Legendary Recipes – History Worth Tasting

Indiana “Punkin” Pie

Hawthorn Room

1611 North Meridian Street
Indianapolis, Indiana

1942 – 1974

Thomas D. Adams originally set out to become a doctor. He was a Kentuckian who had put in three years of pre-medical study at Eastern Kentucky State College in Richmond, and to help pay for his schooling he took a part-time job in one of Cincinnati’s top restaurants. Within a year he was its general manager, and the medical degree quietly disappeared from his plans. He studied landscape architecture in Cincinnati, drifted the rest of the way into restaurant management, and when the firm he worked for needed someone to look at a property in Indianapolis that was not doing well, Adams drew the assignment.

The property was the Seville Restaurant, which had opened in the fall of 1929 in the lower level of the Kahn Building at 7 North Meridian Street, a few steps off Monument Circle. It was meant to bring a taste of old Spain to downtown Indianapolis — with a gold and black scheme meant to evoke a Spanish courtyard and wrought-iron ornamentation everywhere — but it had the misfortune of opening within weeks of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Adams took over as manager in 1931. His son, Thomas D. Adams, Jr., had been born in Cincinnati on February 4, 1930, and came north to Indianapolis as an infant. Adams’s sister, Elisabeth J. Adams, a Kentucky native who had graduated from Transylvania College in Lexington and taken a master’s degree in dietetics at the University of Tennessee, had joined her brother in the Cincinnati venture and followed him to Indiana as well. By any account, Adams got the Seville sorted out. In time he owned it — though not alone. He held it jointly with Max J. Comisar, and the two of them together owned and operated Sevilles in both Indianapolis and Dayton, Ohio.

By the end of the 1930s Adams was looking north. The stretch of Meridian above 16th Street was then a corridor of large Victorian houses in the middle of a slow conversion to other uses — funeral homes, apartment buildings, offices — and the intersection sat at the doorstep of the city’s entertainment district. Adams petitioned in 1941 for permission to operate a restaurant there. In 1942 he incorporated the venture with two partners — his wife, Ida Mae Adams, and Comisar, his partner in the Seville and the Dayton restaurateur credited with bringing fine dining to that city, who had opened the first Seville there in 1928 — and in the spring of that year the Hawthorn Room opened at 1611 North Meridian Street, on the northeast corner of 16th.

The building was low and pale — a one-story restaurant in the picturesque colonial manner then in fashion, its brick and framework painted white and the whole property enclosed by an old-fashioned white fence. A covered drive-in off Meridian, the porte-cochère, let patrons alight at the front entrance before the car continued on to a paved and lighted lot at the rear for some 50 vehicles. Later expansions grew outward from an existing brick dwelling on the lot to the north, which a tunnel joined to the kitchen and which held the commissary and storeroom, offices, showers, dressing rooms, and a lounge for employees.

Inside, the main dining room was arranged around a hawthorn tree, and the tree was the entire idea. Leslie F. Ayres, a prominent Indianapolis architect and artist, devised a huge, stage-like hawthorn whose branches spread over a circular counter: large flat leaves painted bright green against a mass of red haws, lighting fixtures shaped like bird cages hanging from the boughs, and thorns jutting from the limbs, the larger of them pressed into service as hat hooks. An oak bench circled the base, where patrons waited their turn at the counter, and the terrazzo underfoot ran green to suggest grass, patterned with fallen hawthorn leaves. The counter itself was oak and inverted, so that diners sat on the inside and were served from the outer rim, on stools upholstered in rust, brown, blue, and chartreuse. On an end wall Frederick M. Rash, an Indianapolis artist, painted the four seasons of the hawthorn — the white and reddish blossom, and the haws that resemble miniature apples. (Rash would go on to serve in World War II and to work for Howard Hughes, producing art renderings for the Spruce Goose and other projects.) That last detail is almost certainly why so many customers thought that the Hawthorn’s centerpiece was an apple tree.

Beyond the counter the main dining room ran the full length of the building, two steps down, finished in natural oak and divisible by ceiling-high drapes into semi-private stretches. A sunken terrace enclosed by a large bay window and screened with Venetian blinds fronted off it, furnished in wrought iron with black Formica tops; a compact private room off the front of the dining room seated 12. The entire interior was air-conditioned year-round, with acoustical ceilings to deaden the noise.

One decision shaped the restaurant’s clientele more than any other: The Hawthorn Room served no alcohol, and never would. That made it a natural home for sorority luncheons, women’s clubs, and church groups, and it placed the Hawthorn squarely in the local tearoom tradition then represented downtown by the Canary Cottage on the Circle and the tearoom on the fifth floor of the L. S. Ayres & Company department store. It also meant that the restaurant had to live or die on its food, since there was no bar revenue to prop up a thin evening.

The food was built on abundance without ostentation. Every dinner arrived as a full sequence — an appetizer, a salad, two side dishes, and dessert — which made it very difficult for a diner to leave the Hawthorn Room hungry. The signature items were a roto-cut steak, Indiana fried chicken, and the butterscotch rolls that became the restaurant’s trademark. Chef William Hanna presided over the kitchen and would hold the position for all but the restaurant’s final years; he had come up through the Seville, and he trained the whole kitchen staff himself in what the house called “made-from-scratch” home cooking. Alongside him for most of those years stood a second chef, Cleo Edwards, who shared charge of food preparation, retired briefly near the end, and came back.

The restaurant kept long hours and odd ones. In 1946, with Adams listed as manager, the Hawthorn stayed open to provide after-theater service from nine in the evening until one in the morning, and closed on Wednesdays. That same year it introduced a between-meals interlude called the Soda Snack, an afternoon window of soda-fountain delicacies in which a slice of pie or cake ran 15 cents.

In August 1948 Adams cut the cord to downtown, announcing the sale of his interests in the Seville to his partner, Max J. Comisar of Dayton, Ohio, after 17 years running it. He poured the proceeds into Meridian Street. Additional property acquired along the block gave the Hawthorn an overall frontage of 120 feet and room for a new dining room — the Garden Room, built out over the ground where the driveway had once cut in — plus two private dining rooms. Capacity went from 130 seats to 260. By 1949, with Adams described in the papers as proprietor and 18 years into the restaurant business in Indianapolis, remodeling had brought the building to nearly twice its original size. Expansion continued northward, eventually overtaking the house next door and yielding the Saddle Room, where the family’s equestrian trophies and tack were displayed, and the 500 Room, featuring a hand-painted mural of the start of the Memorial Day race.

Then, in 1951, the place nearly burned. Fire tore through the restaurant and left roughly $100,000 in damage behind, running through the 500 Room, the Garden Room, and the Flat Saddle Room. One fireman, describing the main dining room to a reporter, said it “was belching and roaring like a furnace.” Adams rebuilt, and rebuilt larger.

The rebuilt Hawthorn Room is the one that acquired a national reputation, and it did so partly on the strength of a single visit. Clementine Paddleford, the New York Herald Tribune and This Week food writer who logged half a million miles hunting down American regional cooking, arrived in 1952 and filed a rapturous column. She had, she reported, “made a 250-mile detour from Detroit to Indianapolis” on her way to New York — for pumpkin pie. She found the fried chicken “done to perfection in Midwest style,” the mashed potatoes “whipped to snowy lightness,” and, in the milk gravy made in the same pan as the chicken, “not a lump.” The butterscotch rolls she dispatched in three words: “yum, yum, yum.”

Paddleford also included a vivid physical description of the interior. The restaurant was then feeding as many as 2,000 people on a good day, across a warren built on three floor levels with four rooms opening more or less into one another. The room men liked best, she observed, was the one whose walls carried murals tracing an Indianapolis 500 race from start to finish. There was a circular counter for solo diners who did not want the exposure of a table. Before she left she collected recipes for roast-beef hash, cherry cobbler, Indiana pumpkin pie, and sour-cream raisin pie, and printed all four.

The Hawthorn kept modernizing at the edges while leaving the core alone. A 1957 advertisement made a small technological boast of the fried chicken, which was by then “pressure-fried in just 10 minutes” — long enough, the copy promised, for juicy tenderness inside and golden crispness out. Downtown that same year, the Seville that had launched Adams’s career disappeared, remade by Comisar, who had bought him out nine years earlier, into the King Cole, an oak-paneled English room hung with European oil paintings.

Geography turned the Hawthorn into an industry canteen. WFBM-TV was at 1330 North Meridian, WISH-TV at 1440, and WLWI between them, with radio operations attached and advertising agencies clustered nearby. Media Row ate lunch at 16th and Meridian, day after day. Adams leaned into the restaurant’s name with enormous blown-up photographs of hawthorn trees on the walls — trees, by one account, that grew in his own backyard. In the bar area, where the only thing poured was coffee, a large wooden tree rose to the ceiling with dollar bills hanging from its branches. Customers came for particular things and remembered them for decades: the roto steak and the cloverleaf rolls on Sunday evenings, a frozen fruit salad with poppy-seed dressing, the glazed ham loaf. Shortridge High School held its activity dinners there. A couple who had their first date in the restaurant in 1960 would write, 60 years later, that they had “never forgotten” it. A priest who ate there with his father four times a week for years put the verdict plainly: “There is no place like it today.”

By 1961, when the Indianapolis News sent its women’s editor, Thelma Machael, out to profile the operation, the Hawthorn Room had become a wholly family enterprise, and a peculiar one. In summer Adams could be found in midmorning and midafternoon out in a field, hurrying along the rows or bending over tomato plants. He grew Golden Cross Bantam sweet corn and a special hybrid tomato on the family farm at the edge of the city, and he liked to pick them less than an hour before they were served and drive them in himself. Elisabeth Adams, whose menus one admirer described as “home cooking with a touch of Southern hospitality,” ran the menu planning; Machael credited her imagination and her restraint with seasoning in equal measure, and offered as a typical item baked fresh fruits, hot in their own juices and lightly dressed with sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg, served alongside stuffed pork chops, butterscotch rolls or muffins, and a molded raw vegetable salad. Ida Mae Adams, the corporation’s secretary and by all reports an excellent cook, had been active in developing recipes for the restaurant but was giving more and more of her time to the Hawthorn Restaurant Stables at the farm, where the family bred American saddlebred brood mares and colts for show. The colts went to Danville, Kentucky, to be trained by Garland Bradshaw, and came home from Midwestern rings with trophies and blue ribbons.

The children were embedded in the operation. Dianne Adams, a graduate of Stephens College and Indiana University, was the dining room supervisor; she showed the family’s horses, was finishing a master’s thesis on restaurant management at Michigan State University, and twice a week convened the dining room staff for meetings that used visual aids and open discussion of problem-solving and attitudes. Thomas D. Adams, Jr., the supervisor of kitchen and dining room service, had graduated from Broad Ripple High School and gone on to Indiana University, where he later served as secretary of the I.U. Men’s Club of Indianapolis; he and Elisabeth inspected each plate before it left the kitchen.

The staff, too, had stopped turning over. By 1961 the hostesses Clara Kraft and Jan Carr had been there 17 and ten years respectively; pastry cook Margaret Jessup had 14 years in, second cook Joe Hanna 19, and chef William Hanna 30. The restaurant was open from 11 in the morning until nine at night, seven days a week. That year it also unveiled a redone 500 Room, in which color photographs and photo murals of the race divided the dining space; the plan was to swap in new pictures of the individual qualifiers each May, hung around an enlarged portrait of the winner. Over these two decades the Hawthorn accumulated the recognition that would follow it into its obituaries: It had appeared in Duncan Hines’s Adventures in Good Eating guides for more than 20 consecutive years, long enough to earn the guide’s “Fifth of a Century” award, an honor it shared locally with the Russet Cafeteria on South Meridian Street.

The unwinding took two years and involved three owners. In 1972 Adams sold the Hawthorn Restaurant to Merrill Cohen, a well-known Indianapolis restaurateur whose firm operated two Stockholm House restaurants among other properties. Adams died the same year, at age 70. By then his interests had spread well beyond the corner that made him: He owned the Hawthorn Heights Apartments and the Hawthorn Plaza Shopping Center, both carrying forward the name of a restaurant he had opened during World War II.

The Hawthorn’s own advertising that July, a full page of house copy published a few weeks after the sale, reads like an inventory taken before a move. Seven rooms now, grown out of a small restaurant with one odd counter. More than 150 years of service among the kitchen staff alone and another 150 across the waitresses, hostesses, and cashiers, with Irene Gantz, Vivian Ford, and Henry Caldwell past 20 years each, Norma Reed at 17, and nobody under five. A luncheon menu rewritten daily and served from 11 to 4, complete for $1.35 to $1.95; dinner from 4 to 8, at least nine entrees at $2.15 to $3.75, each arriving with its appetizer, potato, vegetable, salad, hot breads, dessert, and beverage. The counter still drew the solitary diners it had been built for, offering, the copy claimed, privacy without loneliness. The 500 Room by now carried a huge photographic mural of the start of the 1950 race and a gallery of driver portraits. And the phrase the house reached for to describe what a new owner had just bought was “the old-time tea room atmosphere.”

Cohen leased the establishment out, and in 1973 a new operator, Nick Farris, took over with a stated intention of restoring what had been lost. Farris promised gradual refurbishing of each of the seven dining rooms. “We want to recreate the tearoom atmosphere,” he told a reporter. It was the right diagnosis and the wrong moment. Longtime restaurant personnel would say afterward that business had been declining steadily for several years.

What finally closed the Hawthorn Room was a meat bill. Farris Restaurants, Inc., owed $3,400 to Stark, Wetzel & Company, the Indianapolis firm founded in 1936 and known across the region for its luncheon meats and sausage. When the bill went unpaid in early June 1974, creditors forced the business into receivership. On June 21, the Indianapolis Star columnist Thomas R. Keating gave readers the news in a single paragraph tucked between an item about a wandering man at the Democratic state convention and a note on contract talks with the Indianapolis Pacers basketball team. The Hawthorne Room Restaurant at 1611 North Meridian Street, he wrote — the paper spelled it with the terminal e that half of Indianapolis used — “long was one of the finest eating places in the Midwest,” and would close down that weekend, “possibly for good.” It was. The sale of what was left came on Tuesday, July 23, at one in the afternoon, by order of Judge Glenn W. Funk of the Marion Superior Court: the fixtures, equipment, and supplies of the “Hawthorne Room Restaurant,” offered in their entirety or in lots and parcels, handled by a firm on East Washington Street that advertised itself as a liquidator of all kinds of businesses.

