Name: Chocolate Angel Pie
Yield: 1 (9-inch) pie; 8 servings
Ingredients: Unsalted butter, for the pie plate; 1/4 cup granulated sugar; 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar; 2 large egg whites, at room temperature; 1/2 cup pecans or other nuts, coarsely broken or chopped; 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips or finely chopped semisweet chocolate; 3 tablespoons hot water; 1 teaspoon vanilla extract; 1 cup heavy cream, cold

Oklahoma City/ Oklahoma

Veal Cordon Bleu

Jacques’ Internationale

5201 North Shartel Avenue
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

1963 – 1971

Before Jacques Orenstein sold Oklahoma City on Veal Orloff, he sold it dresses. Born Jacob Orenstein in West Virginia in 1918, he spent part of his youth in New Orleans, where the city’s Creole kitchens left a mark that would take four decades to surface. Orenstein earned his living on the road, representing women’s ready-to-wear lines across the region and at some point Frenchifying his first name; by 1953 he was a special representative for Carlye Fashions, a St. Louis-based women’s clothing brand known for upscale junior dresses and suits, and in 1955 newspaper advertisements in Oklahoma were billing him as the “renowned fashion expert” headlining a department-store fashion show. He had no professional food training then and never acquired any. What he had was a salesman’s instinct for what people wanted before they knew they wanted it.

The same 1955 advertising pages that carried his name also carried notices for the Redbud Restaurant & Tea Room in the Wileman Shopping Center, a retail strip at Northwest 50th Street and Shartel Avenue that later accounts would call simply the Shartel Shopping Center. The Redbud was a fixture of a particular mid-century institution: the ladies’ tea room, serving light lunches to a genteel clientele. Orenstein would remember it, decades later, as a place filled “with little old ladies with hats.”

In 1962, in his mid-forties and weary of the road, Orenstein abandoned the garment trade and bought the Redbud. The purchase looked like a modest career change into the lunch business. It wasn’t. Within a year he had jettisoned the tea-room concept and reopened the space at 5201 North Shartel as Jacques’ Internationale, a Continental restaurant of a kind Oklahoma City had never seen. The lights were dimmed. An accordion player glided from table to table. The menu ran to dishes like Veal Orloff — roasted veal layered with soubise and mushrooms under a blanket of Mornay sauce — in a city where such a thing bordered on the exotic.

“The fare in Oklahoma City in 1963 was fried chicken, chicken fried steak, and then came steak,” Orenstein recalled in a 1985 interview. “That was it. There just weren’t many restaurants and we introduced this kind of food — continental food.”

He was not entirely alone in this missionary work. Downtown, at almost the same moment, Frank Hightower had commissioned James Beard, who was known as the “Dean of American Cookery,” to convert The Cellar in the Hightower Building from a tea room into a modern French restaurant, and installed John Bennett, a young graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, as its first chef. Between them, The Cellar and Jacques’ Internationale introduced classic French and Continental cooking to a city that had gotten along without it — The Cellar with an East Coast pedigree, Jacques’ with the self-taught enthusiasm of a former dress salesman who credited his palate to New Orleans and, as his son Jon later put it, “learned from the chefs that worked for him through the years.”

Enthusiasm did not immediately pay the bills. Oklahoma City’s dining public, offered its first accordion-serenaded Continental menu, largely stuck to its fried chicken. So when a local television station came calling with the offer of a weekly cooking segment, Orenstein said yes without hesitation. “When you’re starving to death trying to get a restaurant off the ground — and we were really scratching because Oklahoma City wasn’t ready for us yet — I agreed to the show,” he said in that same 1985 interview. “You couldn’t buy that kind of publicity.”

The segment, “Cooking With Jacques,” ran on WKY-TV (Channel 4) — Oklahoma’s first television station, later KTVY and today KFOR. It made Orenstein a household face. Each week he demonstrated a Continental dish on camera: how to make it, what the finished plate should look like, and, pointedly, how to eat it, since much of his audience had never confronted the dish in question. The segment is best remembered as a feature of “Dannysday,” the daytime talk and variety program that broadcasting legend Danny Williams produced and hosted beginning in 1967, and on which a young Mary Hart would later serve as co-host. Orenstein’s television work, by his own count, ran seven and a half years, and it continued until 1971 — for roughly the entire life of the restaurant it was created to promote. The arrangement, a bargain struck out of desperation, became one of the great marketing coups in Oklahoma City restaurant history: a struggling restaurateur teaching an entire television market, week by week, to want what only his dining room served.

It worked. By the middle of the decade Jacques’ Internationale had become the city’s occasion restaurant — the top destination for anniversaries, courtships, and expense accounts. The restaurant’s advertising by 1967 carried the slogan “Where Dining Becomes an Experience,” and the experience extended past the plate: the room, the music, the tableside ceremony, and the drinks. In October 1967 the restaurant received a form of national recognition rare for an Oklahoma establishment when Gourmet magazine printed the recipe for its Velvet Hammer, the silky after-dinner cocktail of orange liqueur, crème de cacao, and cream. The restaurant also published “50 Famous Recipes from Jacque’s Internationale,” a souvenir booklet that pressed its greatest hits into home kitchens, notwithstanding the misplaced apostrophe on its cover.

Success bred expansion. In 1968 Orenstein opened a second restaurant, Jacques’ Sign of the Ram, in a new hotel on the grounds of Will Rogers World Airport — advertised at its opening as the Holiday Inn–Airport, though the property was remembered in later accounts as the Sheraton Inn, the flag it apparently flew for most of the restaurant’s run. The Sign of the Ram gave Orenstein a foothold in the hotel trade, cooking for travelers and conventioneers while the Shartel Avenue flagship held down the carriage trade in the city’s near-northwest neighborhoods.

Then, in 1971, the flagship ran aground on the most prosaic of hazards: real estate. Orenstein lost his lease at the Shartel Shopping Center, and no rescue materialized. The advertisements that spring were blunt (“Lost our lease—Selling out”), followed by auction notices announcing that all the restaurant’s equipment would be “sold out piece by piece—lot by lot.” After eight years, the dimmed lights at Northwest 50th and Shartel went dark for good. The television segment ended the same year. The tea room Orenstein had bought from the little old ladies in hats had lasted, in its Continental incarnation, from 1963 to 1971, and nothing ever occupied quite the same place in the city’s affections again.

Orenstein himself was far from finished. A newspaper advertisement he placed in 1972 doubled as a family Christmas letter and a statement of ambition: “It’s been ten years since we started in the restaurant business with Jacques’ Internationale. We have been Oklahoma City’s ambassador to St. Louis with Jacques Old World in the Sheraton Inn-Airport, and to Tucson with Jacques’ Sign of the Gaucho in the Sheraton Pueblo-Inn.” It was signed “Sincerely, Jacques, Babette, Lou & Jon” — Babette being his wife, and Jon the son who would become his business partner. The Sign of the Ram carried on at the airport hotel until 1974, and the brief multistate hotel-restaurant empire suggested by that advertisement marked the high-water line of the Jacques’ name.

Back home, Orenstein kept moving. In 1974 he led a group of investors in opening The French Revolution at Northwest Expressway and May Avenue, a restaurant built around French crêpes; it lasted until 1976. That year he pivoted again, this time away from restaurants altogether, organizing, with Jon, Creative Cookery — a gourmet cooking school, kitchenware shop, bakery, and delicatessen at 6500 North May Avenue that rode the crest of Oklahoma City’s oil-boom prosperity. Creative Cookery brought nationally known cooking teachers to town, and in 1980 it very nearly delivered the biggest name of all: 16 students had signed up to watch James Beard demonstrate the techniques of haute cuisine when Beard, ill in a San Francisco hospital, was forced to cancel. Business stayed strong until 1983, when the oil bust caught up with it; in 1985, at the end of its ninth year, father and son put Creative Cookery into liquidation, one more casualty of a sluggish local economy then entering its third year.

Orenstein was in his late sixties by then, and the interviews he gave carried the unguarded candor of a man with nothing left to sell. Asked to assess the dining scene he had spent 23 years cultivating, he did not flatter it. “We’ve got a lot of restaurants and 99 percent of them are lousy,” he said. “I hate to say it, but they are. They’re mediocre. They serve food. That’s all.” The old adversary, he conceded, had never really been beaten: “And it’s hard to reason with people who say, ‘What’s wrong with fried chicken?’”

He tried the restaurant business once more. In 1988, six months after opening Jacques’ Restaurant in the Spring Creek Shopping Center at 2801 Northwest 122nd Street, an effort to raise fresh capital failed and he closed the doors, announcing that he did not intend to operate a restaurant in the city again. He kept his word on restaurants, though not on retirement. By 1992 a local columnist was calling him “the Guru of Cuisine” and noting that he “just can’t stand retirement — although he’s tried it at least three times.” That June he was back in front of audiences doing cooking demonstrations to help sell home gas ranges; that fall he demonstrated alongside a younger generation of chefs — among them Kurt Fleischfresser of The Coach House — at a Nichols Hills kitchen tour benefiting hospice care. By 1994 he had devised one final format: cooking schools held in private homes, where three or four couples could gather in someone’s kitchen and have Jacques teach them Southwestern, Italian, or Hungarian cooking, for one evening or a weekly series. Thirty years after television had carried him into Oklahoma City’s living rooms, he was making house calls.

