristened the restaurant Chapeau Rouge, the name of a supper club he’d opened in late 1933 and closed a little more than a year later.

Cardinali died in 1994 in North Palm Beach, Florida, at age 90. “It’s a mistake to think that superb cooking must necessarily be expensive,” he once told a reporter. “It may take more time to prepare a really fine dish, but it can be done reasonably. The best cooks are usually the thriftiest.”

December 18, 2024 By
0
South Pasadena/ Florida

Veal Cutlet Parmigiana

Azure Restaurant

1500 Pasadena Avenue South
South Pasadena, Florida

1956 – 1960

Michael S. Badolato and Theodore R. Schluter surely were hoping that three would be the charm when, in 1955, they paid $57,000 to acquire Max Lanier’s Diamond Club in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Five years earlier Max Lanier, a standout pitcher whose excellent control and deceptive curveball had helped propel the St. Louis Cardinals to two World Series championships, had joined forces with John Broccoli, the owner of Johnny’s Tavern, to buy the Rhapsody Restaurant at 1700 Pasadena Avenue South and convert it a high-end venue with a baseball star’s name on the marquee. And it wasn’t just any star: Lanier called St. Petersburg his home, as the Cardinals held their spring training there every year.

But by 1954 Lanier’s star was fading fast, with Whitney Lewis, a sports columnist for the Associated Press, describing him in a piece filed from St. Petersburg as “at one time quite a fellow in [the Cardinal] locker room but now a fading veteran of 38, fighting for one last chance in the big show.” In his column, filed from St. Petersburg, Lewis went on to observe that Lanier “has a restaurant here, but baseball is his love and he wants that one last chance to finish his career in the upper class.”

What’s more, Johnny Broccoli had died in 1952 at age 48, leaving Lanier without an experienced business partner. (Broccoli’s brother, Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, who was living in Los Angeles, would go on to achieve fame as a motion picture producer and co-creator of the blockbuster James Bond film franchise.)

Lanier never made it back onto the Cardinals roster, and in late 1954 he and Broccoli’s widow put the Diamond Club up for sale. After a deal signed in December of that year fell through, they found an eager buyer in Badolato, who’d just moved his family to St. Petersburg from Rye, New York, where his family had owned several restaurant properties.

Badolato and Schluter spent more than $30,000 to turn the Diamond Club into the Azure Restaurant, commissioning architect Martin Fishback to oversee the transformation. Fishback introduced a number of modern design elements, including eye-catching entrances to both the restaurant and its cocktail lounge that featured vaulted canopies of translucent yellow plastic supported by steel posts and girder-like horizontal beams. Fishback also altered the entire interior floor plan, devising plastic-covered partitions that could be opened to create one big dining area that could seat 200 guests or closed to create two or three smaller rooms. Then there was the Azure’s cocktail lounge, whose centerpiece was a mesmerizing “waterfall bar” that got its own neon sign, just below the restaurant’s, that could be seen up and down Pasadena Avenue South.

The Azure Restaurant officially opened its doors on January 17, 1956. Despite its glamorous aura, the restaurant offered modestly priced meals, with lunches starting at just $1.00 and dinners starting at $2.50. Armand Kauffmann, a French-born culinary maestro and former executive chef of New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, helmed the kitchen.

St. Petersburg had never seen anything like the Azure Restaurant, and often its 150-car parking lot would be full or nearly full. Soon, too, the cocktail lounge, with its unusual waterfall bar, would become a big draw on its own.

But by 1960 Badolato and Schluter were apparently ready to sell, just as Lanier had been five years earlier. They found a buyer in Jefferson F. Buttress, a former automobile dealer, who paid $90,000 for the property and rebranded it as the Circle J Steak House. Soon after that Badolato opened the Azure Package Liquor Store next to the restaurant, at 1401 Pasadena Avenue South. (In 1957 the address of the Azure Restaurant had been changed to 1500 Pasadena Avenue South when St. Petersburg shifted the street-numbering scheme near the Corey Causeway.)

Badolato died in 1996 at age 83.

As it turned out, the Circle J Steak House did no better than its predecessors. It closed in 1965 and was briefly replaced by the Red Garter restaurant and then, for a much longer stretch, by an outpost of the Florida-based New England Oyster House chain. In 1980 the building was reconstructed as a replica of a covered bridge in Pennsylvania and became the Covered Bridge Restaurant, but its owners closed the restaurant in 1986 to switch to the citrus business, first as Florida Orange Groves and then as Florida Orange Groves Winery, which occupies the site today.