The building stood empty for three years. It was razed in the summer of 1977, and that December a local franchisee opened a McDonald’s restaurant on the site — the city’s newest at the time, since replaced by a different structure, still selling hamburgers where the porte-cochère used to be. The parking lot and the restaurant together now occupy most of the 1600 block of Meridian.

The people scattered into other lives. Thomas D. Adams, Jr., who had spent his working years checking plates at 16th and Meridian, turned to the passion he had carried since attending his first Indianapolis 500 at age 16 in 1946: He founded Adams Automotive Associates, built racing engines, entered two cars in the 500, and ran stock cars with his friend Leon Duray “Jigger” Sirois, a race-car driver from Shelby, Indiana. Adams was a drummer, too, and kept playing with jazz bands around the city. He moved to Largo, Florida, came home to Indianapolis late, and died there on October 5, 2018, at age 88. Among the handful of messages left in his online guest book was one from Jeannine Gantz Toon, whose mother, Irene, had waited tables at the Hawthorn Room for more than 20 years and called him Tommy. His obituary preserved the phrase one of his longtime caregivers had used for him: he was “the last of the true gentlemen.”

August 14, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Cadillac/ Michigan

Cinnamon Pudding

Kelly’s Restaurant

124 South Mitchell Street
Cadillac, Michigan

1942 – 1968

In the spring of 1941 the directors of the Cadillac State Bank in Cadillac, Michigan, decided to move. The bank had occupied the same corner at South Mitchell and West Cass Streets since 1901, and its stockholders now voted to relocate down the block into the building the Peoples Savings Bank had abandoned when it failed during the Great Depression. That left a handsome and thoroughly obsolete piece of real estate on the market, and George Banks Kelly wanted it. He paid $14,000 for the yellow-brick building and set about the extensive remodeling required to convert it into a restaurant. He opened Kelly’s Restaurant there in 1942.

The building Kelly bought had been put up as a statement. Banking on that corner traced back to 1883, when D. A. Blodgett of Grand Rapids and D. F. Diggins of Cadillac opened a private banking house under the Blodgett name, with Diggins running it day to day. Diggins withdrew in June 1892 to join the lumber firm of Blodgett, Cummer & Diggins. In 1895 the private house was reorganized under state law as the Cadillac State Bank, capitalized at $50,000, with lumberman Frank J. Cobbs as president and S. W. Kramer as vice president. Deposits nearly tripled in the bank’s first seven years, and in 1901 the directors spent the profits on a new building at Mitchell and Cass. A county history published two years later described the interior with obvious pride: “mosaic floors and mahogany woodwork throughout,” the teller fixtures milled from selected mahogany as well, a heavy steel burglar-proof vault, and two additional fireproof vaults for securities and ledgers.

None of that was of much use to a restaurateur. Kelly’s crews had to pull the cages, break out the vault doors, and carve a kitchen, a counter, and a dining room out of a floor plan built to keep money in one place and people at a distance. When the work was done the corner had a new face entirely — a low, flat-roofed streamline-moderne front with rounded corners and dark trim, the name “Kelly’s” lettered in tall red script across both the Mitchell and Cass elevations, and, above the door, a smaller line that mattered a great deal in the 1940s: “Air Conditioned.”

Kelly was not new to feeding Cadillac. He had come up in the business as the proprietor of Kelly’s Soda Grill, a fountain-service café in the Lyric Theatre Building at 202 South Mitchell, just across Cass Street from the bank corner. The theatre had opened in 1918, a 1,000-seat house operated by the Fitzpatrick-McElroy circuit under manager George H. Kennedy, with novelty “automobile box seats” in the balcony saluting the industry that was displacing the lumber trade. A café attached to a theater that size did steady trade twice a night, plus whatever the downtown shoppers brought in between shows. But a soda fountain is not a restaurant, and by 1941 Kelly clearly wanted the other thing.

His timing was better than it looked. Cadillac in 1941 was not a lumber town anymore; the last hardwood stand in Wexford County had been cut in 1934, and the mills that had built the place were gone or going. What replaced them was a diversified manufacturing economy — metal fabricators, rubber goods, garment plants, and, beginning that February, Chris-Craft, the Algonac-based boatbuilder, which had bought a former Mitchell Brothers plant to expand production against the military contracts it saw coming with World War II and rolled out its first Cadillac-built pleasure boat on February 25. The city sat at the junction of three highways, held the state highway department’s district headquarters for 24 counties, and had been identified by the 1936 Federal Marketing Atlas as the trading center for 33 surrounding communities. J. C. Penney had arrived in 1925, Montgomery Ward in 1928, H. L. Green in 1940. The city had imposed a two-hour parking limit in 1937 and would install meters in 1947. A restaurant at Mitchell and Cass was standing in the middle of the current.

Kelly’s Restaurant caught on quickly. The room itself, as it appears on the souvenir postcard Kelly had printed by the Harry Baker Company of Grand Rapids, was less a white-tablecloth dining room than a well-run American café raised a grade. The interior panel shows a long service counter beneath a sweeping curved canopy finished in pale blue-green, wooden captain’s chairs, a decorative floral motif painted high on the wall, and the general air of a place that could turn a table fast at noon and still hold a steak dinner at seven. Steaks, in fact, were on the menu, which would matter later.

By the mid-1950s George and Ethel Kelly had expanded north along Mitchell Street. They acquired the Northwood Hotel, the three-story brick establishment at the corner of Mitchell and East Harris that was, and had long been, the most consequential building in downtown Cadillac. Its lot had been sold in 1873 by G. H. Cook to D. C. McKinnon for $1,050, on a rumor that a mammoth hotel was coming; the rumor proved out, and the Hotel McKinnon opened the following year in the village of Clam Lake — incorporated as the city of Cadillac in 1877 — and drew crowds partly on the strength of a patented dining-room stove that needed no flue. In the 1920s the owners bought the property to the north and rebuilt the whole structure at a reported cost of $350,000, including the expense of refacing it in brick. Renamed The Northwood Hotel, it opened in July 1928 with a ballroom its advertising called the finest in northern Michigan, a five-chair barber shop, a coffee shop, a portico sheltering the East Harris Street entrance, and a view of Lake Cadillac.

Prosperity, however, did not follow. The Michigan Trust Company of Grand Rapids took the hotel by foreclosure decree on August 25, 1940, against $63,795.26 in obligations dating from 1928 and 1933 that had never been paid, and the property changed hands repeatedly through the war years and after.

The Kellys ran the hotel and their restaurant as a single proposition and printed new postcards to say so. One card carried three panels — the Northwood on the left, Kelly’s exterior and interior on the right — under a line on the reverse announcing that “Kelly’s Restaurant now joins hands with the Northwood Hotel under one-owner managership.” For a traveling salesman coming up U.S. 131, that was the whole pitch: a fireproof room with a telephone and a real restaurant a block and a half away.

Which is how, on the afternoon of Monday, November 4, 1963, Louis Armstrong came to be eating a steak dinner in Kelly’s Restaurant.

The chain of events bordered on the absurd. The Cadillac Chamber of Commerce had built its membership drive around an exhibition jump by Kim Emmons-Knor, the hometown skydiver who had won a world championship the year before. After her jump, hundreds of small white parachutes were released over the city, two of them carrying free memberships in the chamber. Louis Armstrong and The All Stars had checked into the Northwood Hotel the day before. Walking around town that Monday, one of the musicians spotted a white parachute snagged in a tree. Inside was a membership card. The band found its way to the chamber’s office — a log cabin in the city park — and Armstrong himself presented the ticket. Keith McKellop, the president of the chamber, had an annual dinner scheduled that night at Caberfae Lodge and a band with an eight o’clock show in Traverse City, so he improvised an induction ceremony for five o’clock under the Northwood’s portico. The Cadillac Evening News ran a story the next day under the headline “Living legend joins Cadillac Chamber Monday.”

The part of the afternoon that Cadillac actually remembered, though, happened at Kelly’s. The junior high school sat two blocks east of Mitchell Street, and after the last bell students walked downtown to loiter. One group was inside the restaurant when they noticed who was at the table with his wife, working through a steak. Charlie Nystrom went over. “Pardon me sir, are you Mr. Louis Armstrong?” he asked, and remembered decades later how courteously the answer came back. Down the street at the soda fountain in Cunningham’s Drug Store the news traveled fast; Bill White abandoned whatever he was drinking and ran for Kelly’s, awestruck at meeting a man his parents had talked about his whole life. Patty Cuddeback Kingsbury followed White and found Armstrong plainly delighted by the knot of teenagers crowding his table. Later, when word came that he was standing in front of the hotel, Kay Kendall left a cherry Coke on the counter at Cunningham’s, went out the back door, and got his autograph on a sheet of paper torn from a spiral binder.

Armstrong was at a strange point in his career that fall. He had not made a record in two years and the swing era that made him was two decades gone. In December, a month after the parachute jump, he recorded “Hello, Dolly!”; the following May it knocked the Beatles out of the number-one spot on the Billboard chart..

The Kellys closed their restaurant in May 1969, having sold the Northwood Hotel 11 weeks earlier, and moved to Florida. George Kelly died in 1981 at age 80; Ethel died in 1986 at age 79.

The vault is long gone, the moderne facade has been worked over more than once, and the address at 124 South Mitchell Street now belongs to RE/MAX Central, whose agents sell lakefront property out of the room where four Cadillac eighth-graders once interrupted Louis Armstrong’s dinner.

August 12, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Las Vegas/ Nevada

House Scampi

Philips Supper House

4545 West Sahara Avenue
Las Vegas, Nevada

1978 – 2002

The invitations went out for a benefit opening on February 6, 1978, which was one way of announcing that the strange green-and-white house at 4545 West Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas was in fact a restaurant. Philip Deale had spent the previous months building it — 9,000 square feet of gingerbread trim, mansard angles, and Victorian porch work, dropped onto an almost empty stretch of desert road between Arville Street and Decatur Boulevard. The Strip lay two and a half miles east, close enough that Deale’s advertising could eventually describe the drive as five minutes, far enough that most of Las Vegas considered the location a mistake. Many residents thought exactly that when Deale quietly opened his Edwardian-New England supper house for business.

Deale had not come to the restaurant business through a kitchen. Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1928, he served in the U.S. Army and arrived in Las Vegas about 1958, when the valley held perhaps 60,000 people. By the early 1970s Deale was developing commercial real estate on the west side, and in October 1972 he and general contractor Bernie North broke ground on Sahara West Village, a 12,000-square-foot retail strip in Spanish-mode slump stone at West Sahara and Arville. It stood on the same stretch of West Sahara where Philips Supper House would rise six years later.

In September 1976 Deale and a partner named Marvin Strusser had made an offer on the Cyril Wengert house at Sixth Street and Charleston Boulevard — a 1939 Tudor mansion, one of the first big homes in Las Vegas, by then serving as the offices of Nevada Southern Title Company — intending to turn it into a gourmet restaurant. The neighbors organized against them. When the zoning change went before the Las Vegas City Commission that December, an attorney for the neighborhood produced a petition carrying 86 signatures, and the commission voted 3-2 to deny it. Unable to get the back 100 feet of the lot zoned commercial, Deale and Strusser abandoned the project. Deale then went back out to West Sahara, where he built Philips Supper House. By the time he broke ground on the restaurant he was 50, and he’d built the place himself — a detail regulars repeated for years afterward.

One of his first hires said a good deal about the clientele he expected. To greet guests at the door, Deale installed Walter Slaughter, who had spent the previous 23 years as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as the host. In a town where the line between civic leadership and organized crime was more of a suggestion, installing a career G-man at the entrance of a discreet, alcove-heavy supper club was either a very good joke or very good insurance, and possibly both. Slaughter had left the FBI in 1977 under the federal mandatory retirement program, and he was not finished with public life. That summer he ran as a Republican for the Nevada Assembly in District 5, campaigning to curb plea bargaining — a practice he said had been abused and misused everywhere he had worked — and to strip the sales tax from food and medicine. The restaurant where he spent his evenings stood inside the district he hoped to represent. He lost.

Deale had designed his restaurant to make people feel unobserved, with intimate alcoves, a cocktail lounge, and self-parking on site — an amenity worth advertising in a city where every other good restaurant sat behind a casino’s valet stand. By 1983 the restaurant sat about 230 in its dining areas with banquet seating for 50, and by 1987 it had grown to some 270 seats across three dining rooms, with more than two dozen booths, an 80-seat banquet room, and a bar that doubled as a waiting room; the trade press that year put its full capacity as high as 320. Whatever the count on a given night, the geometry never changed: a large restaurant chopped deliberately into small rooms, six of which held anywhere from five to 17 people.

The semi-private geometry was not decoration. It was strategy. “Our only business is serving dinner,” Deale told the trade magazine Restaurant Business in 1987. “We don’t have slots and games.” In a city where nearly every dining room was a loss leader affixed to a casino floor, Philips had no floor to subsidize it and nothing jangling behind the banquettes. What it had was locals — and, increasingly, conventioneers on expense accounts who wanted three uninterrupted hours away from the noise. “Tourists don’t come to Las Vegas to eat out — they come to laugh and giggle,” Deale explained. “The convention people are looking for a little more. People with expense accounts want to entertain.” He had chosen his ground with that in mind. “I never wanted to be on the Strip,” he said. “The cost would be astronomical. Besides, we’re situated better for locals — and they’re here 52 weeks a year.”

The kitchen backed him up. The menu ran to seafood — including live Maine lobster, flown in and tanked, which was not a common sight in the Mojave in 1981 — alongside steaks, prime rib, lamb chops, and a growing list of Italian specialties. Dinner was served seven days a week from five in the evening until midnight, with reservations suggested.

To keep locals coming on Tuesdays as well as Saturdays, Deale ran what he called the Twilight Menu in the early evening, Sundays through Fridays. In 1987 it was eight items at a flat $8.95, mostly reduced portions of standard dinner offerings — a smaller cut of prime rib, that sort of thing — and it was, by Deale’s account, especially popular with seniors. A decade later the same idea survived under the plainer name of the early-bird, from 4:30 to 6 p.m., with entrees between $8.95 and $14.95. There was one eccentricity in the operating calendar unthinkable for a Las Vegas restaurant today: for years Philips simply shut its doors through July and August and waited out the heat.