Jacques Orenstein died in Oklahoma City on June 17, 2000, after a short illness. He was 81. “He was always optimistic and upbeat,” Jon Orenstein said the next day. “He loved people and he loved being around people.” When the food editor of the Daily Oklahoman closed out the year 2000, she counted his death — alongside that of Johnnie Haynes of Johnnie’s Charcoal Broiler — as the loss of one of the two giants of the local food industry that year.

The restaurant itself had by then been closed for nearly three decades, but it refused to be forgotten. In 1999, when readers of the Daily Oklahoman were asked to name their favorite Oklahoma City restaurants of the previous half-century, Jacques’ Internationale made the list of the departed places people still missed. And on Valentine’s Day 2018, the Daily Oklahoman’s Dave Cathey published a list of eight long-gone Oklahoma City restaurants he would reopen for a single night if he could. There at No. 7, between The Cellar and Chez Vernon, sat Jacques’ Internationale — dimmed lights, gliding accordionist, Veal Orloff and all — 47 years after the lease ran out.

August 2, 2026 By Bill Hogan

New York/ New York

Lobster Newburg

Ship Grill

400 East 57th Street
New York, New York

1931 – 1951

Olin Chester Potter was 23 years old when he began organizing the Ship Grill Corporation in 1924, and nothing on his résumé pointed toward the restaurant business. Potter had graduated from Cornell University in 1922 and then spent two years in New York studying interior design. His partner in the venture was, on paper, an even less obvious restaurateur: Richard Ridgely, a Kentucky-born stage actor turned filmmaker more than 30 years his senior, who had directed nearly 40 silent pictures for Edison Studios between 1913 and 1917 — among them Eugene Aram and The Destroying Angel — before leaving the movies for real estate in 1918. Together the young designer and the retired director opened the first Ship Grill in October 1924, at 121 East 52nd Street in New York City.

The name announced the theme, and Potter’s design training carried it through — ship’s lanterns, old brass, pewter, and private booths became the house look as new locations opened. The food came from his travels and, almost surely, the fact that his Scottish-born wife, Anne, was a daughter of Sir James Beattie, a British industrialist. Potter had been so taken with what he ate on visits to England that he adapted English cooking to his American dining rooms: meat pies and tarts anchored the menu, and hot gingerbread arrived at the table the moment guests were seated. The formula caught on, and by early 1927 Potter and Ridgely had opened a second Ship Grill.

The next year brought expansion on three fronts — and one public scolding. In mid-1928 the Ship Grill Company was fined $100 for conducting an eating house in the restricted Murray Hill district, where it had opened a dining room in an 18-story apartment hotel at 66 Park Avenue, at the southwest corner of 38th Street. Under the zoning rules, a private dining room serving a building’s own tenants was perfectly legal in a residence district; a restaurant open to the general public was not. The company might have escaped notice with quiet table service, but it had hung out a sign bearing a picture of a ship and the restaurant’s name in gold letters, which settled the question for the authorities. The setback did nothing to slow Potter down. By September a Ship Grill was operating in Greenwich, Connecticut, and in December, joined by a new partner, B. Dawson Berry, Jr., he opened a Ship Grill at 132 East 58th Street, just off Park Avenue, fitted out with the chain’s signature booths, lanterns, brass, and pewter. That year Berry offered a newspaper columnist his view that more business was transacted in New York City over restaurant tables than in offices.

The tables soon got a uniform of their own. Through the Barth Equipment Company, a New York supply house founded in 1928, the chain ordered Lamberton China, the commercial tableware produced by the Scammell China Company of Trenton, New Jersey. The floral border design was the work of Emil Schnepf, Scammell’s chief designer, and the dinner plates carried a sailing ship in the center of the well. Larger pieces were backstamped with both the restaurant’s name and Barth’s. Schnepf’s border was not exclusive — Scammell sold the same pattern to a number of customers — but the ship in the well was the house’s own flag.

By the end of the decade the Ship Grill had eaten its way into distinguished company. In 1929 O. O. McIntyre, whose syndicated “New York Day by Day” column appeared in more than 500 newspapers, passed along a list of favorite dishes compiled by a friend who had spent his life chasing culinary surprises around the city: the chicken hash at the St. Regis, the old-fashioned strawberry shortcake at the Algonquin, the spinach soufflé at the Ritz, the minestrone at Moneta’s, the crêpes Suzette at the Brevoort, the mixed grill at Keen’s, the special sandwich at Reuben’s, the corned beef and cabbage at Dinty Moore’s—and, holding its own on the roll call, the open-face apple pie at the Ship Grill, a five-year-old operation listed among some of the city’s most venerable establishments.

The advent of the Great Depression did not stop the growth. The 57th Street Ship Grill Corporation was chartered in 1931, and that November the seventh Ship Grill opened at 400 East 57th Street, near Sutton Place. That same year Ridgely, now past 60, retired from the business. In 1932 James Aswell, in his syndicated newspaper column “My New York,” pronounced the Ship Grill chain’s onion soup “the best onion soup in town.” By November of the following year there were six Ship Grill restaurants in all, with the corporation headquartered at 400 East 57th Street.

It was at the East 57th Street location that the Ship Grill picked up an unexpected place in the history of New York nightlife. Around 1934, the restaurant became home to socialite Marion Cooley’s madcap Sunday night suppers, and their premier entertainer was Jimmie Daniels, the Texas-born cabaret singer just back from engagements at the Summer Sporting Club in Monte Carlo and Ciro’s in London. Daniels — a fixture of Harlem Renaissance circles and, by 1934, the companion of the architect Philip Johnson — sang tunes by the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter, and the Ship Grill suppers were a springboard: Within a year he was hosting his own series of parties at the Bronze Studio, and he went on to Le Ruban Bleu, to his own Harlem supper club, and eventually to a decade as the celebrated host of the Bon Soir in Greenwich Village, where Barbra Streisand would, years later, have her first New York engagement.

The music kept coming. By the summer of 1935 an African American newspaper was taking note of the entertainment there: the singer Billie Haywood, appearing in the late evenings with her piano partner, billed in the notice as Cliff Hall. Haywood was then a year away from introducing “My Last Affair” in the Broadway revue New Faces of 1936 — the song Ella Fitzgerald, Mildred Bailey, and Billie Holiday would all record soon after — and she and her longtime pianist worked the same Manhattan club circuit, from Leon and Eddie’s to the Famous Door, for years afterward.

Then there were the dogs. In 1936 a gossip column noted that the Ship Grill on East 57th offered “a regular lunch for dogs,” and the newsreel cameras came to see for themselves. Under the title “Dog’s Day!” the footage caught a couple checking two bulldogs at the hat check, the host escorting women with dogs on leashes to their tables, and a long table of diners and their pets — a poodle, a Yorkshire terrier, a dachshund, and a Great Dane working through three bowls at once — while a woman placed the order of the day: her companion “will have a canine and I’ll have a dry martini.”

In 1937 Potter and his wife took on a second, very different property: the Old Drovers Inn in Dover Plains, New York, a tavern built in 1750 to serve the drovers who herded cattle down from New England to the New York markets. Under the Potters, the inn earned a reputation as the countryside counterpart to Manhattan’s “21” Club, complete with a browned turkey hash created to answer 21’s famous chicken hash, and it was run in tandem with the Ship Grill restaurants — Potter applied for a liquor license for the Dover Plains operation in March 1942, and the two houses came to share a chef. In the city, the war years kept the Ship Grill’s pricing modest: a 1943 dinner menu ran its entrées from $1.50 to $2.00.

The chef the two houses shared was Adolph Roberts, and in 1946 he gave the Ship Grill its fullest moment in print. With a meat shortage looming that year, Roberts went to the New York Times’s kitchen to demonstrate the house specialty, Lobster Newberg, for a series of interviews with the chefs of the city’s leading restaurants. Roberts had grown up in Jamaica, where he learned to cook nearly at his mother’s knee, and had joined the Ship Grill in 1926, soon after arriving in the United States; 20 years on, he divided his time between East 57th Street and the Old Drovers Inn.

A Thanksgiving menu from the following year shows the house in full postwar voice. On Thursday, November 27, 1947, the Ship Grill’s Victorian Room served Thanksgiving dinner from one to nine o’clock at $3 a person: marinated fresh shrimps and mushrooms or Indian River grapefruit with sherry to start; a choice of creamed oyster stew or the onion soup that Aswell had crowned 15 years earlier; and roast young Maryland turkey with chestnut stuffing, giblet gravy, fresh cranberry sauce, creamed silver-skin onions, baked sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and string beans served family style. Dessert ran from hot mince and pumpkin pies with aged American cheese to Liederkranz and crackers, black raspberry sherbet, and vanilla ice cream with crushed fresh strawberries. The Ship Special cocktail — six-year-old Rhum Clément from Martinique served in a sugar-coated glass — was $1, and the wine suggestions offered an imported 1940 Moulin-à-Vent or a 1940 Graves at $3 a bottle, with a very dry 1937 Finger Lakes white at $2.50. The menu carried a single credit line: Olin Chester Potter, Proprietor.