December 12, 2024 By
0
Brielle/ New Jersey

Crab Meat Soufflé

The Bite Shop

425 Higgins Avenue
Brielle, New Jersey

1928 – 1963

Forman C. Bissett had spent most of his life in the hotel business when, on July 4, 1928, he opened a little sandwich shop on State Highway 35 in Brielle, New Jersey, a small, picturesque borough along the Manasquan River in southern Monmouth County, near the Atlantic Ocean. Bissett aimed for his modest roadside restaurant, which he named The Bite Shop, to cater to travelers driving between Manasquan and Point Pleasant and from points beyond. The Bite Shop did so well from the start that in 1932 Bissell spent $12,000 to build a new, 75-seat home for the restaurant on the other side of the highway, at 425 Higgins Avenue, and expanded its menu to include seafood and platter dinners.

Although Forman’s untimely death in 1933 at age 63 could have spelled the end of The Bite Shop, his widow, Caroline (Carrie), and one of his daughters, Eva C. Bissett, immediately took over the operation, which by now had 15 employees in season (from April to November). Under Eva’s leadership, a columnist for the local newspaper noted in 1934, the Bite Shop had “attained its highest recognition” by such serving such dishes as broiled lobsters “fresh from the water [and] so skillfully prepared, seasoned, and served that the most fastidious appetite finds them a delicacy long to be remembered.” The columnist went on to note that the restaurant’s broiled chicken, served on a sizzling platter, was “another of the dishes for which The Bite Shop is justly famous.” Meanwhile, Carrie had been turning out a tantalizing variety of pies, cakes, and other baked goods.

By 1943 the widespread foot shortages brought on by World War II—including meats, sugar, butter and cooking fats, canned goods, and coffee—forced the Bissetts to temporarily close the restaurant. “Regret to Announce Because of Present Conditions Will CLOSE at Once,” the Bite Shop declared in a large newspaper ad. Yet, by 1947, the restaurant had bounced back, celebrating its 19th anniversary with fanfare. A local newspaper observed that it had “come a long way from its humble beginning as a sandwich shop” to become “famous now for broiled lobsters, steaks, and fine home-baked pastries.”

Guests delighted in the antics of Eva’s talkative parrot, which became a quirky symbol of the restaurant. While Carrie was still overseeing the pastry department, Eva had taken over the ownership and management of the Bite Shop, appending her name to the restaurant’s newspaper ads, printing a poem on the back of its menu, hanging paintings by local artists on its walls, and crafting such homespun slogans as “Good Food Is Good Health” and “What a Lovely Place to Eat.” She even sought to lure diners to the Bite Shop by sending out Western Union telegrams with a suggested special—“Fresh Vegetable Soup, Broiled Juicy Steak with French Fried Onion Rings, Potato Balls with Parsley, Lettuce with Russian Dressing, Coffee,” one of them read—for just $1.

But in 1963, with Carrie and Eva facing the inevitable challenges of growing older, a classified ad in the Asbury Park Press signaled the end of the Bite Shop: “Completely equipped restaurant, air-conditioned. Finest equipment. Seats 92. Owner’s apt. $35,000 including property. Good financing.” With its sale, the restaurant was remodeled into a real-estate office.

Carrie died in 1967 at age 93; Eva died in 1988 at age 91.

In later years the restaurant that once lured diners with lobster, chicken, and steak dinners—and, of course, sandwiches—later became the office of a certified public accountant and, most recently, a spiritual adviser offering such services as psychic readings, Reiki healing sessions, and “aura cleansing.”

December 9, 2024 By
0
Lincoln/ Nebraska

Pollo alla Cacciatora (Chicken Cacciatore)

Italian Village

5730 O Street
Lincoln, Nebraska

1936 – 1960

Anthony J. “Tony” Domino was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, but moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1935, where, despite the fact that the nation was in the midst of the Great Depression, he immediately set about planning a restaurant he would call the Italian Village.

Domino’s modest establishment opened the following year at 5730 O Street. It had just 46 seats and a jukebox, but word quickly spread around Lincoln that its kitchen was turning out some of the best Italian-American food available anywhere in the city.