The kitchen through those first years belonged to a chef named Louis Puglisi, and it was Puglisi who, around 1980, hired a 16-year-old who had just moved to Las Vegas from Iowa and was knocking on doors along Sahara looking for after-school work. Jerry Bormann had a little fast-food experience and not much else. “Basically, the main job was to wash dishes, prep cook, that type of thing,” he told an interviewer years later. The education that followed was hands-on and occasionally abrupt. “The chef threw a leg of veal on the table and said, ‘Let’s see what you can do with it,’ ” Bormann said. Another time the instruction was simply to cook a steak. “I stood there and cooked a steak,” he said. Four years in, Puglisi left for Phoenix, and Bormann — then just 20 — inherited the range. He would run the kitchen in one capacity or another for most of the next two decades.

It was in the summer of 1983 that Philips Supper House became briefly and unhappily famous. The dispute was peculiar to Las Vegas, where taxicab drivers had long collected “tokes” — kickbacks, in the plainer word — for delivering passengers to restaurants, wedding chapels, motels, and brothels. Deale played that game harder than anyone. Seven restaurants sued in June 1983 — the Flame, the Lobster Trap, Andre’s, the Port Tack, the Golden Steer, Piero’s, and the Cattlemen’s Steak House — alleging that Philips had conspired with taxicab companies and their drivers to divert passengers, and that the restaurant was paying three dollars a head to do it. Philips also outfitted drivers with hats, jackets, and menus advertising the place.

The lead plaintiff was Edward Jaffe, the owner of the venerable Flame, and the attorney was Frank Ellis III, whose investigators took 169 cab rides around the city. In 55 percent of them, Ellis reported, the driver tried to steer the passenger somewhere other than where he had asked to go. The pitch, as Ellis described it, was crude and effective: A rider asking for the Flame would be told the food was bad, the service was worse, and the health department had shut the place down. Ellis sued 11 cab companies, a number of individual drivers, and — in his own characterization — the biggest culprit, Philips Supper House. Jaffe had once paid cabbies 50 cents a head himself; when they pushed for a dollar and he balked, he said, they forgot his address.

Deale’s attorney, Albert Marquis, argued that no one had proven diversion and said his client would gladly stop paying if the rest of the town stopped too, an offer nobody rushed to accept. Marquis conceded the arrangement had become “something of a vicious circle.” The first judge to hear the matter, District Judge Carl Christensen, made his feelings unmistakable, telling both sides that if he were a dictator he would outlaw toking a cab driver altogether, and complaining that a driver could collect three dollars for delivering a turkey — which, he said, is what a passenger becomes when subjected to that kind of practice. The defense promptly asked him to step aside, and he did. The case moved to District Judge John Mendoza, with a ruling due at the end of March 1984 on whether the 11 cab companies would be cut out of the case and tried separately, and with trial set for June. Nevada made diversion an offense carrying a $50 fine, which, as Ellis noted, deterred no one. “The money is just too enticing for the cab drivers,” he said.

No verdict ever came. The parties agreed instead to an injunction against the tipping practice, and it accomplished nothing. “The problem with that was enforcing it,” Ellis said afterward. “As long as the carrot was out there, they kept going back.” Las Vegas City Attorney George Ogilvie was blunter: “The lawsuit really didn’t accomplish much. The parties in the lawsuit agreed to an injunction, but that proved ineffective.” Nevada’s statutes against diverting were by then 23 years old, and the state Taxicab Authority’s regulations carried penalties running from a warning to revocation of a driver’s permit. None of it worked, because all of it pointed at the driver and none of it at whoever was paying him.

So the restaurateurs went around the courts. In August 1985 Las Vegas made it an offense for a licensee to pay a cab driver for delivering customers, punishable by a $250 fine on a first offense, with the City Council empowered to revoke the license of anyone who kept at it. The following month the Clark County Liquor and Gaming Licensing Board wrote the same prohibition into the county Liquor Code and threatened violators with the loss of their licenses. Two people spoke at the hearing, both in favor. One was Van Heffner of the Nevada Restaurant Association, who told the board that reimbursing drivers was where the incentive to divert was born, and that the county amendment supplied the last piece of law the problem needed: the Taxicab Authority rules reached only the driver, he said, while this one reached the restaurateur. The other was Ellis, who called the practice unfair competition and, to his mind, a kickback — and who conceded that the new ordinance had probably finished his own case. The Philips suit had been pending 27 months. It was now, he said, most likely moot.

The litigation did nothing visible to Deale’s standing, and he kept courting out-of-town business through convention programs, airline magazines, advertising at McCarran International Airport (today Harry Reid International Airport), and mailings to meeting planners. For a while the restaurant ran its own van to return customers to their hotels, a service Deale eventually halted. “All you’d have to do is stop fast once and you’d have 14 lawsuits,” he explained. He kept the van anyway and drove it himself when a big convention made cabs impossible to find, using it, as he put it, at his discretion.

In 1985 he doubled down on the conceit that had made the building famous. Jerry Manrico, an Italian-born sculptor who had taught himself bas-relief plaster work and made his living designing restaurants, was commissioned to do the banquet room. What he produced was a 35-foot Golden Gate Bridge in relief, seen as it appears from behind Telegraph Hill — a Bay Area landmark reproduced 1,100 miles from the water, inside a building that was itself a reproduction. Manrico built his scenes up out of wet plaster with two putty knives and his fingers, then sealed them with oil paint cut with epoxy. Guests at wedding receptions and Rotary lunches ate their prime rib beneath his installation for the next 15 years.

In 1989 the day-to-day operation of Philips Supper House passed to younger hands. Bormann and a front-of-house veteran named Louis DeFilippis — who had begun in Las Vegas dining rooms as a waiter at DiMartino & Sons Italian Family Restaurant in 1978 — took over as the restaurant’s co-owners and operators, an arrangement that ran a full decade while Deale remained the name on the marquee and the presence at the door. By the mid-1990s the room drew roughly 65 percent locals and 35 percent tourists, the latter mostly conventioneers, and a considerable number of the locals had been coming since 1978. Bormann described the resulting atmosphere as something close to a family out in the dining rooms, which was charming and also, professionally speaking, a trap.

“Sometimes it’s hard, because every time we try new things, it seems we have to just keep adding and adding and we can never take anything off,” Bormann told a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1997. He repeated the complaint almost verbatim a year later, when a reporter canvassing local chefs about seasonal menus got nowhere with him. “I don’t have a summer menu,” Bormann said. “I have tried fruit salad and things like that, but our clientele is pretty much all regulars.” What he offered instead was accretion: “When we change our menu we don’t take anything off, we just keep adding.” Steak and seafood remained the spine of it. The menu that resulted was long, unfashionable, and exactly what the regulars wanted.

Two dishes carried the house. The first was the House Scampi, and by 1997 Bormann was uncompromising about it: only fresh Mexican white shrimp, jumbo, about a dozen to the pound, dipped in flour and sautéed two or three minutes until three-quarters done, the oil poured off, then finished with lemon, white wine, butter, garlic, and three-quarters of a cup of whipping cream boiled down hard. The shrimp ran about two dollars apiece, which he admitted was punishing. Substitutions were possible; two things were not. “It’s got to be real whipping cream and real butter,” he said. The other signature was scalone — ground abalone and sweet sea scallop meat pressed together, sautéed, and topped with an almond-butter sauce — an old Pacific Coast preparation that had all but vanished from menus elsewhere, and that former patrons would still be hunting for two decades after the restaurant closed. Elsewhere on the card were trout almondine, lobster Dijon, halibut piccata, prime rib, and Australian lobster tails.

There was a second constituency the guidebooks never mentioned. In the retelling of people who worked there, Philips Supper House functioned for years as a tableside clubhouse for the city’s political class, its civic operators and, in the standard Las Vegas formulation, its movers and shakers — a category that in that era shaded, without a firm border, into organized crime. The private booths and the five-seat side rooms were not an accident of floor plan, and neither, one suspects, was the former FBI man at the door. When the Las Vegas Sun revisited the city’s vintage restaurants in 2015, it described Philips flatly as a hangout for politicians, civic leaders, mobsters, and others of that description.

The restaurant closed briefly in the summer of 1997 for a remodel, and Bormann used the occasion to tinker with the menu. It was a quiet interval in what turned out to be the last stable stretch of the restaurant’s life. On January 6, 1999, Bormann and DeFilippis opened a place of their own — Tuscany Grill, at 4350 East Sunset Road in the fast-growing Green Valley area, in a space that had been Che Pasta — with Che Pasta’s former owner, Michael McQuady. They combined their menus. By that September, when a Review-Journal feature surveyed the restaurant boom in Henderson and Green Valley, the two men were described as former partners at Philips Supper House.

Deale, then in his early seventies and in declining health, sold the restaurant that same year to Martin W. Herbert, a manager with a résumé assembled almost entirely from marquee kitchens. Herbert had run Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House at the MGM Grand, Gallagher’s Steakhouse at New York-New York, Napa and the Voodoo Cafe and Lounge at the Rio, the nightclub Ra at the Luxor, and Rhodes Ranch Country Club; before Las Vegas he had worked at K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen and Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, and he held a business degree from the University of New Orleans. He was, in other words, a product of exactly the corporate, chef-branded Las Vegas dining economy that Philips Supper House had spent 21 years ignoring.

The changes came fast and were announced in the newspaper in early November 1999. “Supper House” was dropped from the name; the restaurant would be simply Philips. Lunch, never before served, would begin December 6. A late-night menu was planned for the lounge to catch the service-industry crowd coming off shift. The green wallpaper would go, replaced by a new color scheme, track lighting, greenery and new art; the lounge would be rebuilt. Herbert hired Michael Falduti — a graduate of the Atlanta Art Institute with a pastry credential from Ursula’s Cooking School in Atlanta and line-cook time at Emeril’s, Andre’s French Restaurant, and Ruth’s Chris — as executive chef in December, then brought in Kirk Costello, formerly of Emeril’s and Rosemary’s, who began making stocks from scratch, a practice the newspaper noted was new to the house.

Herbert was careful, in public, to sound reverent. “I want to create the feel of walking into someone’s home,” he told the Review-Journal in March 2000. The private dining booths would stay. So would the twilight menu, whose possible elimination had, he acknowledged, alarmed the regulars more than anything else about the sale. “At first diners were real worried about the change of ownership,” he said, “but we’ve retained them.” He was renovating in stages on purpose: “I just want to make it as graceful a change as possible so that we’re not shocking the loyal clientele.” He described the cooking, memorably, as straightforward, middle-of-the-road power food, and promised to keep the focus on steaks and seafood while diversifying around them.

The ambition underneath the reassurances was a different restaurant. “We’re trying to appeal to a wider market,” Herbert said. “Philips will evolve for a later crowd so we can capitalize on the local service industry market. I know a lot of people who would like a late-night place for something more than chicken wings and chicken fingers. People are looking for a cool, hip place to hang out.” The menu he built reflected it: lobster and crab stuffed shiitake mushrooms at $8.50, oysters Rockefeller Southern-style over creamy polenta with ham hocks at $9, a steak salad Napoleon at $10.50, braised lamb osso buco at $24.95, macadamia-crusted sea scallops at $20.95, lobster Thermidor at $29.95. An 11-ounce filet mignon still went for $24.95, a full pound of prime rib for the same.

He did not get to see it through. By the summer of 2000 the restaurant had changed hands again. A premiere party for the newly renovated Philips was thrown on July 11, hosted in part by the establishment’s new owners — Kevin and Victoria McMullen, and Vicki and Larry Smith — a group of partners based in Oklahoma City. Two weeks later the Review-Journal noted that Philips Restaurant was marking its 22nd anniversary with a full renovation of lounge and dining areas complete, now serving lunch from 11:30 to 3 on weekdays, dinner from 4:30 to 10 daily, and a late-night menu until 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

The Oklahoma partners were, in their own telling, carrying on the tradition, and one of their first acts was to put “Supper House” back on the sign. Kevin McMullen, the principal owner and a practicing surgeon in Oklahoma City, flew in often. Their remodel went further than Herbert’s: an entirely new lounge described as posh, a video poker bar (gaming at last, in the one Las Vegas restaurant that had built its identity on not having any), and private and main dining rooms redone in warm hues with bright fixtures and original artwork.

In July 2001 the dining room began moonlighting as a theater. A Dean Martin impersonator named Randy Urgola opened a show called “Return to the Sands — An Intimate Evening With Dean, Frank, and Friends” at Philips, running an early dinner performance and a late cocktail show, with Sinatra handled by his frequent California partner Gary Corselo. Because the Sahara Hotel already had a scripted Rat Pack tribute, Urgola went for cabaret looseness instead. “I’m going to make it a revolving door of guest performers,” he said. The restaurant also hosted an interactive murder mystery, “Talked to Death,” on selected nights that August. Two doors down at 4533 West Sahara, the Egg & I had been running its own murder-mystery show since 2000; the block had become, briefly, an unlikely off-Strip theater district.

The last routine notice the restaurant received in the Review-Journal was a health-inspection item in January 2002, reporting that Philips Supper House at 4545 West Sahara had taken zero demerits on a January 17 reinspection and been restored to an A grade — the mundane paperwork of a house that had slipped and recovered. Sometime that year it closed for good. What the address advertised next tells the rest of the story: a “Now Hiring” notice for a Latino nightclub. The club appears to have operated as La Pachanga, under the same Oklahoma ownership that had bought the restaurant two years earlier. It did not last either. When fire officials described the property in December 2004, they said the establishment had closed down, reopened briefly as a nightclub, and then sat vacant for roughly two years.

Philip Deale died in 2003 at age 75. He had been out of the business for several years, but Elsie Lyon, who had worked for him for more than 30 years, said he had told her only weeks earlier that he was thinking about buying the restaurant back and re-establishing the supper club under his own name, health problems notwithstanding. “He was always for the underdog, the underprivileged, gave so much to the homeless shelters here,” Lyon said. “He was a great person, great man to work for.” Van Heffner — by then the president and chief executive of the Nevada Restaurant Association, and the same man who had gone before the county board in 1985 to help outlaw what Deale had been doing — called Philips Supper House an old-time Las Vegas landmark and its founder a fine-dining restaurateur who had given the city a genuinely good room.

Eighteen months later the building followed him. At about three o’clock on the afternoon of December 3, 2004, fire broke out inside the vacant structure at 4545 West Sahara. Crews arriving found what Las Vegas Fire Department spokesman Tim Szymanski described as heavy fire and smoke, and the column rising off the old Victorian roofline was visible for miles. Roughly 20 units and 55 firefighters from Las Vegas and Clark County surrounded the building and poured as much as 4,000 gallons of water a minute onto it. Police shut Sahara Avenue between Decatur and Arville until about 5:30 p.m., backing traffic up in both directions for several blocks.