The everyday table drew notices of its own. Helen Burns, the where-to-dine editor of the Miami Daily News, vacationing in New York in 1948, came to 400 East 57th Street on the strength of the Old Drovers Inn’s standing among gourmets — the Manhattan house, she noted, was every bit as famous — and found her dinner “delightful in all details”: Manhattan clam chowder (“appetizing and delicious”), filet of sole bonne femme (“especially succulent with its tangy sauce”), fresh peas, baked squash served to be eaten straight from the rind, and Boston lettuce with farmer dressing, followed by a fresh cream coconut cake (“a masterpiece of confectionery”) and coffee (“ultra luscious”). The bill for it all struck her as more than moderate: $2.00.

The founders went out within a few years of each other. Richard Ridgely died in 1949, at age 80, at Bay Shore, Long Island. By the postwar years the East 57th Street restaurant was the only Ship Grill still operating in New York City; it closed in 1951, ending a run of some 27 years. In February 1953, Olin Potter — at age 51, and identified in the press as the former president of a corporation that had operated seven restaurants in New York — was killed in an automobile accident near New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Anne Potter, who would die in 1965 at age 75, ran the Old Drovers Inn until her retirement in 1956, when a nephew, James Potter, took the reins.

August 1, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Tucson/ Arizona

Dolmathes Avgolemono (Stuffed Grape Leaves with Egg-Lemon Sauce)

Palomino Restaurant

2959 North Swan Road
Tucson, Arizona

1968 – 1994

In the early 1940s Johnny Gekas found what he was looking for at the end of a rough dirt road several miles from the center of Tucson, Arizona, where he had recently settled with his wife, Mary, in the hope that the desert climate would ease his tuberculosis. It was a ramshackle cantina called the Watering Hole, sitting at the corner of North Swan Road and East Fort Lowell Road amid the mesquite and horse country northeast of town — and to Gekas, whose family had been running restaurants in Tucson since the early 1930s, it looked like a diamond in the rough. In 1942 Gekas and his cousin, John Paulos, took over the place, renamed it Venice Gardens, and refashioned it as a little roadside nightclub, furnished with card tables and red-checkered tablecloths and offering mariachi music for dining and dancing under the stars.

Within a few years the club had been rechristened the Palomino, a name inspired by the large horse ranches that dotted the surrounding countryside, and it prospered along with fast-growing postwar Tucson. In 1948 Gekas and Paulos sold the Palomino and moved on to other ventures. The building and grounds eventually came into the hands of Beatrice Padilla, and when fire destroyed the restaurant in the 1950s, it was Padilla who rebuilt it. The Palomino name survived the flames, and the restaurant carried on under a succession of proprietors — among them, at one point, Christopher and Betty Tsaguris — until, sometime in the mid-1960s, it finally went dark.

The Gekas family, meanwhile, had been busy. Over the decades the family would be associated with a dozen restaurants in Tucson, including the Flame Room, at the northeast corner of West Congress Street and North Church Avenue downtown, which was gutted by fire in the 1950s; the Cliff House, near West Rudasill and North Oracle roads, which the family ran from the late 1950s into the early 1960s; and, by 1964, the Coat of Arms in the Casas Adobes Shopping Center. Paulos, for his part, opened Paulos Steak & Chop House in 1956 in a converted garden and pottery shop, where it would stand for nearly five decades.

Then, in 1968, Padilla approached John Gekas with a proposition: Would he reopen the Palomino? “Johnny was really excited with the idea of running the Palomino again, turning it into the dance place that it once was,” Mary Gekas recalled years later. She wasn’t quite so excited. “When I saw it for the first time I nearly had a heart attack,” she said. “It had orange walls and lime-green carpeting and chrome tables and chairs.”

Working with professional decorators, the Gekases gutted the interior and redid the whole place in a Spanish-Mediterranean style, dressing up the windows with spindles and stained glass and dividing the space into separate dining rooms that together seated 120. The reborn Palomino opened in March 1968.

The nightclub half of John Gekas’s dream, however, refused to come back to life. Tucson had changed since the war years, and so, it seemed, had Tucsonans’ appetite for open-air revelry. As Mary Gekas put it, “It was always either too hot or too dusty or too buggy to dance outside.”

So the Gekases changed course. In the early 1970s John Gekas decided to sell one of his two remaining restaurants. A buyer for the Coat of Arms turned up first, in 1972, and Gekas threw himself into the Palomino. The big outdoor patio — the scene of all that hot, dusty, buggy dancing — was enclosed, and the restaurant was reconceived as a series of handsome rooms devoted to fine dining. Now billed as Johnny Gekas’ Palomino Restaurant and advertising itself as “the finest steak house in Tucson,” the place promised patrons “the finest available in aged beef plus special sour dough bread and our own special meat sauce.”

It took off in a big way. Through the 1970s and 1980s the Palomino came to define Continental dining in Tucson: bouillabaisse and rack of lamb were house specialties, Caesar salads and chateaubriand were prepared tableside, and cherries jubilee arrived in flames. Service ran deep in the restaurant’s bones — regulars liked to boast that their usual highball would land on the table within minutes of their being seated, unbidden — and for a generation of Tucsonans the Palomino became the standard for life’s landmark evenings: anniversaries, engagements, prom nights.

Presiding over it all was Mary Gekas, who greeted arriving guests with red lipstick and a warm smile and ran her dining rooms with a firm, gracious hand. Foul language was not tolerated, and the restaurant closed on Sundays so that she could attend church. On any given night, half of Tucson’s power elite might be tucked into one of the U-shaped booths, hammering out a deal while a visiting celebrity dined quietly a few tables away. Over the years the guest register came to include Bob Hope, Richard Boone, Walter Matthau, Lee Marvin, Paul Newman, George C. Scott, Willie Nelson, Jamie Farr, and Kris Kristofferson, along with President Gerald R. Ford and — years before anyone imagined him in the White House — George W. Bush. (No celebrity was more devoted than Bob Hope, who came to Tucson nearly every year to play in the Tucson Open’s celebrity pro-am and made the Palomino a regular stop.)

Mary Gekas made certain that fame purchased privacy at the Palomino. “Mostly the celebrities want to be left alone when they come to dine,” she once explained to an interviewer, “and we made sure they were left alone.”

The Gekases also built a busy catering trade, and the family long treasured the memory of one particularly improbable job in the 1970s: chateaubriand for 200 guests at Kitt Peak National Observatory, executed in a facility equipped with a single hot plate.

John Gekas fell seriously ill years before his death, and it was Mary who took the reins of the Palomino — the restaurant, in an age when women rarely ran businesses of any kind, along with everything else. “She did it all,” the couple’s oldest daughter, Kiki Kinkade, would later recall. “She took care of the restaurant, her husband and the children. My mother did it all.” She haggled with liquor salesmen and stared down butchers, and her command of the trade left a lasting mark on the family’s younger women. “It was wonderful to have that type of mentor,” her niece Maria Houpis recalled.

John Gekas died in 1982 at age 67, and the Palomino passed to his wife and their son, Jim, who had struck out on his own in 1979 with a restaurant called Harpo’s at East Sixth Street and North Fourth Avenue.

Mother and son ran the Palomino together for the next 12 years. In the kitchen, chef Joe Bigardi turned out the classics and trained a line of younger cooks, at least one of whom — Steve King, later the chef at the Fairmont’s Grille Restaurant in Santa Monica, California — would remember him as the teacher who made him want to stay. Out front, Mary Gekas kept a particular eye on the youngest members of the staff. “The busboys were her pet project,” Kinkade said. “She counseled them. She was respected by adolescent kids. People would send their wayward children to her.” Many employees, from busboys to chefs, stayed with the family for 20 years or more.

By the early 1990s, Mary Gekas was in her mid-seventies, and the family began to contemplate closing the Palomino. Offers arrived from chain operators, and were declined. “We wanted the restaurant to go to someone local,” Jim Gekas explained, “preferably another family with special talents.” On Saturday night, April 23, 1994, the Palomino served its last dinners — 26 years after the reopening, and 52 years after John Gekas and John Paulos first hung the Venice Gardens sign on the old Watering Hole. “We’ve been running restaurants for 52 years as a family,” Jim Gekas, then 44, told the Arizona Daily Star. “It’s been wonderful, but it’s time for us to do other things. This is the right time to do it. My mother is ready to relax and enjoy life. I’m too young to retire, but I like change.” He allowed that his own plans ran to fishing in Mexico, and after that perhaps college, or a return to the kitchen.

Two days later, the reservation phone was still ringing, and Mary Gekas could not stop herself from answering it. “Reservations line,” she explained to a visiting reporter. “I feel so badly to have to say we’re closed.” For the first time since 1942, Tucson woke up without a Gekas family restaurant.