The Italian Village was soon packed just about every night. In 1941, however, Domino ran into trouble when police raided his restaurant and several other establishments that they suspected of violating local liquor laws. Although Nebraska had repealed Prohibition at the federal level when it ratified the 21st Amendment in 1933, the city of Lincoln still outlawed liquor by the drink. One Sunday morning police officers swooped into the Italian Village and seized some alcoholic beverages as well as well as assorted soft-drink bottles that had allegedly been used to provide the restaurant’s patrons with setups. Arrested and charged with operating a “disorderly house,” Domino pleaded guilty, paid a fine of $15 plus court costs, and went back to business at to his restaurant.

Over the next decade, except for a brief period during World War II when he was in the U.S. army, Domino repeatedly expanded and improved the Italian Village, to the point where, by 1948, the restaurant could accommodate 360 diners. The jukebox was gone, replaced by a state-of-the-art sound system. There was dancing until 1:00 a.m. and nightly performances by Don Tichy on what was said to be $5,000 Hammond organ—simultaneously broadcast live on Lincoln’s KOLN radio station—as well as Jack Wells taking requests from patrons at the restaurant’s new piano bar.

In 1944, after the Lincoln police paid another visit to the Italian Village, the assistant city attorney charged Domino with “maintaining and operating a public dance without having a license to do so; permitting dancing on Sunday on premises leased and controlled by him; and permitting persons to collect and engage in the unlawful drinking of intoxicating liquors in a building leased by him and under his control.” A municipal judge found Domino guilty on all three counts and fined him $45 and costs.

On May 27, 1951, tragedy struck when a devastating fire all but destroyed the Italian Village and claimed the life of Joseph Delphia, the restaurant’s live-in custodian, who was sleeping in the boiler room and succumbed to smoke inhalation. Only the building’s brick walls were left standing.

Domino plowed some $150,000 into rebuilding the Italian Village. The new restaurant, completed in late 1951, could accommodate a total of 500 patrons in its main dining area as well as five private rooms reserved for banquets, receptions, club meetings, and the like. The floor shows were bigger and better, too, featuring such famous entertainers as Peg Leg Bates, a tap dancer with a prosthetic leg who dazzled audiences with his speed, precision, and creativity, and Lowe, Hite, and Stanley, a vaudeville comedy trio that used their radically different physical statures (Hite was promoted as “the tallest man in the world”) to deliver Three-Stooges-style slapstick humor.

In the back of the Italian Village was the “locker room,” where customers could store their alcohol, as it was still a no-on in Lincoln for restaurants to serve liquor by the drink. With a relaxation of the local liquor laws, though, the Italian Village could provide the setups—ice, glasses, and mixers—and leave the rest to its customers.

By this time Tony Domino himself had become a local legend, and his last name, flanked by two dominoes (7 and 11), glowed in neon on the sign above the restaurant’s entrance. He liked to keep his pink Cadillac—also emblazoned with dominoes—parked right in front the restaurant, and inside he worked the dinnertime crowds nonstop, radiating a kind of supper-club glamour and hospitality. On occasion he even went up on the stage to play the drums when certain acts were performing.

Then there was the attention-getting “Cupid in Cigno” (Cupid on Swan) statue that stood in front of the Italian Village. It had been sculpted by Sirio Tonelli, an Italian-born artist whose oil painting of Christ had been featured on the front page of the Omaha World-Herald on Christmas Day, 1953. (The story that Domino won the statue in a craps game in Florence, Italy, was almost certainly apocryphal.)

In 1960, after 24 years at the helm, Domino decided to sell the Italian Village—statue and all—to the Legionnaire Club of Lincoln for an amounted reported to be $185,000. After a remodeling it became home to Lincoln’s 5,600-member American Legion Post 3 (the third largest such post in the nation at the time) and a meeting place for various other veterans organizations.

Tony Domino died in 1966 at age 60. In the years ahead the place that once was the Italian Village would undergo several more transformations, first as a Farabee’s Restaurant, then as the home of Carpenter Motors, and most recently, in a newly constructed building, as a used-car dealership.

December 7, 2024 By
0
Collinsville/ Illinois

Turkey Hash, New Orleans Style

Katsinas Evergreen Cafe

1701 Saint Louis Road
Collinsville, Illinois

1947 – 1949

John H. Katsinas was just 16 or 17 years old when, in 1906, he left his family in Platonos, Greece, to forge a new life in America. On arriving in the United States, he found his way to St. Louis, which had gained no small measure of fame from mounting the largest world’s fair in history—the Louisiana Purchase Exposition—just two years earlier. There Katsinas landed a job in a small cafe, and over the next decade he demonstrated a natural aptitude for the work that would become his life’s calling.