The smoke drew a crowd that parked in nearby lots to watch. Tamajon Bivins, who lived out near Buffalo Drive, caught a glimpse of the fire on television and loaded her nine-year-old son and his friend into the car. “We got in the car and just followed the smoke,” she said. “I thought it would be something fun to do with the kids.” Crews had the blaze under control in about 25 minutes and kept it from reaching neighboring homes and businesses, though Szymanski expected them to be chasing hot spots all night. Investigators found evidence that homeless people had been sheltering inside, and several witnesses reported seeing children playing around the building shortly before the fire started.

Mike and Theresa Lemmens, who lived directly behind the property, stood and watched the loss of what they remembered as an elegant restaurant with dark wood and romantic lighting. “Now it’s ruined,” Theresa Lemmens said. The Clark County Assessor listed the parcel’s new owner as Hallier Investments LLC, which, Szymanski said, intended to renovate the building into a retail center. Whatever survived the fire came down. The Golden Gate Bridge came down with it. Manrico had chosen his medium because it endured. The only way to get bas-relief off a wall, he liked to say, was to chisel it off.

What survived went east, to Henderson. Tuscany Grill, which Bormann, DeFilippis, and McQuady had opened in the last year of Philips’ independence, kept the old dishes on its menu — the scampi in a choice of heavy cream or garlic butter, the trout almandine, and the scalone — and kept the customers who ordered them. Some found their way there by accident and discovered the past sitting on the menu.

The site itself did not stay empty. Today 4545 West Sahara Avenue holds Rhythms Dance Studio & Event Center, a banquet hall and dance venue that rents its rooms for weddings and quinceañeras and, on some Saturday nights, opens the floor for salsa and bachata until well past ten. The Victorian is gone, and so is the bridge, and so are the booths and the twilight menu and the ex-FBI man at the door. But the parcel that Philip Deale bet on in 1978 is still, on the right night, a room full of people out west on Sahara who have somewhere to be.

August 9, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Glasgow/ Delaware

Crabmeat Imperial

Glasgow Arms Restaurant

2409 Pulaski Highway
Newark, Delaware

1937 – 1994

In 1937 Constantine “Gus” Sclavos opened a restaurant at the crossroads of U.S. Route 40 and Delaware Route 896 in Glasgow, Delaware. The location was strategic. Before the interstate-highway era, U.S. 40 was one of the principal automobile routes between Baltimore, Philadelphia, and points farther north, carrying an almost continuous procession of salesmen, vacationers, politicians, diplomats, newlyweds, and families past the restaurant’s front door.

Sclavos had spent years learning how to serve such travelers. Born in Greece, he’d come to the United States in 1917 and gotten a job as a toolmaker at a Bethlehem Steel plant in Baltimore. He later became a co-owner, with a partner named George Vaggie, of the Howard House Hotel in Elkton, Maryland, a town then known as the “Marriage Capital of the East.” Unlike its neighbors, Maryland required neither a waiting period nor a residency to obtain a marriage license, and Elkton, as the state’s most northeasterly county seat, was the closest such haven to Philadelphia, New York, and New England. At the height of the trade the town supported more than a dozen commercial wedding chapels, ministers who performed hundreds of ceremonies a month, and a syndicate of taxicab drivers who met the southbound trains and sold couples a package deal. Elkton recorded better than 16,000 marriages in 1938 alone, and its reputation was national. Joan Fontaine, Willie Mays, Martha Raye, Debbie Reynolds, and Cornel Wilde all took their vows there.

In 1931 Sclavos opened the Elk Restaurant in Elkton, but in 1937 the Maryland legislature passed a 48-hour waiting period for marriage licenses, aimed squarely at Elkton, and nobody in the town’s hospitality business could have mistaken what it meant. Petitions forced the question onto a statewide ballot, buying the chapels and the taxicab drivers and the restaurants a year’s reprieve, but in November 1938 voters approved the measure overwhelmingly, over the objection of Cecil County. The last of Elkton’s few-questions-asked weddings took place that December. Sclavos did not wait for the vote. He kept the Elk Restaurant running until 1938, but by then he had already opened the Glasgow Arms across the Delaware line, on a stretch of highway whose traffic depended on nobody’s marriage license.

The Glasgow Arms was neither a diner nor a roadside lunch counter. Sclavos conceived it as a proper restaurant — comfortable, substantial, and dignified enough for an anniversary dinner or wedding reception, yet accessible to the steady traffic along U.S. 40. Over time, the building developed into a sprawling, white-clapboard landmark whose Colonial appearance stood out in the broad commercial median where Routes 40 and 896 met.

Its name linked the restaurant to the community, which had itself been named by Scottish settlers for Glasgow, Scotland. The connection was made official in the restaurant’s insignia. With permission from the Lord Provost of Glasgow, the Glasgow Arms adopted that city’s coat of arms as its crest — the tree, the bell, the salmon with a ring in its mouth, and the motto “Let Glasgow Flourish” — and printed it in red on its menu covers above the line “Used by Permission Of The Lord Provost, Glasgow, Scotland.” In the years to come, Gus Sclavos would fill his restaurant with Scottish china, copperware, pewter, antique firearms, paintings, and other such objects.

These were not incidental decorations. They made the Glasgow Arms seem like an inn that had accumulated its furnishings over generations, distinguishing it from the multitude of cookie-cutter highway restaurants that began springing up after World War II. Here, both locals and travelers could relax in the atmosphere of an established country house.

The menus carried the theme as faithfully as the walls did. Printed on green foil stock crinkled to resemble hammered metal, they opened with the coat of arms stamped in red and closed with a back-cover history lesson: “Historic Glasgow, Aikentown (old name). Here came General Howe’s Army, September, 1777, and engaged General Washington’s Army at Cooch’s Bridge, 3 miles north of here, where the American Flag, adopted June 14, 1777, was first unfurled in battle. A substantial monument marks the site.”

Inside, the cooking was plainly and confidently mid-century American. A typed insert dated November 25, 1953, offered a $1.25 special dinner — juice or a cup of soup, a Spanish omelet or golden brown croquettes with brown gravy, two vegetables, rolls and butter, pudding or Jell-O or ice cream, and coffee or tea. Full-course dinners ran from grilled hamburg steak with onions and gravy at $1.60 to a grilled sirloin steak, cooked to order, at $4.00, with a mixed grill of lamb chop, calves liver, and Canadian bacon at $2.25, and backfin crabmeat imperial at $2.30. À la carte platters, served with two vegetables, rolls, and butter, included a boned and breaded center-cut pork chop at $1.10, homemade Boston baked beans en casserole with Canadian bacon at 90 cents, pan-fried calves liver with bacon and roast turkey with giblet gravy and cranberry sauce at $1.75 apiece, and fried half Delaware spring chicken at $1.80 — the last a nod to the broiler industry that had grown up in the counties to the south, and which the restaurant promoted with a small color card reading “Eat Delaware Chicken.” Vegetables ran to succotash, candied yams, pickled beets, and coleslaw. The sandwich list stretched from a chicken club at a dollar down to peanut butter and jelly at a quarter; the salads included jellied tomato aspic on lettuce for twenty cents; coffee was a dime, as were Postum and Sanka.

Three lines printed at the foot of the sandwich page amounted to a statement of principle: “Please Do Not Rush — Everything Is Cooked To Order.” “We Use Only Vegetable Shortening For Frying.” “Our Kitchen Is Open At All Times For Your Inspection.” The bar list opposite was long for a roadside restaurant — five dozen whiskies, brandies, and cordials, with a 25-year-old Ambassador scotch at 95 cents topping the column and Chivas Regal just below it, martinis at 55 cents, beer at 35 cents a bottle, and a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck champagne at $8. It closed with an invitation to visit the restaurant’s package store.

The Glasgow Arms was a family affair. Gus’s son, John A. Sclavos, had been born into the hotel and restaurant business — born, in fact, in the Howard House itself. As a boy at the hotel, he’d sketched guests on pieces of cardboard taken from cracker boxes. After graduating from Elkton High School in 1943, he joined the Marine Corps and served during World War II, and he would serve again in Korea. When he returned in 1947, he went directly to work at the Glasgow Arms, still wearing his uniform. “I didn’t even have time to buy civilian clothes,” he would later recall. “I was working in the restaurant in my uniform. I loved that business.”

John’s artistic interests followed him into the dining rooms. The illustrator Frank E. Schoonover and his wife frequently dined at the Glasgow Arms, and after John showed the noted artist some of his sketches, Schoonover invited him to study at his Wilmington studio. John attended classes twice a week for roughly four years. Schoonover believed that his student had the makings of a professional portraitist and offered to help establish him.

John declined. He enjoyed painting, but the restaurant had the stronger claim on him. “I liked to paint,” he told an interviewer in 1990, “but I loved the restaurant business more.”

He never stopped painting. Some of his landscapes and still lifes hung at the Glasgow Arms, where customers saw them and began commissioning portraits. Over the years, John turned out more than 200 portraits. The restaurant supplied not merely a livelihood but a clientele. John did not advertise his work or carry business cards; diners who knew him, or saw his paintings on the walls, approached him directly.

As the restaurant’s reputation grew, so did the range of people passing through it. Its position on U.S. 40 made it a natural stopping point for travelers between Washington and the Northeast. John Sclavos recalled serving politicians, bankers, real-estate figures, and foreign dignitaries. Among the visitors who made the greatest impression on him was Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. “I don’t know why exactly,” Sclavos said years later. “Maybe it’s only that once you are close to him you never forget the time, the circumstances.”

Even through the 1960s, the Glasgow Arms still benefited from its proximity to Elkton. Although the town had lost much of its earlier fame as the nation’s quickie-marriage capital, couples still arrived there to wed, and some crossed into Delaware afterward for a reception or celebratory meal. In January 1964 actress Joan Fontaine, then 46, married her fourth husband, Alfred Wright Jr., the golf editor of Sports Illustrated, at the Cecil County Courthouse, and the wedding party’s first stop afterward was the Glasgow Arms. “I knew it was a wedding party,” John Sclavos said. “One of the girls told me it was Joan Fontaine. I found an excuse to go over and take a look. I’ll tell you one thing. She’s a lot prettier, a lot younger looking than her pictures would have you believe.”

The Glasgow Arms also appeared in a brochure published by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) that identified desegregated restaurants along Route 40, placing it squarely within a larger struggle over travel in the mid-Atlantic states. In the summer of 1961, several newly arrived African diplomats were refused service at segregated restaurants along the highway in Maryland, provoking formal protests to President John F. Kennedy and considerable embarrassment for an administration courting the newly independent nations of Africa. CORE, extending the momentum of the southern Freedom Rides, organized a Route 40 campaign of sit-ins and freedom motorcades between the Delaware Memorial Bridge and Baltimore. During the civil-rights era, African American motorists traveling the corridor could not assume that every restaurant would serve them. CORE publicized businesses where service was available, the Glasgow Arms among them, making restaurant integration a matter not only of principle but of practical safety and mobility.

The Glasgow Arms offered abundance rather than novelty. Portions were generous, sauces familiar, and ingredients, at the restaurant’s best, minimally adulterated. The kitchen’s recipe for a pound of crab imperial began with a pound of crabmeat, and the finished dish carried little filler.

Interstate 95 would change everything. President Kennedy dedicated the Delaware Turnpike, the state’s link in the new expressway, on November 14, 1963, in one of his last public appearances, and the road diverted much of the long-distance traffic that for decades had sustained businesses along U.S. 40. The old highway remained busy, but it was no longer the region’s indispensable east-west artery. Travelers in a hurry now passed several miles north of the Glasgow Arms. What had been a prime position gradually became an isolated one.

The Sclavos family nevertheless kept the restaurant going. John took the reins in 1967, although the business continued to involve other family members, including his sister Mary and his wife, Stephanie “Stell” Sclavos. Stephanie had married John in 1954 and joined him, his father, and his sister in operating the restaurant.

The continuity was a strength, but it also encouraged resistance to changing fashions. By the 1970s restaurants were embracing theme concepts, casual service, lighter cooking, and an expanding range of international influences. The Glasgow Arms remained committed to the menu and manner that had made it successful. Customers came for familiar food, full service, and a setting ideal for anniversary dinners, family celebrations, club meetings, prom-night meals, wedding receptions, and the like. For generations of local residents, being taken to the Glasgow Arms signaled that an occasion mattered.

Gus Sclavos died in 1985 at age 88. He had continued working at the restaurant until two weeks before his death. By then, the establishment he created had become conspicuously old-fashioned. A critic visiting that year observed that it was not run-down but “fashionably dated.” The restaurant still offered two vegetables with dinner. Salads were conventional, the wine list unsophisticated, and most desserts bought from an outside bakery. The one dessert still made on the premises was rice pudding, which had been on the menu since at least the early 1950s. But the portions were generous, service cheerful, and prices moderate. A five-course meal for two, with wine and tip, barely exceeded $30. “Keeping in mind its conventionality,” the reviewer concluded, “the Glasgow Arms is a good restaurant.”

Family and financial troubles compounded the challenges of a shifting market. During the 1980s, a dispute between John and his sister led to the Internal Revenue Service padlocking the restaurant for nearly a year. John declined to publicly describe the underlying disagreement, but in April 1987 he became sole owner of the Glasgow Arms and prepared to reopen the restaurant after renovations that included new carpeting and draperies and an entirely rebuilt kitchen.

The reopening, however, did not provide a lasting solution, as the Glasgow Arms continued to evoke the grand roadside restaurants of the late 1950s. It had once employed as many as 72 people, but its staff had fallen to about 30 by the spring of 1989, when Sclavos closed the doors again and put the property up for sale. He later attributed the business’s troubles in part to undercapitalization, and in part to demographics: Age had taken the restaurant’s affluent clientele, and younger diners had found flashier places to eat. He refused to chase them. “I just wouldn’t get trendy — Cajun food and all that,” he explained.

Still, Sclavos believed in the site, as residential and commercial development was accelerating between U.S. 40 and Interstate 95. “That’s always been a heck of a corner,” he said, “and now everything’s coming to Glasgow.”