The building did not sit idle. Mary and Jim had found their local family: Pedro and Evelyn Sevilla, who within weeks moved Encore-Med, their well-regarded Euro-Spanish restaurant, into the 14,000-square-foot building and its four separate dining rooms, later adding a second concept, Cafe Triana. Mary and Jim stayed on to help with the transition, as did many of the Palomino’s longtime employees.

One artifact left with the family. In the days after the closing, Jim Gekas took down the huge mural of the Acropolis that had hung on the north wall of the Palomino’s main dining room and carried it across the street to El Greco’s Grecian Gardens, the Kotzambasis family’s Greek restaurant then taking shape in a converted Circle K on East Fort Lowell Road. There the mural watched over diners until El Greco’s served its own farewell dinner on April 23, 2005 — 11 years to the day after the Palomino’s last night. The painting then passed to Tucson’s St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church.

The old corner at Swan and Fort Lowell stayed in the restaurant business a while longer. In November 1998, after a renovation reported to have cost a million dollars, meat-distribution magnate Bob McMahon opened McMahon’s Prime Steak House in the building, and for a time it reigned as the crown jewel of his Metro Restaurants group; it operated until 2015, when a bankruptcy court ordered it closed. In 2018 the building was converted into real estate offices, its new tenants pledging to preserve the landmark character of the place.

Mary Gekas filled her retirement with the arts, her church, and the theater. A benefactor of the Arizona Opera for nearly two decades and president of the Arizona Opera Dames from 1980 to 1986, she gave freely and quietly. “She always wanted to help, be it time or money,” her friend Evelyn Doll said. “She would give anything she could.” The giving was rarely announced; her children often stumbled across awards that she had accepted months or years earlier and never mentioned. “She was very behind-the-scenes, a very humble person,” Kinkade said.

A series of strokes slowed Mary Gekas in her final years, but never, her family insisted, her spirit. She died on June 18, 2006, at age 89.

August 1, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Miami/ Florida

Sautéed Veal Kidneys in Madeira Wine Sauce

Anton’s Continental

6521 Bird Road
Miami, Florida

1952 – 1957

In the winter of 1952, drivers heading west out of Coral Gables, Florida, along Bird Road began passing a new sign at Southwest 65th Avenue. “Announcing the Opening of Anton’s Continental,” the advertisements read — a restaurant “For Gracious Dining,” serving the finest French and Italian cuisine, and situated, as the ads were careful to point out, “on route to Tropical Park.” The geography was no accident. Two miles farther west, where Bird Road met the future path of the Palmetto Expressway, sat Tropical Park Race Track, the 245-acre thoroughbred oval that had anchored Miami’s winter racing circuit alongside Hialeah and Gulfstream since 1931. Every racing season, a river of horse players, snowbirds, and stable money flowed past the restaurant’s door — an audience with time on its hands, cash in its pockets, and, if Anton’s had anything to say about it, an appetite for snails.

The man who put his name over the door — more or less — was Anatol A. Brezo, a New Yorker in his mid-fifties who had arrived in Miami around 1938. Brezo’s résumé read like three or four lives stacked end to end. He had been an operatic tenor, singing at various times at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in New York City and at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. In Miami he became a builder, then a real estate agent, and finally an educator of a very particular kind: the founder of a school for food-processing specialists, an institution his contemporaries knew as the Miami Institute of Food Technology. Anton’s Continental opened in 1952 as an adjunct to his school, and Brezo ran the dining room like a laboratory — the operation was designed, as the local press later explained it, on the “scientific” daily control of food purchasing, preparation, and service. The kitchen’s mandate was equally deliberate: to specialize in unusual and hard-to-find recipes, the dishes other Miami restaurants wouldn’t touch.

Brezo did not run it alone. His wife, Ester Brezo (born Ester Dordoni), served as co-owner and hostess, and she brought her own brand of theatricality to the front of the house. Ester had directed plays at the University of Miami and was a champion of children’s theater in the area, and diners who came for the food often stayed for the welcome. Between the tenor in the kitchen and the director at the entrance, an evening at Anton’s came with a certain sense of production.

The menu delivered on the promise of the unusual. In 1953 lobster thermidor could be had for $1.70, and the specialty of the house was braised sweetbreads en casserole at $1.95. But the columnists steered readers first to the snails. Herb Rau, a columnist for the Miami Daily News, insisted that “you haven’t lived until you’ve eaten” the escargots bourguignonne — snails baked in a garlic-butter-parsley sauce, a bargain at $1.25 — before so much as touching the sweetbreads. Frogs’ legs and veal kidneys rounded out a roster of what Rau called the restaurant’s epicurean standouts, and the gossip columnists began doing their part as well: Milt Ross and Louise Brown, a husband-and-wife team who were fixtures on the Borscht Belt and Miami Beach hotel circuit, were spotted at a table that year, the first in a string of boldface names the restaurant would collect.

The veal kidneys, in particular, became a calling card. In January 1954, when the Miami Daily News invited the chefs of Greater Miami to reveal their favorite recipes, Anton’s contribution was its Veal Kidneys Sautéed in Madeira Wine Sauce — kidneys minced, seared hard in their own fat, then finished in a thickened sauce of golden onions and shallots, wine, tomato purée, and brown beef gravy, and sent out over croutons with a shower of chopped parsley.

That same year Brezo doubled down. He closed Anton’s Continental for a remodeling of the interior and announced that the restaurant would reopen on November 16, 1954, while he continued plans for something more ambitious: a frozen-food specialty operation in an adjoining building. Five days after the doors reopened, Herb Rau surveyed the whole operation in the Miami Daily News under the headline “Gourmet’s Paradise.”

A gourmet of his acquaintance, Rau began, was prepared to swear “on a stack of Escoffier cookbooks” that the best frog legs Provençale in Miami were to be found at Anton’s. The dish was one of a half-dozen house specialties, its garlic-butter sauce the object of connoisseurs’ devotion; others included sliced filet of beef sauté Forestière, roast beef, veal escallopine à la Française, and veal parmigiana. Table d’hôte dinners ran seven courses — appetizer, soup, entrée, vegetables, garlic bread, dessert, and beverage — with 22 entrées in all to choose from, at prices from $2.50 to $4.50. The à la carte side of the menu, Rau wrote, was “for the real gone gourmets,” organized in the classic French manner — hors d’oeuvres, potages, poissons, grillades, pâtés, fromages — and running from the escargots (six snails drenched in a garlic-butter sauce of fine herbs) through vichyssoise, pompano amandine, chateaubriand, and eggplant parmigiana, and on to baked Alaska, peach flambé, and crêpes suzette. The kitchen remained in the hands of chef Andre Marcel Longuesserre, formerly of the Brook Club and the Larchmont Yacht Club in New York — Rau assured his readers that the top-quality staff was unchanged by the redecoration — and the cocktail lounge, recently added and stocked with a vast collection of imported spirits, was staffed by a barman who, in Rau’s words, “whips up a perfect sherry-martini.” An advertisement on the same page quoted Gourmet’s Guide to Good Eating, the national restaurant directory published by the editors of Gourmet magazine, as pronouncing Anton’s “tops in Miami.”

Brezo, never a man to let a good corner lot idle, then opened a second restaurant next door. Il Guappo — the name is Neapolitan slang for a swaggering dandy — debuted next door to Anton’s Continental as a straight Italian eatery, trading on the reputation its parent had built in only a couple of seasons. Herb Rau used the occasion to recap the proprietor’s improbable arc: The one-time operatic tenor who had concertized at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, and the Hollywood Bowl, now running two restaurants on Bird Road and standing up a frozen-food business in between.

By 1955 Brezo’s frozen-food business was no longer just a plan. Anton’s was freezing a half-dozen of its house specialties for distribution to food markets — among them an item the columnists singled out as pelmeni, “a luscious little hors d’oeuvre.” The choice of pelmeni, the classic Russian meat dumpling, was a quiet tell about the man behind the Continental façade: Brezo’s funeral would one day be held at St. Vladimir Russian Orthodox Church, and the Social Security rolls carried him as “Anatoly.” The company hired real star power to sell its wares. Billy Gilbert — the rotund character comedian whose convulsive sneezing routine had made him famous and won him the voice of Sneezy in Disney’s Snow White — flew to Miami to film a series of Anton’s Continental frozen-food television spots through Reela Films, the local production house. The dining room, meanwhile, kept drawing names: the Phil Wylies — the Miami author of Generation of Vipers and the Crunch-and-Des fishing stories, and his wife — were spotted at Anton’s that year.

By 1956 the sideline had incorporated as Anton’s Continental Frozen Foods, Inc., with Jack Castaldi serving as vice president, and the restaurant itself had settled into the role of neighborhood institution. On the third Thursday of every month, Anton’s turned over a percentage of its business to the Lend-a-Hand Fund, the Miami Herald’s charity for needy children. There was another change at the stoves: Edmond Foulard, who had been chef at the La Gorce Country Club and the Sans Souci Hotel in Miami Beach, now held that position at Anton’s. And the boldface sightings reached their peak. George Engle, the Kentucky oil millionaire who that January had reopened the Coconut Grove Playhouse with the American premiere of Waiting for Godot, hosted Victor Borge and his wife at Anton’s. Tennessee Williams, whose Sweet Bird of Youth had its world premiere that spring at Studio M Playhouse in nearby Coral Gables, dined there the same year.