Then came World War I. Katsinas, like many other Greek-Americans, suddenly found himself serving his adopted country overseas, as a sergeant in the U.S. army. Fortunately, he was able to return home from the war after the Armistice of 1918 ended all fighting between the Allies and Germany on the Western Front.

In 1919 Katsinas met Peter J. Sutter (born Sotirpoulou), another Greek immigrant, in St. Louis. The two men soon went into business together, opening a small restaurant in Decatur, Illinois, that—in a nod to World War I—they called the Victory Cafe. Soon after that Katsinas married Euthimia Polydorepoulou, whose name had been Americanized to Ethel Politer on her arrival in the United States, and before long the newlyweds were joined a daughter (the first of their four children). Around the same time Katsinas and Sutter decided to close the Victory Cafe in Decatur and reopen it in Mattoon, Illinois, where the establishment quickly became a local favorite. Their restaurant did so well, in fact, that Katsinas and Sutter, billing themselves as “Exponents of Good Living,” opened two more restaurants—the Castle Inn Rotisserie and Beef Steak Mike—in Mattoon.

In 1929, eager to strike out on his own, Katsinas ended his 10-year partnership with Sutter and moved to Champaign, Illinois, where in the years to come he would open three restaurants: The Tavern, the Katsinas Cafe, and the Katsinas Buffet. All became hugely popular dining spots, especially with the throngs of locals and visitors attending “Fighting Illini” football games on the University of Illinois campus.

In 1941 Katsinas expanded yet further, opening a Katsinas Cafe in Springfield, Illinois, that quickly became a favorite of the political elite in the state capital. Five years later, however, a devastating fire destroyed the restaurant. Katsinas vowed to rebuild, but shortages of building materials in the immediate aftermath of World War II, coupled with his own recurring health problems, prevented him from following through. Undeterred, Katsinas set his sights on Collinsville, Illinois, just east of St. Louis.

Collinsville, the self-proclaimed “Horseradish Capital of the World,” was also home to the hugely popular Fairmount Park racetrack, and Katsinas knew that in the restaurant business big crowds nearly always meant big business. And so in 1947 he signed a renewable lease on a sprawling but now-closed nightclub in Collinsville known as Evergreen Gardens. Located at 1701 St. Louis Road (U.S. Highway 40) at the intersection of Highways 40 and 157, the establishment had in recent years been a bustling gambling and entertainment operation known for its ties to Frank L. “Buster” Wortman, a notorious St. Louis bootlegger and gangster whose organization had a virtual monopoly on gambling, slot machines, horse parlors, card games, and assorted other illegal rackets in St. Louis and southern Illinois.

Katsinas transformed the venue into the Katsinas Evergreen Cafe, which opened on August 30, 1947. The main building, a Spanish-style structure, featured a glass-surrounded kitchen that allowed patrons to watch their meals being prepared. The restaurant boasted a main dining room and ballroom with a seating capacity of 400, two additional dining rooms, a bar room, a service bar, and a cocktail lounge named the Oval Room for the shape of its star attraction: an 85-foot bar with a walnut base and polished mahogany top. An advertisement from the era touted nightly entertainment in the Oval Room, “perfect food” (with “chops, fowls, sea foods, steaks” listed as specialties, and the promise that “You will always enjoy yourself at Katsinas.”

As Evergreen Gardens had originally been built by the family in Collinsville that owned Schnell Nurseries, the grounds were beautifully landscaped, with hundreds of evergreen trees and a spring-fed lily pond illuminated at night by colored lights. The parking lot was large enough to accommodate 300 or so vehicles.

Despite its initial success, the new restaurant became something of an albatross for Katsinas. In 1949 he filed a $200,000 lawsuit against the property’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. H.C. Schnell, citing their “procrastination” in adhering to the terms of the original lease agreement and alleging assorted breaches of the contract, including their failure to build a drive-in restaurant. The legal dispute led to the closing of the Katsinas Evergreen Cafe before the year was out.

Just after Thanksgiving of that year, a listing under “Business Opportunities” in the classified-advertising section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offered a “Tavern and Night Club” with the following details: “Evergreen Gardens, Collinsville, Ill., Highway 40 and 157; most beautiful; completely furnished; 900 ft. parking lot, black top; oval bar, beautiful stage, 4 dressing rooms, seats 1500, 3 banquet rooms, balcony for weddings; large lake with waterfalls; completely shrubbed; worth $100,000; owner will take $30,000 complete; would also make a beautiful Chinese cafe.” There apparently were no takers.