A buyer came quickly. In May 1989 John Koutoufaris — the owner of the Blue Coat Inn in Dover and president of Clubs International, Inc., the Dover company that also held the Sea Horse restaurant in Rehoboth Beach — announced that he had bought the Glasgow Arms for $1,125,000. Its purchase and renovation formed part of a $3.5 million financing package assembled through the Commissioner’s Economic Development Fund, a pool of investment commitments that Delaware Insurance Commissioner David N. Levinson had won from state-chartered insurers and directed toward job-creating projects. Koutoufaris proposed hiring 75 workers at the Glasgow Arms, giving preference, at Levinson’s request, to employees who had lost their jobs when the restaurant closed, while an expansion of the Sea Horse was expected to create roughly another 25. Roughly $800,000 was earmarked for Glasgow Arms renovations, including a rebuilt kitchen, a new cocktail lounge, and a reconstructed reception lobby.

Koutoufaris planned changes but understood that the old rooms were the restaurant’s principal asset. “Some of those rooms are so classic that I wouldn’t change them,” he told the News Journal. The menu, long rooted in steaks, seafood, and mid-Atlantic standards, would lean more heavily toward seafood.

With the sale closed, John Sclavos had no restaurant to open for the first time in more than 40 years. He built a skylighted studio beside his house in Glasgow, roughly 600 feet off U.S. 40, and took up full time the work Frank Schoonover had pressed on him four decades earlier. Among his subjects was Sherman Tribbitt, who had eaten at the Glasgow Arms for years before and during his term as governor. “He’d even hold the door open for people — imagine the governor helping you out the door,” Sclavos recalled. “Anyway, soon after he was elected, he came in and said, ‘John, will you paint my portrait when I leave the office?’ and I agreed.”

The new investment could not reverse the larger shifts in dining and development. By the early 1990s, Glasgow was one of Delaware’s fastest-growing areas, but growth did not restore the old roadside culture. Subdivisions and shopping centers brought young families accustomed to casual chains, fast food, and lower-priced restaurants. The Glasgow Arms, with its paneled dining rooms and entrées priced around $15, seemed formal and expensive even though its prices were moderate by fine-dining standards.

In February 1994, general manager Dave Regan announced that the Glasgow Arms would close for remodeling and reopen as two more casual operations. Part of the building would become a pancake house, a concept borrowed from the Blue Coat Inn. The former bar, lounge, and banquet section would become the Glasgow Pub Room, offering “pub-type food” with nearly all entrées priced at around $12. Modifications would not be extensive, Regan said, though the lobby would change considerably and the back-in-time atmosphere of the pine-paneled dining rooms was unlikely to survive.

An advertisement invited customers to give “a fond farewell to the historic Glasgow Arms Restaurant” before its reintroduction as the Pancake House and Glasgow Pub Room. On February 19, 1994, after 57 years, the last meal was served under the Glasgow Arms name.

The replacement restaurants failed to establish themselves. Several family-dining concepts occupied the building in succession, but none inherited the loyalty that had accumulated during the Sclavos years. Eventually the old structure stood vacant.

The white-clapboard building had marked the crossroads for more than half a century, surviving the decline of U.S. 40, the rise of the interstate, family disputes, federal padlocks, and repeated efforts at reinvention. For residents of Glasgow, its end carried a significance greater than the disappearance of another restaurant.

The demolition crews arrived in 1997, and residents gathered at a civic meeting as the building came down. “They bulldozed it today,” Lillian McMichael glumly told her neighbors. McMichael, who’d once waitressed at the Sherwood Diner across the intersection, could scarcely see the logic. “It’s just gone … and for what?” she asked. “An Arby’s?”

“I know, can you believe it?” replied Jeanine Gerrick, the group’s vice president. “More fast food. Just what Glasgow needs.” The Sherwood itself had already given way to a McDonald’s. Two locally distinctive roadside restaurants had now been replaced by national chains on opposite sides of the same crossroads.

There was, however, one survivor. The light that once topped the Glasgow Arms was salvaged and installed atop the ChesDel Restaurant on U.S. 13, south of the St. Georges Bridge — itself an assemblage of two displaced diners, the Country Girl, moved out of Wilmington when Interstate 95 cut through the city, and the Viking, brought down from Hares. There the light went on burning over another stretch of Delaware highway until the ChesDel, too, closed in 2018.

August 8, 2026 By Bill Hogan

New York/ New York

Beef Stroganoff

Two Guitars

244 East 14th Street
New York, New York

1949 – 1969

Long before anyone hung a sign reading “Two Guitars” over the doorway at 244 East 14th Street in New York City, the address was already one of downtown Manhattan’s reliable portals to old Russia. The Russian Kretchma — the name means a country inn or tavern — had been serving borscht, shashlik, and chicken à la Kiev to New Yorkers since the mid-1920s, part of a wave of eating places that appeared after the Bolshevik Revolution deposited some 6,000 White Russian exiles, many of them former officers, aristocrats, and members of the intelligentsia, on the city’s doorstep. Most of the celebrated Russian rooms — the Russian Bear, Casino Russe, the Maisonette Russe, the Russian Tea Room — clustered in midtown. The Kretchma held down the Lower East Side end of the trade, a few steps off Second Avenue in the heart of what was then the Yiddish theater district, and it made no apology for its basement Bohemianism. One prewar New York guidebook warned diners that the room lay down a steep flight of stairs, that the waiters in Russian blouses served you when they thought of it and pushed pressed caviar when they didn’t, and that the clientele ran to long-haired gentlemen, short-haired ladies, and sad-eyed literary types in thick spectacles — and then recommended the place anyway, as an adventure not soon forgotten.

The Kretchma’s floor show was the real draw. As late as September 1948, a Minneapolis travel columnist advising a reader who preferred balalaika music to chow mein steered her to “the Russian Kretchma, at 244 East 14th street,” noting that it had been popular for its food and for a floor show full of singing, folk-festing, high-booted dagger-leaping, and juggling. For a stretch in the late 1920s the Kretchma’s star attraction was Nastia (Anastasia) Poliakova, the celebrated Romani contralto who had reigned at the Yar, Moscow’s famous gypsy restaurant, in the empire’s final years. She sang before Czar Nicholas II and at the country estate of the novelist Leo Tolstoy, and toured Russia in a private railroad car before the Revolution sent her fleeing to Turkey and scattered the Yar’s performers across Europe. Poliakova’s deep, dark voice, Time magazine observed when she arrived in the United States, perfectly suited the rambling, improvised style of the gypsy song. Legend attached her even more tightly to imperial Russia’s last days: She was said to have been Grigori Rasputin’s favorite singer. A columnist who recalled the old Kretchma years later mourned that the aging singer, who was reputed to carry more native gypsy melodies in her head than anyone alive, died in 1947 before anyone thought to record them.

In 1949 Alexis Antonoff, a White Russian from Sevastopol, and his Irish-American wife, the former Betty Lynch, bought the old Kretchma for $20,000 and gave it a new name — one every Russian in New York would have recognized instantly. “Two Guitars,” or “Dve Gitary,” is among the most beloved of all Russian gypsy romances, a song of two guitars whining beyond the wall, and the choice announced exactly what kind of evening the new proprietors intended to sell.

On October 8, 1949, the New York Daily News carried an advertisement for the “bright new night club” at 244 East 14th: dinner from five to nine at $1.75 and up, supper, a Russian floor show, balalaika music, and “dynamic dancers,” with a $2.50 Saturday minimum. A menu dated the very next day, Sunday, October 9, 1949 — preserved in the New York Public Library’s menu collection — shows what $1.75 and up actually bought. The à la carte card opened with Zakuska Two Guitars at 75 cents, chopped chicken liver and pickled herring at 45 cents, shrimp cocktail at 65 cents, red caviar garni at 75 cents, and, for the extravagant, fresh Beluga caviar at $4. The Russian entrées ran from blinchiki with sour cream at $1.25 and Siberian pelmeny at $2 through beef à la Stroganoff at $2.50, the Special Two Guitars Shashlik at $2.55, and Cucumber Shashlik at $2.75, up to Cutlet Kiev — the butter-gushing house glory — and blini with Beluga caviar at $4 and $4.50 respectively. There was even a Cutlet Poliansky at $2, an apparent tip of the toque to Konstantin “Kostya” Poliansky, the house bandleader. The table d’hôte listed Cornish de Volaille, Lamb Kula, filet of sole, roast duckling, Caucasian shashlik, and shashlik à la Tiflis. And the kitchen hedged its bets in the American manner: alongside the zakuska and kissel sat shrimp cocktail, chicken salad, Nova Scotia salmon, and a 45-cent Manhattan at the bar. By 1951 the club’s newspaper advertising had settled into a confident formula: “Superb Food — Gypsy Music — Continental Floor Shows.”

Antonoff’s route to East 14th Street had little in common with the standard refugee itinerary. He escaped Russia after the Revolution aboard a Greek ship and spent eight years knocking around the world’s ports before finally landing in New York. During World War II he served four years in the Pacific as a staff sergeant with the Fifth Air Force. Afterward he took a job as maître d’hôtel at the old Russian Skazka, and it was there that he met Betty Lynch, a buyer of children’s wear who dined at the Skazka often enough for the acquaintance to ripen into marriage. Betty had lived for a time in Hammond, Indiana, and the hometown paper kept affectionate track of her. When a Hammond Times correspondent covering the couture Press Week shows was swept off to the club in 1959 by a party of Midwestern fashion editors, she reported home that Two Guitars, “a gay Russian restaurant supper club,” was operated by Betty and Alexis Antonoff, an Irish-Russian combination of owner and host, and that Mrs. Antonoff was a beauty.

The Antonoffs’ shrewdest decision was to change almost nothing else. They preserved the old White Russian customs for which the Kretchma had been famous, and the club became a fixture of the émigré liturgical calendar — Russian Christmas on January 7, Russian New Year’s on January 13, and Russian Easter, which in some years arrived in tandem with the Western feast. Continuity extended to the payroll: The fierce-looking dagger dancer who pinned dollar bills to the floor with flung knives, Mischa Uzdanoff, had performed the same trick at the old Kretchma. A guidebook writer of the era counted Two Guitars among the last of the oldtime Russian restaurants in New York still offering the full Muscovite bill — gypsy singers, balalaika players, and dagger dancers — and pronounced a visit during the Russian holidays a “must.”

A vivid contemporary snapshot of the room comes from Arthur Gelb, who toured Manhattan’s foreign cafés for The New York Times in February 1961. At Two Guitars, a White Russian establishment where the Irish proprietor’s Sevastopol-born husband presided over the bar, Gelb found a pair of dancers in native dress, Ivan Nepa and Sonia; the balalaika player Sasha Polinoff, doubling as a sad-faced master of ceremonies — Russian temperament, you know; a little gypsy orchestra led by Kostya Poliansky; a singer named Edi Hellas; and, memorably, “one of the most cheerfully inept knife throwers” to be found this side of the Volga.

Poliansky and Polinoff were the twin pillars of the entertainment, and both were considerable figures in the small, tenacious world of Russian musical New York. Poliansky, born in Kharkov in 1901, had led his first balalaika band at age 15, fled Russia through Constantinople in 1918, worked the ships of the Messageries line with an orchestra of fellow exiles, and reached New York in 1923. Over the next half century he played virtually every Russian room in the city while writing for radio, television, and film. Sasha Polinoff, the house balalaika virtuoso, achieved a species of immortality that eluded nearly everyone else on the payroll: Monitor Records, the New York world-music label founded in 1956 by Michael Stillman and Rose Rubin, put him on vinyl. His album “Russian Cabaret: The Balalaika of Sasha Polinoff,” recorded with Poliansky’s Russian Gypsy Ensemble and released in 1965, opened its liner notes with an evocation of the club itself: Wander into the dimly lit Russian café in lower Manhattan called the Two Guitars on almost any evening, the notes promised, and you would find Polinoff entertaining the guests — “Sasha sets the Slavic mood for the vodka, caviar, and the Kiev cutlets.” Polinoff and his ensemble also backed the club’s resident chanteuse, Alya Uno — the Roma-born Alya Yunakovskaya — on a Monitor LP of her own, “Songs of a Russian Gypsy,” with 14 numbers on the joys and sorrows of Romani life. Both records can still be streamed today, which means that anyone can summon, more or less intact, the sound of an evening at 244 East 14th Street.

The regulars who filled the little room needed no liner notes. Many were Russian and Jewish émigrés who came to reminisce, and the club obliged with sing-alongs of the old folk songs. One patron of the 1960s, a Frenchwoman named Françoise, remembered the place decades later as a tiny cellar with only about ten tables, a wonderful woman singer with a smoky voice, and a great deal of communal singing in Russian and Yiddish. Another, Claire, recalled a date there in 1963 or 1964 when Alya Uno sang in many languages: “The evening was unforgettable,” she wrote, adding a lament that would serve as the epitaph for the whole genre — they don’t make them like that anymore. The club even acquired an unofficial theme song of sorts, at one remove: “The Kretchma,” the mock-Russian comedy number by songwriter Gene Raskin that Theodore Bikel recorded for Elektra in 1959 and performed for years afterward, spoofed exactly the kind of candlelit, Cossack-guarded, vodka-soaked establishment that the old Kretchma had been — and at least one veteran of the New York balalaika world insisted the song was written about the 14th Street original. Sasha Ressetar, a balalaika player and friend of Polinoff’s, also passed along the club’s most glamorous piece of lore: that Vera Bryner, the lyric soprano sister of Yul Brynner, once sang at Two Guitars. Bryner, who had performed Russian and Roma songs with her brother in the émigré nightclubs of prewar Paris before building an American career that included the original Broadway run of Menotti’s “The Consul,” was certainly the sort of artist the room attracted.

By the mid-1960s the club was making its accommodations with the age. In 1965 a nightlife column reported, with evident amusement, that Kostya Poliansky and His Gypsies had “succumbed to the Go-Go cartel” and would, if you insisted, play for the Frug, the Monkey, the Mule — or the Kazatski. The old calendar still governed the big nights, though. In April 1968 the club staged a two-night Russian Easter pageant with authentically costumed performers: the singer Alya Uno, the sword dancer Vladimir Lazarev, the balalaika soloist Sasha Polinoff, and Kostya Poliansky and his Gypsy Dance Band. Later that year, after a seasonal closing, Two Guitars reopened with a new show in which Mischa Danilo took over the balalaika solos alongside Uno, Lazarev, and the Poliansky orchestra, and that winter the club advertised its Russian New Year’s celebration — January 14 by then, the calendar having drifted a day — at $15 a head. The last documented flicker comes from a New York Times cabaret listing of April 12, 1969, announcing a Greek Orthodox Easter celebration at Two Guitars, and in December 1970 a new establishment, the Russian Troika, opened at the site of the old Two Guitars.