And then, with the abruptness that was the fate of so many mid-century Miami restaurants, it was over. Anton’s Continental served its last dinners in 1957. By 1958 the papers were reporting that what was once Anton’s Continental at 65th Avenue and Bird Road was now Ronnie’s Steak House, and the address kept churning: By 1961 the Bon Vivant, redecorated and under new management, occupied the site. The frozen-food dream, the food-technology school, the adjoining Il Guappo — all of it faded from the columns.

Anatol A. Brezo died in 1968 at age 70. His obituary noted that services would be held at St. Vladimir Russian Orthodox Church in Miami. He was survived by Ester, who lived another 17 years; at her death in 1985 she was remembered, fittingly, as the co-owner and hostess of Anton’s Continental.

July 31, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Detroit/ Michigan

Hungarian Goulash with Spätzle

Huck’s Redford Inn

25241 Grand River Avenue
Detroit, Michigan

1939 – 1961

Long before the Huck family arrived, the stretch of Grand River Avenue where it crosses Seven Mile Road was the kind of place Detroiters went when they wanted to slip the city’s leash. Grand River was U.S. Route 16, the old plank-road route to Lansing and the great northwest artery out of town, and in the 1920s and 1930s the roadside building at 25241 Grand River in Redford Township operated as the Ackmur Club, remembered years later in the Detroit press as a haven for “thirsty gamblers” through Prohibition and the Great Depression. The gambling eventually caught up with it. Authorities shut the club down, and the handsome building on its landscaped grounds sat waiting for a more respectable tenant.

As things turned out, it got one with a pedigree. Emil Huck and his brothers Otto and Gus had been feeding Detroit since 1905, when they opened the Schiller Restaurant on Gratiot Avenue. Two years later they moved to the Log Cabin Restaurant on Michigan Avenue, directly across from the old Cadillac Hotel, and in 1912 they took over the Westwood Inn and Garden in Inkster, which they would run for the next quarter century. The Westwood became one of the storied stops of the big-band era — Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller all played there — but what set it apart from other dance-hall roadhouses was the kitchen. As Danny Raskin, who wrote a weekly column on restaurants for the Detroit Jewish News, most places of that ilk “were not noted for tasty viands.” The Westwood was.

The Hucks left Inkster in 1937, and on July 1, 1939, Emil Huck opened Huck’s Redford Inn in the old Ackmur building with his two sons, Emil, Jr., then in his early thirties, and Harold, barely into his twenties. The announcements promised a cocktail lounge, numerous large meeting and banquet rooms for private parties, dancing nightly, and — a genuine luxury for a suburban restaurant in 1939 — air conditioning. The linen postcards the family commissioned from Chicago-based Curt Teich & Company that first year showed off the tiered gardens and used the back of the card to sell the menu, which is where the Hucks intended the emphasis to fall.

The formula worked immediately. Redford Township was still countryside then, and Huck’s became one of those destinations people liked to drive to on a pleasant Sunday afternoon — far enough out to feel like an excursion, close enough for dinner and dancing on a weeknight. The menu leaned on what the trade called roadhouse dinners: fish, frog legs, chicken, and steak, served in generous platters, with vegetables the family grew on its own farm. There were more ambitious entrées on the card, but it was the roadhouse dinners that built the Huck reputation and, within a few seasons, made the place one of northwest Detroit’s most popular and most profitable restaurants.

The postwar years brought the inn’s only significant physical change and a lucrative new neighbor. In 1950 the family added a new cocktail lounge; otherwise the main building stayed as it was, freshened by periodic redecoration. That same year the Detroit Race Course opened a few miles southwest in Livonia, and the Hucks went straight after the racing crowd. “Before and After the Races,” read the inn’s advertisement in the Daily Racing Form in June 1951, pitching the famous food, the cocktail lounge, the air conditioning, and reservations through the KEnwood exchange — and billing the place, without apparent embarrassment, as “Michigan’s Most Beautiful Roadhouse.”

By mid-decade the dining rooms had acquired an unexpected second identity as an art gallery. Joseph de Grimme, a Detroit art dealer who over the years placed some 50 pieces of fine art into local dining rooms, installed seven masterworks at Huck’s. The showpiece was “The Squire’s Birthday” by William Bromley, the English genre painter whose crowded, storytelling canvases hung in the Royal Academy exhibitions of the Victorian era. The painting was enormous — it very nearly covered one of the inn’s walls — and a 1954 account marveled that this “remarkable museum piece” contained no fewer than 77 distinct figures. Diners waiting on their prime rib could count them.

The family’s private life intruded on the business only once, and briefly. In 1956 Emil Huck, Jr., filed for divorce from his wife, Vivian, whom he had married in 1939 and with whom he had two children. His suit charged that she had an uncontrollable temper, that she had been telling restaurant customers detrimental stories about him, and that in one altercation she had hit him with a lamp. Circuit Judge Robert M. Thoms issued a temporary injunction restraining Mrs. Huck from entering the Redford Inn, from molesting her husband, and from running up charge accounts. The restaurant managed to run on without missing a service.

By 1959 the countryside that had once made Huck’s a pleasant Sunday drive had vanished under houses, gas stations, and a seemingly endless string of storefronts; Emil, Jr., liked to say that the old roadhouse now felt practically downtown. The food had not changed with the scenery. The French onion soup remained on the menu every day, a favorite of long standing, and the demand for roast prime ribs had grown so great that the kitchen was moving a ton and a half of them every week. A generous cut — rare, medium, or well done — went for $3.60 a serving, a price one contemporary account called “an absolute steal.”

The restaurant’s success in Redford Township financed an expansion clear across town. In 1960 Harold Huck purchased the former Beachcomber restaurant at Nine Mile and East Jefferson in St. Clair Shores, on the old lakeside amusement strip where the Jefferson Beach park had drawn summer crowds since the 1920s. The building had housed the Club Marjo in its heyday and a string of mediocre restaurants since, and Harold spent roughly $100,000 renovating it. Huck’s Lakeshore Restaurant opened the first week of May 1960, offering a $1.50 luncheon buffet and a $3.50 dinner buffet under the family’s chosen motto: “Fine Food Appetizingly Served.”

Emil Huck, Sr., lived to see the second restaurant open, but not much longer. He died on February 27, 1961, at age 73, and in his honor Huck’s Redford Inn and Huck’s Lakeshore Restaurant both went dark on March 2. After more than two decades of ownership, the family, with its patriarch gone, sold the Redford operation. The buyer was Burgess, Inc. — Don Burgess, the president of the Knife and Fork Club in downtown Detroit — who dropped the family name from the sign and reopened the restaurant simply as the Redford Inn, advertising a grand-opening celebration with the tagline “Don Burgess, your new host.” Victor Pegg came aboard as the new maître d’, and in 1962 Burgess announced with pride his association with chef George A. Marchand, whose artistry Detroiters had praised at the Knife and Fork.

The revival, however, did not hold. By 1965 the classified pages were listing the property under a blunt heading — “For Sale: Commercial. Formerly Huck’s Redford Inn” — and it was advertised again the following year simply as a commercial site. Emil Huck, Jr., died in 1978 at age 72. Harold, the last of the founding trio, died in 1996 at age 78 in Boca Raton, Florida, 57 years after he had helped his father hang the Huck name over the door of an old gamblers’ club on Grand River Avenue.

July 30, 2026 By Bill Hogan

New York/ New York

Cappuccino Florentino

Cafe Borgia

185 Bleecker Street
New York, New York

1959 – 2001

The northeast corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets in New York City sits at what was once the busiest crossroads of bohemian America. In the years after World War II, no intersection in Greenwich Village — arguably no intersection anywhere — packed more coffeehouse culture into a smaller radius. Caffe Reggio, pouring cappuccino on MacDougal since 1927, stood a block north. Cafe Le Figaro held down the southeast corner directly across the street. And beginning in 1959, the ground floor of the ornate Beaux-Arts tenement at 185 Bleecker Street belonged to Cafe Borgia.

The couple who opened it were products of the neighborhood in the most literal sense. Mary Latalardo was born on Spring Street, a few blocks south in what was then called the South Village, the daughter of Stephano and Anna Latalardo, immigrants from Salerno, Italy. Her father owned Napoli, a restaurant that occupied a few different locations on Spring Street over the years. Philip Cardaci grew up nearby, and the two met as teenagers. When Philip returned from Army service in Europe during World War II, they married at St. Anthony of Padua Church in 1947. Both went to work at Napoli, learning the family trade, before striking out on their own with a coffeehouse of their own design at the Bleecker Street corner.