Around this time Katsinas’s health began to fail, and he died at age 60 in 1951. (Ethel had died three years earlier at age 48.) The daily newspaper in Mattoon described Katsinas “a hard worker” and noted that some of his friends attributed his death “to strenuous hours spent at his business.”

In 1952 the G.S. Suppiger Company, best known for the Brooks brand of tomato products, moved its headquarters from St. Louis to the Collinsville property that had been home to the Katsinas Evergreen Cafe. (Three years earlier the company had built a 170-foot-tall water tower in the shape of Brooks Catsup bottle just south of its Collinsville bottling plant.) Then, in 1964, the Church of the Nazarene, originally chartered in East St. Louis in 1929, relocated to the Evergreen Gardens building, where it remains to this day.

December 6, 2024 By
0
New Canaan/ Connecticut

Minced Chicken and Tongue Sandwiches

The Buttery

54 Elm Street
New Canaan, Connecticut

1948 – 1956

In 1948 Mildred Boyd of New Canaan, Connecticut, decided that she was the right person to take up where Marjorie and Kenneth Mellin, the founders of Mar-Ken’s, a classy restaurant and confectionary in the city, had left off. A year earlier the Mellins, having grown weary of the nonstop grind after 18 years in business, had decided to sell Mar-Ken’s to John Vincent Gonzalez, a veteran restaurateur who’d been working most recently as the resident manager of the Pickwick Arms Hotel in nearby Greenwich, Connecticut.

For whatever reason things with Gonzalez didn’t work out, and in 1948 Boyd took over the space at 46 Elm Street, directly across from the New Canaan Playhouse, that had long been occupied by Mar-Ken’s. She named her new restaurant The Buttery and adopted the motto “For Food of Quality.”

But Boyd didn’t stay there long. The following year she moved her restaurant just a few doors down the street to 54 Elm, which for many years had been home to the Albert Franco grocery. In 1948 Temp-Tee Bakers had taken over the space, followed in just a few months by the local outpost of the Brother and Sister Shop of Norwalk, a children’s clothing store. It didn’t do much better.

Boyd created a genteel, garden-like atmosphere for the Buttery at 54 Elm Street, advertising the fare as “Delicious New England Style Food.” The Mother’s Day menu in 1953, for example, listed complete dinners, priced from $1.95 to $2.45, featuring these entrées: “Choice Prime Ribs of Beef,” “Broiled Calves Liver and Bacon,” “Broiled Swordfish Maître d’ Hôtel,” “Roast Stuffed Young Tom Turkey,” “Baked Virginia Ham,” and “Casserole of Fresh Lobster and Scallops á la Newburg.”

All this, too, in a restaurant with a lunch counter and a soda fountain (with Schrafft’s ice cream) open from 8:30 in the morning until 9:30 in the evening. Customers could also drop in for hot meals to take home, as well as for freshly made pies and cakes.

In 1956 the local newspaper announced that the Buttery had been sold to the House of Hasselbach, the legendary confectionary founded in New Haven in 1882, which soon opened a restaurant and candy store in the same space. But it closed its doors the following year, and the entire contents of the restaurant—including the soda fountain that it had inherited from the Buttery—were sold at auction.

December 2, 2024 By
0
Chicago/ Illinois

Sauerkraut Balls

Tom Brown’s Coach Light Restaurant

5200 North Lincoln Avenue
Chicago, Illinois

1956 – 1963

Four may have been the charm for Tom Brown, as legions of customers came to know Chicago restaurateur Thomas F. Brown in the two decades immediately following World War II.

His first restaurant, Tom Brown’s Cafe Lounge, opened at 1102 Granville Avenue in 1945 and quickly gained a loyal following for its aged steaks and for lobster and other seafood that, as its newspaper ads said, were “flown in daily.” Next, in 1952, came Tom Brown’s Skokie Restaurant, at 8617 Niles Center Road in the upscale Chicago suburb of Skokie. And then, in 1955, came Tom Brown’s Blackboard Club, a members-only “key club” with assorted bon mots gracing blackboards on the walls of its main dining room and a kitchen headed by Sam DeFino, who’d been the chef at the Granville Avenue restaurant, which Brown had just closed.