The club was gone by the time the next generation of balalaika players arrived in New York; Ressetar, who worked the city’s Russian circuit for some 15 years, lamented that he had come too late to hear Polinoff play the room. Poliansky performed in New York’s Russian restaurants until 1972 and died the following year. What survives of Two Guitars is scattered but surprisingly rich: the 1949 menu in the New York Public Library; the Monitor LPs; and a sheaf of promotional glossies preserved from the files of the newspaper restaurant critic Robert W. Dana, whose “Tips on Tables” column archive keeps alive the faces of the club’s forgotten troupers — Kiko de Brazil, Lubov Hamshay (“the Manhattan Gypsy”), Marina Federova, Olga Karpis, the belly dancer Scheherazade, and Alya Uno, who sang, danced, and played guitar. None of them became household names. But for 20 years, in a dim cellar just off Second Avenue, they made a room full of exiles feel, for the length of a floor show, that they were home again.

August 8, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Chicago/ Illinois

Chicken Mushroom Soup

Johnstone’s Restaurant

4747 West Peterson Avenue
Chicago, Illinois

1952 – 1964

In 1946, the corner of Peterson and Cicero Avenues sat at the quiet northwestern edge of Chicago, where the Sauganash neighborhood’s brick bungalows gave way to open lots and the city thinned toward Lincolnwood. That year a small, plain building went up on the southwest corner: a cozy snack shop called The Pie Pan, which built an enormous following on a single specialty — pie, eventually in more than 30 varieties — with hamburgers and frozen custard on the side. Its proprietor was Shelby C. Johnstone, a Texas-born pie man who had come up in the trade the hard way, driving one of the distinctive red-and-yellow pastry wagons that once plied Chicago’s streets.

Johnstone, as it happened, did more than anyone to put those wagons out of business. He developed a commercial method for the frozen pie — crust and filling assembled in advance, held at low temperature, and baked only when needed — an idea that would eventually remake the American dessert aisle, and he was pursuing it on an industrial scale well beyond his corner shop. He had joined the Lloyd J. Harriss Pie Company, one of Chicago’s leading commercial bakeries — a firm that had built its trade before the war delivering fresh pies in metal cases along established city routes to restaurants, lunchrooms, grocers, and other institutional customers — as a special delivery man, and over the years he methodically worked himself up the ladder until he was an officer and, finally, the president of the company’s Chicago-based operation. A news photograph that appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1950 shows him displaying quick-frozen pies ready to be shipped all over the country, along with a frozen strawberry shortcake that required no baking at all; within a few years, Harriss would open a dedicated frozen-pie plant in Saugatuck, Michigan, close to the orchards of the western Michigan fruit belt, on its way to becoming one of the largest independent pie manufacturers in the United States. Johnstone backed his own end of the enterprise with equipment of his own invention: the “Shelby Oven,” as it was called, could seamlessly move pies from freezer to oven in the window of a restaurant, bakery, or other establishment, leaving them table-ready in just 45 minutes.

By 1951 the sleepy corner had become valuable ground. The Edens Expressway opened that December, and its curving approach ramps deposited a river of automobile traffic practically at the Pie Pan’s door. Johnstone was ready for it. In December, help-wanted advertisements began appearing for “Chicago’s newest and most beautiful restaurant,” set to open in a week’s time and promising top salaries, ideal working conditions, hospitalization, insurance, and paid vacations. The debut slipped to January 3, 1952, but when the doors opened, the southeast corner of Peterson and Cicero, on leased ground directly across from the little drive-in, held a big, showy, California-style building of brick and glass: Johnstone’s Restaurant and Bakery.

The new restaurant was built to impress. Some $3,000 worth of living plants — 38 varieties, each labeled for the botanically curious — filled the dining room, which seated 306; the parking lot held 500 cars. The kitchen was all gleaming stainless steel. A thousand pies at a time waited in the deep freeze, and the Shelby oven turned out 400 of them a day. A columnist for the Chicago Tribune, surveying the intersection that first year, pronounced it “a pie eater’s paradise” and crowned Johnstone its “potentate.” The Pie Pan advertised no fewer than 32 varieties; the new restaurant fielded an equally formidable lineup. The bakers were proudest of the lemon meringue, raspberry, strawberry, and Southern pecan, but the adventurous eater could find nearly anything between the flaky crusts — sweet potato, gooseberry, boysenberry, even fruit salad.

Where the Pie Pan leaned on the hamburger, the dining room across the street concentrated on a tight roster of a half-dozen entrées, including fried chicken, deep-fried shrimp, lake perch, prime rib of beef, and frogs’ legs. Four salads came with every dinner, served family style. It was solid, generous, middle-of-the-road cooking, and the neighborhood heartily embraced it.

Johnstone himself was rapidly becoming one of the Northwest Side’s more colorful citizens. In 1954 he was showing movies of an Alaskan hunting expedition to local audiences: He and his wife, Marie, had hunted wild sheep and caribou in the Kenai River country south of Anchorage, gotten thoroughly lost, and been rescued by a bush pilot. The walls of the Pie Pan filled up with mounted prize catches and hunting trophies, mementos of the owner’s consuming passion for rod and gun.

The Tribune caught the operation at its peak in 1955. Sauganash housewives, the paper’s “Have You Heard?” columnist observed, didn’t bother baking pies — not with a resident expert who had been “dabbling in dough for over two decades” across the street. The count now stood at 31 varieties — including apple, cherry, banana cream, coconut custard, pineapple, gooseberry, boysenberry, blackberry, rhubarb, lemon cream, raisin, and cherry cream — and if the one you wanted wasn’t on hand, the bakery would have it ready within two hours. In season, fresh fruit went into the whipped-cream pies. The columnist’s own dinner began sensibly with the four family-style salads, proceeded through a filet of fresh whitefish broiled in butter, and detoured happily into a bottomless basket of hot breads — cornbread among them, along with a crisp, feather-light biscuit the house called batter bread — before arriving at a strawberry cream pie piled with whole berries and fresh whipped cream. The writer detected “a slight tinge of southern influence” running through the menu — the pan-fried chicken, the pecan and sweet potato pies, the cornbread — and Johnstone confirmed that all of it was a souvenir of his boyhood in Georgia, where his parents had moved after he was born. The menus themselves carried a tongue-in-cheek motto that told customers exactly how seriously to take it all: “What foods these morsels be.”

Success bred expansion. In 1956 Johnstone took over the Mardi Gras restaurant at Touhy and Lincoln Avenues in suburban Lincolnwood — the former House of Pierre — and opened his third establishment, a rambling, ranch-type Johnstone’s with a New Orleans motif. Some 200 diners could be seated in its New Orleans, Pink, and Louisiana rooms, with more space at a C-shaped bar (the only bar in the chain; the Peterson Avenue restaurants had none) and in a thickly carpeted lobby. A fountain played in the main room, huge bay windows overlooked the busy intersection, background music soothed the diners, and the Louisiana room’s west wall carried a colorful display of cutouts, mobiles, and Old South folklore symbols.

The Johnstone empire’s numbers, laid out in a pair of 1956 newspaper features, were remarkable for a business built on a snack shop: three booming restaurants and bakeries selling 25,000 pies a month over the retail counters alone. The Lincolnwood menu ran to U.S. prime charcoal-broiled steaks and chops prepared on an open hearth — a filet mignon was $4.25 à la carte with salad bowl, potatoes, and Johnstone’s own rolls; a porterhouse, $5 — and the menu instructed diners precisely what each degree of doneness would deliver, from a rare steak’s “red cool center” on up, while the management recommended rare or medium for fullest enjoyment. There were giant butterfly French-fried shrimp with potatoes and salad for $1.60, hickory-smoked baked ham with candied yams, and fresh seafood. But the pride and joy remained the pan-fried chicken: $1.60, served disjointed — no carving required — with potatoes, tossed salad, and hot rolls. One reviewer, working through an enormous slice of the best-known pie in the house — the fresh strawberry cream — concluded that Johnstone attached no secrets or formulas to his success; he simply served good food at fair prices in a pleasant environment.

The Peterson Avenue flagship, meanwhile, had been dressed in a modern-American motif: three comfortable rooms with leather booths, a distinctive beamed ceiling, and a color scheme of sandalwood tan and forest green. Its kitchen now deployed a special fryer that could prepare 150 chickens every 15 minutes.

The Lincolnwood palace turned out to be a short chapter in the story. In early 1957 Johnstone sold it to Steve De Kosta of the Near North Side’s Huckster Key Club, who reopened the room that March as the Huckster’s Country Club, admission by key only.

Johnstone had bigger game in mind — literally. That same year, he and three friends — Norman Johnson, a manufacturer of fireproof doors; William Koenig, a building contractor; and Arvin Strom, the owner of a chain of gift shops — capped a full year of preparation with a three-month safari through Kenya, Tanganyika, and the Belgian Congo, their first trip to Africa. They carried the flag of the Adventurers Club of Chicago, the storied explorers’ fraternity founded in 1911, and they came home with 27 trophies — rhino, buffalo, zebra, antelope, hartebeest, gazelle, waterbuck, and other plains game — along with, as one account tallied it, “inexhaustible memories, insect bites, and a few broken bones.”

The safari would define the restaurant’s final act. In 1958 Johnstone took on a partner: Richard “Dick” Grassfield, a restaurant man who had spent nine years with the Cleveland-based Stouffer restaurant organization and owned Grassfield’s Jefferson Cafeteria in Bloomington, Illinois. When Johnstone retired in May 1960, Grassfield carried on, advertising the house as Grassfield’s Johnstone Restaurant, and he kept the founder’s spirit conspicuously on the walls. A 1961 write-up singled out the restaurant’s unusual Safari Room, done up in leopard carpeting and leopard lampshades, hung with wildebeest and zebra skins, game heads, and masks — all reflecting, as the item noted, the hobby of the original owner, the Adventurers Club member and wild-game hunter Shelby Johnstone.

Under Grassfield the kitchen kept up its industrial rhythms: By 1962 it was running a thousand lake perch a day through the fryer. In 1963 the restaurant advertised a complete seven-course old-fashioned turkey dinner, with all the fixings, for Thanksgiving or Christmas at $3.25. Johnstone himself, though retired from the restaurant, was anything but idle — that same year Chicago television viewers could find him on WBBM-TV’s World of Adventure, hosted by Carter Davidson, in an episode billed as “Hunting the Big 5 in Angola,” matching his rifle against Africa’s most dangerous game. But for the restaurant, the end was near. By 1964 it had closed its doors, replaced by Hagerty’s Buffet Restaurant, with Schmitt Bakeries advertising from the same address. Twelve years after the California-style palace of pie opened for business, the Johnstone name had disappeared from the corner it had made famous.

Shelby Johnstone never stopped chasing the wild. He resurfaced in the national press in 1967, and the story was pure Johnstone. Residents of Portland, Oregon, called the police one morning to report a huge cheetah loose in their Southeast Side neighborhood. It belonged to Johnstone — now describing himself as a professional hunter and photographer — who was staying overnight with friends and had tied his 70-pound cat, Sheba, to their fence. “Oh, that cat wouldn’t hurt anybody,” he assured a reporter for the Associated Press. “She’s very gentle.” Sheba, he added, had always been “very well accepted” at hotels and motels. And in 1981 a columnist for the Oakland Tribune in California noted that Shelby Johnstone, Jr., a representative of the Jolly Time Popcorn Company of Sioux City, Iowa, had been squired to dinner at Francesco’s and identified the young man’s father, in passing, as “the famous big-game hunter of Sedona, Arizona.” The senior Johnstone had died earlier that year at age 81. The pioneer of the frozen pie, the potentate of the pie eater’s paradise, had passed into the record one last time, 2,000 miles from Peterson and Cicero — remembered not for a wedge of pie, but for the gun.

August 6, 2026 By Bill Hogan

St. Johnsbury/ Vermont

Maple Muffins

Maple Cabin

1052 Portland Street
St. Johnsbury, Vermont

1920 – 1951

“Keep your eye on Maple Town!” the St. Johnsbury Republican urged its readers at the beginning of a page-one story in 1920. This was the newly minted name for an old stretch of the Vermont village — the upper end of Portland Street, where the George C. Cary Company was then erecting an enormous sugar factory. Standing beside the rising plant was the neighborhood’s first finished landmark: a rustic log structure called the Maple Cabin, completed only days earlier at 167 Portland Street, whose immediate patronage, the newspaper observed, already “justifies the enterprise.”

The enterprise behind the Maple Cabin was considerable. George Clinton Cary had founded the Cary Maple Sugar Company in St. Johnsbury in 1904, building it from a bulk sugar-buying operation — much of his early product went to flavor plug tobacco — into what was reckoned to be a million-dollar business. By the 1920s the company controlled as much as 80 percent of the world’s bulk maple sugar trade, newspapers had crowned George Cary the “Maple King,” and St. Johnsbury was styling itself the Maple Center of the World. The Portland Street plant anchoring Maple Town was the physical expression of that dominance, a processing and distribution complex fed by a network of warehouses and hundreds of local sugar buyers strung along Vermont’s railroad lines. The Maple Cabin was its public face: a place where the traveling motorist, rather than the tobacco company purchasing agent, could meet Cary’s products on friendly terms.

The Maple Cabin settled quickly into the rhythms of a seasonal roadside business, timed to the summer tourist flow along Portland Street, which carried the main highway east toward the White Mountains. An advertisement announced its opening for the season on July 4, 1922, and the operation soon grew beyond syrup and sugar into a full-fledged tearoom and gift shop of the sort then flourishing on the nation’s new automobile routes. A 1925 advertisement promised “a choice selection of Spanish and Italian Pottery and other attractive gifts,” along with woven scarves, table runners, bags, rugs, handkerchief dolls, and babies’ jackets, bonnets, and booties — a lineup of products pitched squarely at the touring wife with a back seat to fill.

Management changed hands more than once in the early years; the Maple Cabin reopened “under new management” in the spring of 1928, and by decade’s end the merchandise had taken on a distinctly continental sweep for a log cabin in the Northeast Kingdom. “Ice Cream — Cold Drinks — Novelty Souvenirs,” ran a 1929 advertisement, which went on to tout “an extensive assortment of Navajo Rugs purchased directly from the Indians in Arizona and New Mexico,” alongside the house staples: “a full line of delicious maple syrup, sugar, and candies.”