The Cardacis named it for the most notorious family of the Italian Renaissance, and they committed to the theme. Portraits of Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia hung on the walls. Shields of armor and electric torches gave the room the look of a Medici-era hall, and a Renaissance-style mural of Venice by Franklin Moody dominated the space. The furniture, though, came straight out of the older South Village café tradition: small marble-topped tables and wrought-iron chairs. In 1964 Shirley and Bob Sloane, a husband-and-wife team of American travel journalists, placed Cafe Borgia squarely in the lineage of the Italian coffeehouses that predated the beatniks — the era, as the piece put it, when it was the neighborhood’s Italians who knew and appreciated a proper coffee house.

Borgia opened at precisely the moment the Village coffeehouse boom detonated. Cafe Wha? opened around the corner on MacDougal the same year; the Gaslight was already running its poetry nights a block away; Le Figaro, across the intersection, had been drawing writers since 1957. Into this ferment poured the Beat poets and their successors, and Cafe Borgia became one of their reliable stations. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were counted among its patrons, along with the playwright Edward Albee and, in time, Andy Warhol, who was known to spend hours at its tables. Joan Baez came through during the folk revival years, part of a roster of regulars and drop-ins that Village memory would eventually expand to include Bob Dylan, Al Pacino, Sam Shepard, and the writer Howard Norman.

The photographer Fred W. McDarrah, the Village Voice’s tireless chronicler of the downtown scene, caught the cafe at its cultural high-water mark: His night shot of pedestrians drifting past Borgia’s glowing corner windows, taken May 22, 1966, later became part of a collection documenting Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village. The image captures what made the place work — the cafe was not a stage or a nightclub but a room for gathering, talking, and reciting poetry, open late, where a cup of espresso bought a seat at the center of things.

Unlike the folk clubs and basket houses that surrounded it, Borgia never depended on performance for its identity, which is partly why it outlasted nearly all of them. When the tourist wave of the mid-sixties crested and receded, and when the folk boom gave way to rock and the clubs began to close, the Cardacis were still doing what they had always done: coffee, pastry, conversation, no cover charge.

Cafe Borgia remained a family operation throughout. In 1975 the Cardacis’ son Philip opened a second location, Cafe Borgia II, on Prince Street near Mercer in SoHo — a hot-pink building across from Vesuvio and Milady’s — extending the franchise into a neighborhood then in the early stages of its own artistic colonization. Philip Sr. died in 1980, and the younger Philip carried on at both locations. Mary Cardaci remained an active presence behind the counter at the original Bleecker Street café until 1995.

Through the seventies and eighties, as the Village changed around it, Borgia settled into the role of institution. A 1983 city guide, ticking off the surviving old-world cafés, described it simply: a cozy Italian café dominated by a mural of Venice, at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, second in age among the Village coffeehouses only to Caffe Reggio. Regulars from those decades remembered the little round marble tables, the wire-backed chairs that discouraged lingering but never quite succeeded, the worn menus, and cappuccino at prices that stayed stubbornly below what the tourist traps charged.

The end came the way it usually does in Manhattan. Philip Cardaci was paying $4,100 a month for the corner space when his lease expired, and the landlord declined to offer a new one. Cafe Borgialost its lease in October 2001 and served its last customers at the close of December — 42 years after it opened, and just months after the September 11 terrorist attacks had thrown the city’s small businesses into deeper uncertainty.

On the Tuesday after the closing, Cardaci spent the morning packing up the shields of armor and tearing down the electric torches. “There’s a lot of history here,” he told a reporter for the New York Times. “It’s just too bad, but I guess that’s New York.” He said he hoped to reopen the original someday, and he was salvaging what mattered most: the wrought-iron chairs, the Renaissance mural, and the portraits of the family that gave the café its name. Pointing at Lucrezia and Cesare, he said, “I’m taking them as well.”

The regulars mourned in the key that had become standard for Village obituaries by then. “The Village has changed so fast, it’s made us old fogies before our time,” said Jay Reisberg, a filmmaker and longtime customer who blamed gentrification for outpricing his neighborhood haunts one by one. “All those places with texture and character have disappeared.”

Mary Cardaci died at age 82 in 2005, at her home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Her funeral was held at St. Anthony of Padua — the same church where she had married Philip 58 years earlier — with interment in the family mausoleum in Hawthorne, New York. Perazzo Funeral Home at 199 Bleecker Street, a few doors from the old café, handled the arrangements.

The corner space became Ciao, an Italian wine-bar-style restaurant run by Neapolitan-born Marcello Assante, which operated at 185 Bleecker for years before closing in its turn. Across the intersection, Le Figaro poured its last coffee in 2008, a closing widely read as the final death knell for a crossroads that had once been more Greenwich Village than any other corner of Greenwich Village. In 2013, the building that housed Cafe Borgia was folded into the newly designated South Village Historic District, preserving the architecture, if not the establishment.

Cafe Borgia II on Prince Street carried the name for another decade and a half, a last outpost of the classic Italian Village cafés alongside Caffe Reggio. In 2015 it, too, lost its lease and closed, and the storefront was gutted within weeks. Of the old constellation — Reggio, Dante, Figaro, Cino, Borgia — only Reggio remains, still pouring cappuccino from its 1902 espresso machine a block from the corner where, for 42 years, the Borgias kept watch from the wall.

July 30, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Indianapolis/ Indiana

Dungeness Crab à la Maison

La Rue’s

1121 North Pennsylvania Street
Indianapolis, Indiana

1946 – 1962

Long before anyone mixed a cocktail at 1121 North Pennsylvania Street in Indianapolis, the address belonged to Albert E. Fletcher, the youngest of pioneer Calvin Fletcher’s nine sons. Calvin had arrived in the city in 1826, not long after Indiana joined the Union, and built a fortune in law, farming, and banking. Albert, by his father’s own diary-keeping account, was the son least likely to carry the family standard — a boy who once failed to deliver a note to a neighbor because he couldn’t manage to get through the hedge. After repeatedly flunking the mathematics portion of Harvard College’s entrance exam, Albert settled for Brown University, then abandoned his studies altogether in 1868 to marry Eliza Sharpe and join his older brother Ingram at Fletcher & Sharpe, the family bank co-founded by his father and his new father-in-law.

The bank prospered even as Indianapolis struggled through the depression of the 1870s, and in 1873 Albert commissioned Joseph Curzon, a local architect, to design a residence worthy of a banker’s station in life. (In 1852 Curzon had designed the city’s original Union Depot, generally regarded as the nation’s first union station.) The Italianate mansion that rose at 1121 North Pennsylvania over the next year was built to outlast centuries. Its floors were fully six inches thick, resting on three-by-twelve hard maple beams. Its 14-foot double entrance doors and the great interior doors were so precisely hung that decades later they could still be swung with a fingertip — and stay put wherever they were left. The interior woodwork, the finest walnut inset with oak and bronze and overlaid in places with gold-leaf designs, was imported from France and northern Italy; Fletcher brought two Swiss artisans to Indianapolis to supervise its installation, a job that consumed three full years. Every fireplace in the house was of different design, giving each room its own character. There were marble floors and bronze carvings besides.

Albert enjoyed his palace for barely a decade. On the morning of July 15, 1884, depositors arriving at Fletcher & Sharpe found the doors sealed and a notice posted: The partners regretted that they were “compelled to suspend payments.” The failure of one of the city’s oldest banks landed, in the words of historian Jacob Piatt Dunn, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, and it fell hardest on the small depositors — working people who had trusted the Fletcher name with their life savings. The brothers surrendered everything. Albert insisted to the Indianapolis News that “not one cent of defalcation has occurred in our bank,” and even with the family fortunes thrown into the pot, depositors ultimately recovered only 80 cents on the dollar. The mansion on Pennsylvania Street was sold along with everything else and would pass through six more decades as a private residence. Albert finished his working life as a traveling salesman, drifting from Philadelphia to Connecticut to California and back, and died in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1918.

The Fletcher mansion’s second act came in June 1946, courtesy of Jack Ensley, an Indianapolis sportsman who the year before had led a group of businessmen in purchasing Little America, the miniature-golf-and-amusements park at 62nd Street and Keystone Avenue. Ensley announced the opening of La Rue’s, a restaurant at 1121 North Pennsylvania Street, with a schedule built for a full day’s trade: luncheon from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., a cocktail hour from 2:30 to 5:30, and dinner from 5:30 p.m. until 12:30 in the morning. The bar went into Fletcher’s former library, where the original built-in bookcase and secretary remained intact — a detail the club would advertise for years.

Ensley was a restless entrepreneur whose holdings would eventually range across Indiana and Arizona — golf centers, restaurants, cocktail lounges, a sports-car garage — and who would find his greatest fame behind the wheel, campaigning Jaguar D-Types in the 1950s and co-driving at Sebring in 1957 with Indianapolis 500 star Pat O’Connor. He did not linger long on Pennsylvania Street, though. In 1947 he announced the sale of his majority interest in La Rue’s to Gust Lycas of Bloomington, a minority partner in the business, explaining that he would devote his full attention to the Little America Recreation Center at 6160 North Keystone Avenue, where he also planned to build a restaurant.