As Brown was opening his third establishment, George Holt, the owner of the Embers restaurant at 1034 North Dearborn Street in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago, was opening an outpost in the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the city’s North Side. He called it the Coach Light, and it occupied a space at 5200 North Lincoln Avenue that since 1939 had been occupied by Potter’s Stockade, whose owners, William and Bessie Potter, were eager to retire and move to Florida. The Coach Light on November 12, 1954, but Holt’s attention soon turned to another venture, and in March 1956 Brown became the new owner of the Coach Light, and, as was his custom, affixed his name to the marquee.

Brown had a partner in the venture: Frank Helsing, the co-owner, with his brother, of Helsing’s Vodvil Lounge, a restaurant and nightclub at Sheridan Road and Montrose Avenue. This was, to say the least, an unusual establishment. Billing itself as “America’s Most Outstanding Theatre Lounge,” it was attached at the hip to the “Bowlium,” an ultramodern, 24-hour-a-day facility with 30 bowling alleys and nary a column to block anyone’s view of spectators. As for the Vodvil Lounge, it was best known for being the longtime home of Al “Flying Fingers” Morgan, the immensely popular pianist and nightclub singer, and the place where comedian George Gobel had gotten his start in 1948.

At his new restaurant, Brown reprised many of the dishes that had been hits at his first place, including aged steaks and live Maine lobsters. Other specials included roast prime rib of beef (served with onion pie) and an Alaskan king crab platter. Every meal started with a complimentary relish tray and, for many, ended with a slice of one of Brown’s trademark cheesecakes—plain, apricot, chocolate, coconut, or maple walnut—prepared by Ernest Lasenby, the restaurant’s pastry chef.

In the end, though, Tom Brown’s Coach Light Restaurant didn’t fare much better than its predecessors. In 1963 Brown closed it and moved to the Granada Apartment Hotel, also in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, at 525 West Arlington Place, giving his new place an old name: Tom Brown’s Cafe Lounge.

Brown retired from the restaurant business in 1971. He died in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1983 at age 81.

November 29, 2024 By
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Washington/ D.C.

Bounty of the Sea à la Bouillabaisse, Maison

The Three Thieves

2233 Wisconsin Avenue Northwest
Washington, D.C.

1965 – 1971

Almost as soon as it opened in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 1965, the Three Thieves was, or at least was said to be, the city’s new “in” restaurant. For starters, it was embedded in a brand-new office building at 2233 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W., immediately north of Georgetown, the toniest neighborhood in the nation’s capital. And it could seat more than 300 diners in an over-the-top setting that the restaurant’s owners said was inspired by a Spanish castle.

“A stunning new entry on the dining-out scene,” John M. Rosson, the Washington Evening Star’s restaurant critic, gushed in an early review. “The Three Thieves is quite a looker. In terms of décor you’d think you were walking into New York’s Four Seasons. It’s that rich.”

In truth, however, it was more as if the Four Seasons had swapped its midcentury-modern cool for a sort of conquistador-style grandiosity. The central decorative feature of the Three Thieves was a massive fireplace visible from just about every table in the restaurant, but there were also antique brick and wrought iron accents galore, walls of dark-wood panels laid in a herringbone pattern, ornate chandeliers (though made in Mexico, not Spain), and assorted heraldic paraphernalia. An elevated dining area emitted an aura of exclusivity, separated as it was from the main floor by three steps and a decorative balustrade.

Five investors were apparently behind this ambitious venture, including three—Norman Abramson, a lawyer; Norman Bromze, a lawyer turned full-time restaurateur; and Victor Silbert, an accountant—who somewhat cheekily declared themselves to be the restaurant’s namesake “thieves,” this for having unapologetically borrowed the finest recipes from their travels and translated them into an expansive menu designed to bridge European and American palates. (The three men, as it happened, had first joined forces four years earlier when they acquired Costin’s Sirloin Room in the National Press Building.) At one end, for example, there was the pretentiously styled “Bounty of the Sea à la Bouillabaisse, Maison,” at the other the crackers and cheddar-cheese spread that was served gratis to all diners.

The Three Thieves also featured the “Rogue Room,” a cocktail lounge with an intimate area for dancing and, most nights, a talented combo providing live music.

Yet, for all its glitz and glamour, the Three Thieves was not long for the nation’s capital. In 1971 the restaurant suddenly and without explanation closed its doors. Some whispered of financial troubles, others cited shifting tastes in an era of social upheaval. Whatever the truth, the space was soon taken over by a new restaurant, Le Pauvre Immigrant (The Poor Immigrant).

November 26, 2024 By
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