The figure most closely identified with the Maple Cabin was Josephine Cary Smith, George Cary’s sister, who by a later account operated the establishment from 1926 to 1939. Under her hand it became one of the busiest tourist stops in the region. In 1929 alone, roughly 10,000 visitors signed the guest book, and in 1930 the sponsors answered the demand by constructing a second building across the way, the Maple Cabin Inn, with a lobby, two rooms with bath, and an apartment for the hostess, to be supplemented — so the plan went — by tourist cabins the following year. The dining room, meanwhile, had found its signature dish, with the local newspaper reporting that it continued “to serve the chicken and waffles for which it has become famous,” along with soups, salads, homemade cakes, and other specialties.

Josephine Cary Smith was not shy about the obstacles between her customers and her door. In 1930 she wrote a pointed letter to the St. Johnsbury Caledonian-Record reporting that seven out of ten tourists complained to her, unsolicited, about the “dreadful condition of Vermont roads.” It was the testimony of a woman who spent her days listening to motorists fresh off the highway, and it landed at a moment when Vermont was debating how far to go in paving its way into the automobile age. Her prices, at least, gave travelers little to grumble over: a 1931 advertisement offered “delicious Sunday Night Suppers for 75 cents,” and a 1932 notice for “Cary’s Maple Cabin” promised a “High Class Tea Room and Refreshments.”

The Cary name on that advertisement had by then acquired a mournful undertone. George C. Cary’s empire, overextended and battered by the Depression, collapsed in 1931; he filed for personal bankruptcy — the liabilities stemming largely from accommodation endorsements on the notes of other business concerns rather than from the sugar company itself — and died shortly afterward. The company survived him and reorganized, and Portland Street kept its maple character. Indeed, the neighborhood deepened it: In 1929 Cary had purchased Maple Grove Candies, the confectionery business Katharine Ide Gray and her daughter Helen had begun on a local farm around 1915, and a new two-story brick Maple Grove building opened in 1931 directly in front of the big Cary plant, a few steps from the Maple Cabin’s door.

Josephine Cary Smith carried on. She had taken to spending her winters in Los Angeles, returning each spring to reopen the Maple Cabin, and she ran the place with an eye for more than commerce. In the summer of 1938 it doubled as a gallery for Ezra C. Young, an amateur painter in St. Johnsbury, who exhibited his work there through the season; Smith reported the sale of one canvas after another, the pictures going home with tourists alongside the syrup tins and Navajo rugs. It was a modest but genuine cultural turn for a roadside tearoom, and characteristic of a proprietor who understood that the establishment sold Vermont itself as much as anything on the menu.

Smith gave up the Maple Cabin after the 1939 season, and in 1940 word reached St. Johnsbury that she had died in Los Angeles following an illness of nearly two years. The obituaries identified her, as they were bound to, as the sister of the late George C. Cary, founder of the Cary Maple Sugar Company — but to a generation of travelers on Portland Street she had been the hostess of the Maple Cabin, the woman behind the chicken and waffles and the 10,000-name guest book.

The war finished what her departure began. The Maple Cabin closed in 1941 for the duration, its shutters staying up through the years of gasoline rationing that emptied Vermont’s tourist roads. Not until 1948 did it come back to life, reopening under Mr. and Mrs. James F. Willey — he was also proprietor of Willey’s Food Shop — with the St. Johnsbury Republican saluting “the famed Maple Cabin, next door to the Cary Maple Sugar Company,” long celebrated “for its tasty luncheons and maple sugar products.”

The Maple Cabin’s final season as a restaurant came in 1951, when it opened under two local young women, Patricia and Ann Boylan — daughters of Edward R. Boylan, the president of the Cary Maple Sugar Company. The arrangement had the feel of a family posting, and it proved a coda. In 1952 the company announced that, “in an effort to make the tourists’ visit to Vermont more enjoyable,” it was converting the adjoining Maple Cabin into the Maple Museum, trading the tearoom’s tables for exhibits on sugaring.

The conversion, as it turned out, was less an ending than a change of costume. The museum idea took permanent root on Portland Street: Decades later, advertising still directed visitors to the “Maple Grove Maple Museum & Factory, 167 Portland Street,” and the operation endures today as the Maple Grove Farms Sugar House Museum and its red-roofed Cabin Gift Shop at 1052 Portland Street, where busloads of travelers sample maple candy a few yards from the plant George Cary raised in 1920. (The address of the building changed when St. Johnsbury carried out a townwide renumbering shortly after Vermont adopted its statewide Enhanced 911 program in 1997.) The company passed to B&G Foods in 1998, and the Cary’s brand survives as the oldest pure maple syrup label in the country. The Maple Cabin’s chicken and waffles are long gone, and so is the guest book — but more than a century after the local paper told St. Johnsbury to keep its eye on Maple Town, tourists are still pulling off Portland Street to have a look.

August 5, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Chicago/ Illinois

Peanut Soup

The Creole House

3048 West Diversey Avenue
Chicago, Illinois

1966 – 1974

The Creole House opened in 1966 in a converted storefront at 324 West Armitage Avenue, on a block in the Chicago neighborhood of Lincoln Park whose chief landmark was the aging movie house next door — a 1916 vaudeville theater known today as the Park West. The restaurant was tiny, its furnishings modest and its prices to match, and its founding premise carried a pleasing inversion: Of the two partners who dreamed it up, a Southerner worked the front of the house and a Northerner ran the kitchen.

Alvin Branch, of Baxley, Georgia, was the host. Guy Cucci, Jr., a native Chicagoan, was the chef. The two had spent years together in show business — Cucci’s stage résumé put him alongside Charlton Heston, Bert Lahr, Bert Parks, ZaSu Pitts, and the singers Blanche Thebom and Patrice Munsel — and the restaurant grew, as Cucci told it, out of an occupational hazard of the touring life. “All show people talk about food a lot because they have to eat out so much,” he told Kay Loring, the Chicago Tribune’s restaurant reviewer, in 1966. “In our case it led to talk of a place of our own — particularly when we were stranded on the road. We tried out many recipes at the club, then picked out the favorites of those who ate there and that’s what we’re serving here.”

The club in question sat near Branch’s farm at Baxley, where the partners worked between engagements and where Cucci put in five years cooking Southern favorites. The men also described a five-year study of Creole cookery before hanging out their shingle — a curriculum one reviewer judged, on the evidence of the plates, to have earned them graduate degrees. Some of the coursework came by mail from Louisiana. “We have Creole friends in New Orleans who have been generous with their family recipes,” Branch explained.

The kitchen’s calling card, from the first year onward, was a salty peanut soup that early visitors likened in body to split pea. Behind it came a gumbo loaded with ham, shrimp, oysters, crabmeat, and vegetables and served at a temperature and heat level that, one critic warned, would open a diner’s sinuses. Channel catfish was flown up from Georgia and fried, accompanied by hush puppies whose batter — like Cucci’s cornbread batter — was cut with beer. The menu ran to jumbo shrimp in a hot sauce, a crisp fried chicken that drew particular praise, and three separate jambalayas, the signature Creole House version blending ham, chicken, and pork in a beef broth. Desserts were homemade: banana cake, cherry pie, plum pie, and freshly sliced oranges dressed with coconut, marshmallow, and sour cream, with chicory coffee to close. Dinners started at $2.75, with à la carte listings besides. There was no bar — guests brought their own wine — and the little room played up its regional theme with hinged doors and shutters, walls of rough-cut split wood, and ceiling fixtures styled after gaslights.

For the next few years the Creole House settled into life as a little neighborhood café. A reporter passing down Armitage in 1969 sketched it as a high-ceilinged room presided over by its pair of ex-singers, by then three years into the venture. But the neighborhood itself had become the problem, and the problem was parking. “We really don’t care for a larger place, just one where people may park a car,” the partners told Kay Loring that year. “Parking becomes worse every year.”

Their answer lay a few miles west. The Creole House served its last dinner on Armitage on December 13, 1969, and the partners moved their restaurant into what had been a private residence at 3048 West Diversey Avenue — an unpretentious old house wrapped in simulated-brick siding, near the seam of Logan Square and Avondale. They reopened in early January 1970.

The move changed the restaurant’s character as much as its address. Arriving guests rang a doorbell — the front door otherwise stayed locked — and Branch answered it, by his family’s account wearing a tuxedo, to greet and seat them. The dining rooms occupied what had been the living room, the dining room, and a tiny first-floor bedroom; Cucci lived on the second floor. The peanut soup had by now become the house trademark, and the dessert list gained a pecan pie built on sour cream rather than the usual molasses or syrup base, along with a coconut-and-chocolate ice cream pie. In the family’s telling, the Diversey incarnation ran on reservations only and served full-course dinners only, with Cucci doing all the cooking himself. “He was extremely diligent and followed his recipes exactly the same way, ensuring over the years the food would taste exactly the same,” his nephew, Jeff Kanter, recalled decades later.

Curiously, the house itself went on the market during that first year on Diversey Avenue. A 1970 real estate ad pitched a “100-year-old home” as a unique opportunity for a restaurant, an antique house or some other creative use, identifying the present tenant as the famous Creole House Restaurant. Whatever became of the listing, the restaurant stayed put.

The Creole House quietly closed in 1974, four years into the Diversey chapter and eight years after the first pot of peanut soup on Armitage. One partner was retiring; the other was headed into another line of business. The Tribune’s Kay Loring registered her regret, and the house’s next operators, according to Cucci’s family, wanted more than the keys: They offered to buy the Creole House name and its recipes. Cucci refused to sell either. By 1975 the building had reopened instead as the Cajun House under Walter and Rita Manor, and a 1977 reviewer found the new owners trading on much the same formula — similar cuisine, similar décor, the same locked door and doorbell, the same step into what was described as a world of Southern gentility. And in the last half of the 1980s it was the Ragin’ Cajun under owner-chef Harvey Durrson.

Cucci, for his part, went back to the stage. In July 1976, after what the papers called a 10-year hiatus, spent at the Creole House, he joined the cast of “Something’s Afoot,” the Agatha Christie–spoofing murder-mystery musical, at the Chateau Louise resort’s theater in Dundee, billed as the Chateau Mysterie. Fittingly, the company also included Ric Riccardo, Jr., lately of Riccardo’s Restaurant & Gallery — the Rush Street landmark founded by his father and namesake, who with Ike Sewell is credited with having invented Chicago-style deep-dish pizza.

The Creole House name proved harder to retire than the restaurant. In 1982 a classified ad offered an unspecified restaurant and property, billed as “Formerly Creole House,” for $100,000. The physical settings endured, too: the Armitage block’s old theater reopened as the Park West in 1977 and remains a concert hall today, while the house at 3048 West Diversey is home to the Little Bird Prep Nursery & Preschool.

Guy Cucci died in 2021 at age 89. His obituary noted that he wrapped up his theater career as an extra with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where he baked pastries for cast and crew members and where, as Cucci liked to tell the story, Luciano Pavarotti once insisted on having one of his éclairs before a performance.

August 4, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Nashville/ Indiana

Bread

The Corner Cupboard

10 Artist Drive
Nashville, Indiana

1950 – 1963

In the late 1940s Blanche Aldrich put up a log building at the edge of downtown Nashville, Indiana, on the short lane now numbered 10 Artist Drive. The Brown County Democrat, the local newspaper, would later judge it “one of the most interesting log structures in Nashville” — no small distinction in a village where log construction was practically the municipal architecture. She soon opened a business in it, stocking her Settlers Knob Shop with gift items and fine handwoven articles — the sort of goods that sold briskly to the tourists who had been finding their way to Brown County in ever greater numbers since the state routed its new highways there in the 1920s and hard-surfaced them in the 1930s.

Nashville in 1950 was a county seat of only a few hundred residents, but it punched far above its weight in reputation. The town had been the center of one of America’s great art colonies since 1907, when T. C. (Theodore Clement) Steele, the dean of Indiana’s Impressionist painters, built his “House of the Singing Winds” on a ridge near Belmont, a few miles west. Adolph Shulz, generally credited as the colony’s founder, followed with a procession of painters from Chicago and Indianapolis, and by the 1930s at least 18 artists kept permanent homes in the county. Their canvases of hazy ridgelines and weathered cabins — exhibited at the annual Hoosier Salon and across the Midwest and beyond — did as much as any chamber of commerce to fix Brown County in the public imagination as “Peaceful Valley.” The tourists came accordingly. Journalist Ernie Pyle, writing before the war, described autumn weekends when stalled cars stretched from the gates of Brown County State Park clear into Nashville, “an almost immovable mass, choking the streets.” Two state highways, Roads 46 and 135, met at the very center of town, funneling travelers and leaf-lookers right past Nashville’s storefronts.

Into this reliable stream of hungry visitors stepped William and Anna Hoffman, who bought the Aldrich property in 1950 and converted her shop into a restaurant. The Brown County Democrat introduced the Hoffmans’ Corner Cupboard that year as “Nashville’s newest eating house” — a homier designation than “restaurant,” and an apt one for a dining room set inside hand-hewn logs. The timing was good. The Nashville House, the town’s flagship hostelry since 1859, had burned in 1943 and been rebuilt without guest rooms; a village whose population swelled tenfold on an October Saturday could easily absorb another kitchen.

What distinguished the Corner Cupboard from the start was its clientele. The restaurant became the setting for a regular monthly dinner and meeting of the Brown County artists — the surviving first generation of the colony and the painters who had followed them into the hills. The roster reported in 1950 reads like a who’s who of the local art scene: Mr. and Mrs. Curry Bohm, Mr. and Mrs. Dale Bessire, Mr. and Mrs. L. O. (Louis Oscar) Griffith, Marie Goth, Genevieve Goth Graf, Leota Loop, Alberta Shulz, V. J. (Varaldo Giuseppe) Cariani, Ethel Lomasney, Mr. and Mrs. C. Carey Cloud, and Rena A. Hostetler. Gretchen Stark, daughter of the Hoosier Group painter Otto Stark, came with her cousin Marie Goth.

It was a table worth eavesdropping on. Marie Goth was by then the most celebrated portraitist in Indiana. She was the first woman to paint an official portrait of an Indiana governor, Henry F. Schricker, for the Statehouse; she also painted the likenesses of writer and poet James Whitcomb Riley, cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, and most of her fellow colonists. Goth shared a hilltop compound north of town with Italian-born V. J. Cariani, whom she had met at the Art Students League in New York; the two lived as discreet lifelong partners, Cariani keeping a separate studio nearby for propriety’s sake. Goth’s sister Genevieve Goth Graf, a fine painter of florals in her own right, came to the dinners a widow — her husband, landscapist Carl Graf, the first president of the Brown County Art Gallery Association, had died in 1947. Curry Bohm and Dale Bessire were the colony’s reigning landscape men, heirs to the Impressionist manner of capturing light on the wooded hills. L. O. Griffith, who had arrived from Chicago decades earlier, was as distinguished an etcher and printmaker as he was a painter. Alberta Shulz, the second wife of Adolph Shulz, painted broken-palette landscapes so close in spirit to her husband’s that she deflected all credit: “I owe my painting skill to him,” she insisted.