Lycas, a Crete-born Greek immigrant who came to America at age 19, had run the Lycas Restaurant in Bloomington, Indiana, before World War II. He was joined by two part-owners: Forest Keith Klepfer, an Indianapolis businessman, and “Coach” Billy Thom, one of the most celebrated figures in Indiana sport. Thom had coached Indiana University’s wrestling team from 1927 to 1945, winning eight Big Ten championships and the 1932 NCAA title, sending seven wrestlers to individual national championships, and coaching the American squad at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Through the Depression he had supplemented his university salary in the professional ring, wrestling in long, bright-red tights and at one point holding world titles in three weight divisions simultaneously. On the occasion of what was billed as his farewell ring appearance in Indianapolis, Thom made a speech in which he uttered this long-remembered line: “I wish to thank all of you fans — especially those who boo.”

Under the new owners, La Rue’s was rebranded “The House of Distinction” — in the language of its own advertising, “The Real Place of Excellent Foods and Fine Cocktails” — and the Fletcher mansion was carved into a suite of themed rooms that traded on the house’s Victorian bones. Guests could take a drink in the Gay Nineties Cocktail Room, dine in the Gold Room or the exotic Blackamoor Room, or settle into Ye Olde Tea Room. The showpiece came at the end of 1947. The mansion’s old third-floor ballroom had spent years as a catchall storage room; the partners cleared it out, dressed it in tropical décor, and reopened it as the Penthouse Room — with a grand opening on New Year’s Eve. The ballroom could seat 200, and its floor shows became the club’s big draw.

For the next decade and a half, La Rue’s occupied a particular niche in Indianapolis nightlife: white tablecloths and name entertainment inside a genuine Gilded Age mansion, a few minutes’ walk from the Meridian Street corridor of clubs and lounges. Patrons who remembered it decades later described an automatic grand piano in glistening ebony — said to be the first in the city — playing in the cocktail lounge during the years when Indiana law still barred women from sitting at the bar itself, and floor shows headlined by the biggest touring names of the era: Louis Armstrong, Patti Page, Jack Teagarden. The house also did a brisk private-club trade. A group of downtown businessmen and politicians who had outgrown their table at Hussey’s restaurant took over La Rue’s second floor for their meetings, and it was there that someone proposed an annual antelope hunt in Douglas, Wyoming — the founding ritual of what became the Antelope Club, which still operates in Indianapolis today.

The ownership of La Rue’s was never a settled matter for long. In 1950 the club advertised itself as under new management, with Don Steckler billed as “your new host,” as Lycas stepped away to devote himself full-time to a real estate and insurance position. The transition years produced at least one ugly scene: Jack Ensley was arrested for assault and battery after slugging 28-year-old Forest Klepfer, who told authorities that Ensley was still bitter that he, Harley Horton, and Gust Lycas had taken over La Rue’s.

That account is the first appearance in the record of Harley L. Horton, a real-estate broker, entrepreneur, and man-about-town who would preside over La Rue’s golden years and its collapse. By 1952, when fire damaged his home at 4580 East 75th Street, the newspapers were identifying Horton as the owner of La Rue’s Supper Club. Horton lived in a style that matched his club — acquaintances recalled a multi-level mansion he built on the river near 82nd and Keystone, with a two-way fireplace joining an indoor bar to the pool deck, the bar itself fashioned from a repurposed antique soda fountain that now dispensed gin and scotch.

In 1954 La Rue’s celebrated its eighth anniversary with newspaper ads proclaiming it “Indiana’s Finest Supper Club” — and welcomed back a familiar face. Gust Lycas returned to run the operation he had first managed at its 1946 opening, and Gerald Dreyer, the business editor of the Indianapolis News, gave the move his blessing: “Gust Lycas will make the place ‘go’ if anyone can.”

Not everything at La Rue’s, however, was floor shows and prime rib. In April 1960, the Marion County Liquor Board pulled La Rue’s three-way liquor and dance permit while it investigated a curious piece of arithmetic: The multi-floored establishment had 18 telephones listed under five different numbers — a configuration that suggested, to investigators, a bookmaking operation rather than a supper club. For a week La Rue’s operated on a beer permit only. Harley Horton, appearing before the board as La Rue’s manager, assured its members that all other business operations had been removed from the premises, and the full permit was restored. The episode had collateral damage: The Antelope Club and other organizations that met at La Rue’s severed their ties in the wake of the gambling allegations.

Whatever was or wasn’t happening on the telephones, the entertainment calendar stayed ambitious to the end. In the spring of 1961 the club advertised a genuine coup: Dizzy Gillespie, the bebop trumpet titan, was booked into La Rue’s for two days in May. It was the kind of engagement the Penthouse had been built for, and one of the last big bookings the old house would see.

The end came fast. In 1962 the federal government filed a tax lien against La Rue’s for withholding and excise taxes owed from 1961. Horton insisted the club would remain open, and his son Harold petitioned the Circuit Court to appoint a receiver, a maneuver the family’s lawyer explained was intended to let the club keep operating while it cleared its debts. Harold’s petition included a personal grievance: He claimed that he was owed $300 for his own work as the club’s manager. None of it worked. By July an Indianapolis News columnist was noting the weeds growing up around the shuttered supper club, and on January 27, 1963, La Rue’s went under the hammer at an auction ordered by the federal court.

Gust Lycas did not live to see the house that Albert Fletcher built vanish. He died in Bloomington in 1966 at age 73, remembered as the former owner of La Rue’s and of Lycas’ Delicatessen, as a part owner of the West Point Cocktail Lounge on West Ohio Street, and as the patriarch of a family thoroughly embedded in the Indiana restaurant trade — his son Angelo, who died in 1962, had owned the Cozy Bar in Indianapolis, and his brother George the Star Dust Cafe in Bloomington.

The Fletcher mansion itself lingered a few years longer, long enough to be photographed for Wilbur Peat’s 1962 book Indiana Houses of the Nineteenth Century, and long enough to be memorialized in oil. At the 43rd annual Hoosier Salon in 1967, the Indianapolis painter and Herron School of Art teacher Harry A. Davis — who spent decades documenting Indiana buildings destined for the wrecking ball — won the $500 William H. Block Company prize for the outstanding work in oil, a canvas depicting the mansion at 1121 Pennsylvania as it then stood: decayed, empty, and awaiting demolition for the proposed inner-loop highway. The interstate took the house soon after, along with most of its neighbors, and the site where Swiss artisans had spent three years fitting gold-leafed walnut disappeared beneath the pavement of Interstate 65.

July 28, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Edmond/ Oklahoma

Chocolate Angel Pie

Royce Cafe

400 South Broadway
Edmond, Oklahoma

1934 – 1970

Royce B. Adamson came to the restaurant business by way of the printing press. In the 1920s he’d been the editor and publisher of The Edmond Enterprise, the weekly newspaper that served Edmond, Oklahoma, a college and farming town of a few thousand people ten miles north of Oklahoma City. What pulled him out of publishing and into the kitchen, by most accounts, was a friendship. Crawford Noe ran the Wide-A-Wake Cafe at 213 South Broadway, a 31-seat lunchroom that had opened in 1927 as the “Night & Day” and fed truckers around the clock — for years it was said to be the only all-night stop on U.S. Route 66 between Tulsa and Amarillo. Adamson and Noe were best of friends who hunted and fished together, and Noe’s enthusiasm for the trade proved contagious. He urged Adamson to open his own cafe.

The moment Adamson chose was, on paper, a terrible one. The Great Depression had settled over Oklahoma, and drought and dust were shaping much of the state. But the region’s oil industry was on the cusp of a boom — the Royce Cafe’s own postcards would later boast of “The Edmond Oil Field, Three Miles West” — and the corner Adamson picked, Fourth and Broadway, sat squarely on the pavement shared through town by U.S. Highway 77 and the early alignment of U.S. Route 66. The traffic moving along Route 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles, or north and south on U.S. 77, passed his front door.

Adamson announced his plans for a combination cafe and filling station in March 1934 — the original scheme even included tourist courts, which apparently never materialized — and construction on the stone building began that May. The Royce Cafe and Adamson’s Service Station opened for business on July 26, 1934. The name on the sign was Royce’s, but the enterprise was a partnership from the first: He and his wife, Neva, ran the cafe together, with Neva presiding over the kitchen and the pies that would build its reputation, and for the next eight years virtually every expansion and improvement would be announced in the newspapers under a joint billing: “Mr. and Mrs. Royce B. Adamson, Proprietors.”

What rose at Fourth and Broadway was built to last: a low building faced in native red sandstone, with the Royce Cafe inside and Adamson’s Service Station out front, its three Conoco pumps standing at the northwest corner of the lot. Both businesses were open 24 hours a day — a habit the Adamsons may well have borrowed from their friend Noe. Early advertising kept things simple: sandwiches, hamburgers, lunches, ice cream, and cold drinks, with curb service and plenty of parking.