Leota Loop supplied the entertainment. Loop, Brown County’s best-known art teacher, had sold her first sketch at age ten — painted, family legend held, with chicken feathers for brushes and grocer’s wrapping paper for canvas — and had studied with T. C. Steele, William Forsyth, and Will Vawter. Hundreds of her floral still lifes hung in Indiana households, and one of her canvases had been purchased in 1937 for the Governor’s Mansion. Then there was C. Carey Cloud, the most improbable figure at the table: a self-taught illustrator who had spent a career in Chicago designing pop-up books and, beginning in 1937, the toys inside Cracker Jack boxes — millions upon millions of them, earning him the nickname “the year-round Santa Claus.” Cloud had moved permanently to Nashville around the time Blanche Aldrich was putting up her log building, painting from a hilltop cabin he called Cloudcrest, and he threw himself into the art colony’s affairs, eventually serving three terms as president of the Art Gallery Association. He never regretted leaving Chicago. He had gained, he wrote late in life, “a greater spiritual reward by choosing to live among my trees on my hills.”

The lineage running through that dining room reached back to the Hoosier Group itself, the circle of American Impressionists — Steele, J. Ottis Adams, Forsyth, Otto Stark, and Richard Gruelle — whose luminous landscapes had made the state a serious address in American art at the turn of the century. Otto Stark had headed the art department at Indianapolis’s Manual Training High School, where young Marie Goth, the daughter of his cousin, was a student; his encouragement helped set her on the path to New York and, eventually, to Brown County.

The restaurant’s log architecture caught the eye of the art colony’s great documentarian as well. On August 4, 1951, photographer Frank M. Hohenberger — whose “Down in the Hills o’ Brown County” column in the Indianapolis Star had done more than any painting to populate the county with pilgrims — trained his camera on the Corner Cupboard, capturing its log walls, stone chimney, and rustic split-rail fence on a five-by-seven negative. Hohenberger, who liked to say that “pictures speak the only language all mankind can understand,” was by then more than three decades into what would become a 47-year project of recording everyday life in Brown County; his image of the Corner Cupboard survives among the thousands of his negatives preserved at Indiana University’s Lilly Library.

The Hoffmans, meanwhile, ran a straightforward operation. A 1952 advertisement promised simply “Fine Food” and “Fountain Specialties.” The latter was a reminder that a soda fountain was as essential to a 1950s tourist-town restaurant as a deep fryer, dispensing sundaes and phosphates to families fresh from the state park. In 1953 the restaurant received the kind of endorsement that mattered most to a roadside business: a write-up in Ford Times, the Ford Motor Company’s pocket-sized monthly travel magazine. Ford Times had been steering its millions of readers to worthy eating places since 1946, and its imprimatur could put a small-town dining room on the national map. For a log-cabin dining room in a village of a few hundred souls, it was rarefied company.

The artists kept coming through the decade’s upheavals in their own ranks. In 1954 the colony’s old guard split from the Brown County Art Gallery Association, and 17 of the original artists — Goth, Cariani, Genevieve Goth Graf, Bohm, Bessire, and Georges LaChance among them — founded the Brown County Art Guild, installing it in the 1857 Minor House on Van Buren Street. Nashville thereafter supported two galleries, both stocked by painters who knew the Corner Cupboard’s menu by heart. The monthly dinners of the early 1950s had been precisely the sort of occasion where such institutional matters got argued over slices of pie.

By decade’s end the Hoffmans were ready to cash out. A display advertisement in 1959, under the heading “Business Opportunities,” offered the restaurant with the full vocabulary of the broker’s art: “Been in business for past ten years and a money maker,” it began. “Filled with charm and atmosphere this famous specialty restaurant, nestled in the heart of Brown County and two State roads, is offered for sale. Excellent equipment and fixtures throughout. Apartment for owner. Located on valuable property with room for plenty of expansion. Has ample parking facilities. A fine opportunity for the right party. Price $35,000.” Every claim was defensible. The two state roads still met at the center of town — the bypass that would carry through traffic around Nashville was not built until 1965 — and the $35,000 bought a going concern with living quarters attached.

No buyer materialized right away, however, and the Corner Cupboard cooked on into the new decade even as the art colony that had animated its back room thinned. L. O. Griffith had died in 1956. Leota Loop suffered a stroke that cost her the sight of one eye, painted on regardless, presented the state an oil of peonies in honor of the new state flower, and died in 1961 — the same year as Genevieve Goth Graf. Adolph Shulz, the colony’s founder, died in 1963 at age 93; Hohenberger, the colony’s witness, died that same year.

The Corner Cupboard’s own end came quietly. In 1963 the Hoffmans sold the restaurant to Sarah Buttroff. The Brown County Democrat marked the transaction with a short history of the establishment. “What the future plans are for the property are not known at this time,” it reported, “but will be published as soon as Mrs. Buttroff has been interviewed.” Whatever those plans were, they did not include a restaurant. Later that year Buttroff was advertising an electric fryer and other items from the “Old Corner Cupboard property” for sale, and “Cheap” at that — the unceremonious liquidation of 13 years of fine food and fountain specialties.

The address never strayed far from the colony that had given the restaurant its character. The lane itself was christened Artist Drive, and the Brown County Art Gallery — the institution Carey Cloud helped to shepherd, expanded in recent years to hold the art colony’s legacy — stands today at One Artist Drive, a few doors away. Marie Goth outlived nearly all of her dinner companions, and at her death in 1975 left her estate — some 2,000 paintings (hers and Cariani’s) and more than $600,000 — to the Art Guild she had co-founded, ensuring that the faces of the people who once gathered monthly at the Corner Cupboard would hang permanently in Nashville. William W. Hoffman died in 1994 at age 78; Anna Hoffman died in 1995 at age 79.

The log building at 10 Artist Drive today houses a RE/MAX real estate office. And in a climate-controlled vault in Bloomington, on a five-by-seven negative exposed one August morning in 1951, the Corner Cupboard stands as Hohenberger saw it, with its log walls and stone chimney, in the noon light of a very good year.

August 4, 2026 By Bill Hogan

San Francisco/ California

Baby Tomato Salad

Charlotte’s Tavern

529 Powell Street
San Francisco, California

1927 – 1940

In 1927 Morris and Charlotte Nathan opened Charlotte’s Tavern at 529 Powell Street in San Francisco — a location at the foot of Nob Hill, a hundred steps above Sutter Street, in the thick of the city’s tourist-hotel district. The St. Francis was two blocks down at Union Square, cable cars ran right past the door from early in the morning until late at night, and rising at the corner of Powell and Sutter was a $5 million, 21-story tower that would open in October 1928 as the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. Every hotel in the neighborhood kept a dining room, and every dining room served hotel food. The Nathans reasoned that travelers marooned amid all that upholstered grandeur would pay for the one thing the grand kitchens could not convincingly produce: a home-cooked meal.

The Nathans were no newcomers to the trade. By the mid-1930s they would be described as prominent and successful restaurant operators of long standing, and Charlotte’s Tavern was at least the third place they had established within a two-block radius of Union Square. They were partners in the business, but Charlotte’s name was on the sign, and Charlotte’s cooking was the draw.

While the Nathans may have picked the perfect location, their timing was, as things turned out, anything but perfect. The first warning signs of the Great Depression came in mid-1929, and in October of that year came the stock market crash that would be known as Black Tuesday. Between 1929 and 1933, the United States suffered the steepest economic collapse in its modern history, with mass bank failures and skyrocketing unemployment.

The Depression decimated San Francisco’s tourist trade, and at the end of February 1933, with newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt just days away from declaring a national bank holiday, the Nathans got out. The sign on the front of the restaurant, however, stayed up under its new owners, Johan Herbert Franklin and Arlie Mary Franklin.

At the time, few men in San Francisco had fed more people than J. Herbert Franklin. In 1917 he and a partner, H. B. West, had founded Forest Lodge at Greenville, in the Feather River country of Plumas County; he sold his interest to West in 1920. In between came World War I, during which Franklin served as chief commissary steward aboard the U.S.S. Koningin der Nederlanden, a Dutch passenger liner seized by customs officials at San Francisco in March 1918 under executive order, commissioned into the U.S. Navy that April, and converted into a troop transport. The ship carried more than 2,000 soldiers per crossing to France in the closing months of the war, then spent 1919 hauling more than 10,000 of them home again. Back ashore in 1920, Franklin opened the Matson Navigation Company’s cafeteria at Pier 30 in San Francisco and managed it for six years — an operation run at cost rather than for profit, feeding the crews of every Matson ship tied up in port. By 1925 it was serving nine out of ten men on the Matson piers and had passed the half-million-meal mark, and in 1926 the line promoted Franklin to assistant port steward. He later put in a stretch as storekeeper at the Fairmont Hotel, and by 1930 he was back in the resort business, operating Summerhome Park, a vacation community on the south side of the Russian River near Forestville, California, renaming its hotel Franklin Tavern.

He never quite left the old troopship behind. In 1932 — the same year the Koningin der Nederlanden went to the scrappers — Franklin and a fellow crewman, Harry Zemansky of the White House department store, set out to reassemble the several hundred men who had sailed her during the war. The reunion took the form of a banquet at the States Hof Bräu Restaurant at the corner of Market and Eddy Streets. A year later, Franklin and his wife were running Charlotte’s.

When Martha Lane of the San Francisco News called at 529 Powell for her “Eating Around San Francisco” column in 1933, about six months into the new regime, she found the Franklins holding fast to the Nathans’ original concept and planning to deepen it by working old Spanish touches into the rooms — aiming, as she put it, at “true California atmosphere with California hospitality.” What struck her most was the quiet. The dining room was low and bungalow-like, simply furnished, lit by candles rather than glaring daylight or electric fixtures, free of noise and glamor — a deliberate relief, she wrote, from other establishments in the neighborhood. Just inside the door stood the tavern’s totem: a huge candlestick shaggy with stalactites of dripped, multicolored wax. This was the Wishing Candle. Diners wedged pennies into the warm wax — the house legend held that anyone who buried a penny there and made a wish was sure to have it granted — and the mass of coins and wax grew a little larger every day.

The operation behind the candlelight was substantial. The tavern seated about 100 and served an average of 300 meals a day with a staff of 22. Arlie Franklin worked the floor as hostess; her husband did the buying himself, going down to the markets every morning to pick over the seasonal produce — a routine his years provisioning ships and hotels had made second nature. Hours ran from 11 in the morning to 8 at night, except Sundays, when only dinner was served, from 4 to 8. The restaurant also hosted private parties in the dining room and offered to prepare and serve lunches, dinners, picnic spreads, and barbecues anywhere a customer might choose. Diners perusing the midday menu could choose from four tiers — a popular luncheon, a special luncheon, a beer luncheon, and a sandwich luncheon — priced, in the house’s phrase, as low as the quality of the food would allow.

Arlie Franklin’s reputation traveled beyond her own dining room that year: When the San Francisco News ran a menu-planning contest that offered housewives pin money for their best efforts, she was named the final judge, on the strength of her wide knowledge of what to serve, and when, and how.

That fall the tavern advertised a Thanksgiving dinner for just $1.00, with a parenthetical that captured the national moment precisely: “Wines when legal.” Thanksgiving fell on November 30 in 1933. The long-awaited repeal of Prohibition arrived five days later.

Retirement, meanwhile, had not agreed with Morris and Charlotte Nathan. They had set off on a leisurely tour after selling the tavern, and the rest cure promptly turned into a working study of notable restaurants across the United States and beyond the border. In 1934 they leased a one-story building at 272 Sutter Street, two blocks from Charlotte’s Tavern, and immediately set about turning the premises into a high-class restaurant called, this time, Nathan’s. Morris claimed one more distinction on the way in: the credit for filing the first application in San Francisco for an “on sale” liquor license after repeal.

In 1937 Charlotte’s Tavern was in the news for a reason no restaurateur wants. Early one morning, Charles Schemann, a baker at the restaurant, arrived for work to find the rear door jimmied. Safecrackers had dragged a small safe from the front of the restaurant to the rear, wrapped it in clothes to deaden the explosion, and blown it open, escaping with more than $400 in weekend receipts from what a wire report called “one of San Francisco’s better-known restaurants.” A news photograph showed Franklin looking at the wrecked safe and a police officer looking at the camera. The burglars had missed the best of the haul: a signed check for $855 tucked away in a corner of the safe.

The Spanish plan sketched out in 1933 had by then hardened into the house identity. Advertising in 1937 pitched “Charlotte’s Fine Food — Early California Restaurant,” with lunches at 30 to 60 cents and dinners at 50 to 85 cents.

Franklin’s reach still extended well beyond Powell Street. In June 1938 the new Rotary Club at Greenville — the Plumas County town where he had founded Forest Lodge two decades before — engaged him to prepare the dinner for its charter night on June 29, a sit-down for members and 300 guests, with his chef Henry Conte in charge of the kitchen.

That December the Wishing Candle gave up its hoard. Six hundred pennies, pried from a decade of wax, went from Charlotte’s Tavern to the San Francisco Examiner’s Christmas Cheer Fund, which was piling toys and food into a warehouse for the city’s poor. The fund’s columnist, running down the day’s gifts, paused over this one: 600 wishes, the paper reflected, could not have been directed to a better cause, and would be fulfilled. The ledger line read simply: “Charlotte’s: The Wishing Candle, $6.00.”

It was close to a last act. Easter Sunday 1939 brought a 75-cent holiday dinner at Charlotte’s Tavern, served noon to 8:30. But within a year the restaurant had fallen into bankruptcy, and on March 7, 1940, at 2 p.m., auctioneer Jerrold H. Baer raised his gavel at 529 Powell Street to begin selling everything on the premises.

The address did not stay dark long. Later that year, a Hungarian restaurant named Old Budapest opened there, serving chicken paprikás, goulash, and strudel in the rooms where the Wishing Candle had collected its pennies. Right below the new name in newspaper ads were the two words the owners had every reason to believe would bring diners in the door: “Formerly Charlotte’s.”

August 3, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Older Posts