The formula worked from the get-go. By 1936 newspaper ads for the Royce Cafe were headlining a “Big Plate Lunch” for a quarter and touting the establishment as the “Coolest Cafe in Town.” A T-bone steak dinner ran 45 cents; the rest of the menu leaned on sandwiches, homemade chili, soups, pies, and what the Adamsons pointedly advertised as “Real Coffee.” That Thanksgiving, a complete turkey dinner cost 50 cents.

Within two years of opening, the crowds had outgrown the building. In the summer of 1936 the Adamsons had an 18-by-40-foot dining room built onto its south end — constructed and fitted out with fixtures, the Enterprise marveled, in the record time of three weeks. The newspaper credited the cafe’s “wonderful growth in business” for the expansion, reporting that for weeks the original room had been entirely inadequate for the throngs gathering there. The new dining room seated 40, bringing the establishment’s total capacity to 75.

Expansion also gave the Adamsons room to experiment. In 1936 they introduced a novelty called the “Ring Around the Rosey,” for which the Royce Cafe held what it advertised as an exclusive territorial franchise. The steak was cooked inside a covered ring intended to seal in its juices and special seasoning, then served as part of a complete meal with all the hot biscuits a customer wanted. The first biscuits would come from the oven at 5:30 each evening, with fresh batches following throughout the night.

That same year the Adamsons stepped back from the gasoline side of the operation, leasing the station to Herb Keys, who promptly installed a hydraulic lift outdoors in the parking lot to speed servicing. In 1938 Keys built his own station on the northwest corner of the same intersection.

The cafe’s advertising through the late 1930s reads like a seasonal almanac of small-town appetites. In the summer of 1937: ice-cold watermelon at a dime a slice, and fresh peaches and cream. Plate lunches held at 25 cents, complete dinners at 45 cents. The same year the Royce Cafe also announced the arrival of “that good Alpen Brau Beer,” a St. Louis brew made legal again in Oklahoma by the state’s embrace of 3.2 percent beer. And in 1938 the Adamsons announced that a new air-conditioning unit now cooled their cafe.

The Adamsons staffed the place with family and hired good-looking students from Central State Teachers College, a short walk away, to wait tables. The around-the-clock hours and the highway location pulled in bus tours, ball teams, touring musical groups — and, if family lore is to be believed, one notorious outlaw. As the story was later told by the Adamsons’ daughter, John Dillinger stopped in one evening for a cup of coffee. Adamson was warned not to call the authorities at the risk of his life, and — looking out at two guns pointed his way from the windows of a long black car with curtained windows — he was more than willing to comply. The tale, however, is undoubtedly apocryphal, as Dillinger was shot dead outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934 — four days before the Royce Cafe had opened for business.

Sometime around 1940, the Royce Cafe issued a postcard for which it is now, regrettably, best remembered. One side carried a portrait of Royce B. Adamson, the slogan “From Dawn to Dawn We’re Never Gone,” and a civic booster’s inventory of Edmond’s charms: the college, the churches, the parks, the paving, the Santa Fe railroad and hourly interurban service, the oil field three miles west. Folded into that list, as matter-of-factly as the flour mills and the ice plant, was the line: “A Good Place to Live … 6,000 Live Citizens — No Negroes.”

The card was not an aberration. Edmond was a sundown town — a community that deliberately barred Black residents — and had promoted itself as such since at least 1920, when the student newspaper at the college listed the absence of a “negro element” among the features of an ideal school town. Racial covenants barred property sales to anyone who was not white or Native American in every Edmond neighborhood platted between 1911 and 1949, save one. A 1942 promotional letter located Edmond “In the Center of the White Spot of the Universe,” and a newcomer’s guide published four years later, circulated with letters from local businesses and the mayor, put the town’s population at an estimated 7,500 — “100% White. No Negroes.” Residents later recalled a city ordinance forbidding Black people to be in town after sundown; Black travelers on Route 66 could not count on being served at restaurants in Edmond or finding lodging in the city — precisely the conditions that made guides such as The Negro Motorist Green Book indispensable.

The consequences long outlasted the cafe. No African American attended an Edmond school until 1974, and no African American family lived in the city until 1976, as Christopher P. Lehman, an ethnic studies professor who grew up there, documented in a 2014 essay asking whether his former hometown should apologize for its sundown past. In that reckoning the Royce postcard has become the standing exhibit: widely reproduced, regularly cited as the plainest surviving evidence of what Edmond was, its cheerful typography doing the work no apology has yet done. Whether the “No Negroes” line reflected Royce Adamson’s personal conviction or simply the boosterism of a businessman selling his town as he found it, he put his name and face on the card, and it advertises him still.

In 1941 the Adamsons added a 22-by-60-foot annex on the north end of the building and christened it the Mural Room for a 6-by-36-foot painting that ran across the room’s north wall. With hardwood floors, a player piano and a new “automatic record player” — a jukebox in the language of the day — the room was promoted for conventions, banquets, and other private gatherings. The Adamsons set October 9, 1941, for a formal open house celebrating the remodeled cafe.

Royce Adamson did not get long to enjoy it. He died in early 1942, and Neva took over the business she would run for another decade and a half. The wartime ads betrayed no faltering — “The Home of Good Food! Waffles Served Anytime!” — and the postcards were quietly reset to read “Mrs. Royce B. Adamson, Prop.” Alongside the fried chicken, T-bone steaks, hot biscuits, and home-baked pies, the cards made a promise aimed at the traveling public’s hygiene anxieties: “All food supervised by women.”

The postwar Royce Cafe belonged, in the kitchen at least, to Jimmy Tindall, who had married the Adamsons’ daughter, Royce Eileen. Tindall was managing the cafe by 1946, and a 1947 advertisement made the arrangement official: Mrs. Royce B. Adamson, owner; Jimmie Tindall, manager. He was an excellent cook, and the highway guides noticed. Jack D. Rittenhouse’s 1946 A Guide Book to Highway 66, which rationed its praise severely, gave Edmond a single line of commerce and included three words that mattered: “Royce cafe is good.” The cafe also caught the eye of Duncan Hines, the traveling salesman turned national arbiter of roadside eating, who included it in his guide Adventures in Good Eating.

Tindall’s specialties became the cafe’s signatures. He made a fiery chili and served it with ice-cold beer. His blue-cheese salad dressing became so celebrated that he sold it by the jar to customers who could not coax the recipe out of him. In winter the Royce Cafe poured hot Dr Pepper, a curiosity customers recalled for the rest of their lives. Pies remained a house pride — “Pies are a specialty with Mrs. Adamson,” Hines reported in his syndicated newspaper column in 1953 — and the menu kept pace with the times: By 1957 the Royce was even advertising “pizza pie” for 50 cents alongside slices of chocolate or lemon ang el pie for 35 cents. The Tindalls, meanwhile, opened a second Royce Cafe in Oklahoma City, running it while staying associated with the Edmond original, and remained in the food business for the rest of Jimmy’s life.

On January 8, 1958, Neva Adamson announced that she was retiring from the restaurant business. “In the sudden and unexpected announcement,” the Edmond Booster reported in a front-page story, “Mrs. Adamson said that she had sold the land, property, and business ‘lock, stock, and barrel’ to the new owner.” The buyer was Jim Mills, who’d recently sold his interest in Edmond’s Baggerly Funeral Home and shortly after midnight had taken over the operation of what the newspaper called “Edmond’s best known eating establishment.”

Mills lasted barely six months. Announcing that he had bought a funeral home in McAlester and would move there as soon as possible, he sold the Royce Cafe to Mr. and Mrs. R. R. McCoy, the owners of Edmond’s Broncho Theatre — the neon-lit movie house at Main and Broadway with, improbably, a hospital operating on its second floor. McCoy was no stranger to the business, having operated The Grill in Edmond several years earlier, and the couple kept the theater while assuming management of the cafe on July 1.

The McCoys — “Mac and Hazel,” as they signed their advertising — ran the Royce Cafe through the 1960s with a lighter touch and a sense of humor. “Don’t worry about the cooks, they don’t eat here,” a 1962 ad teased. Another pitched the kitchen’s latest invention, the Royce Burger. But the world that built the cafe was dissolving around it: The interstate era was pulling through-traffic away from Broadway, and the 24-hour highway trade that Royce Adamson had bet on in 1934 was migrating to the exits.

The end came in 1970, announced the way it had all begun — in a newspaper ad. “Royce Cafe (of Edmond),” the notice in the Daily Oklahoman read. “Auction—This Very Famous Place Will Be Sold at Auction with Very Good Equipment Going to Highest Bid.” After some 36 years, the Royce served its last plate lunch; its griddles, booths, and pie cases went to the highest bidders.

The red sandstone building proved harder to kill than the business. It still stands at Fourth and Broadway, one of the few physical survivors of Edmond’s highway-cafe era. (The Wide-A-Wake, by contrast, was bulldozed in 1976.) The Edmond History Museum keeps the Royce’s matchbooks and postcards, and the blue-cheese dressing that Jimmy Tindall guarded so jealously finally appeared in print in 1993, in Marian Clark’s The Route 66 Cookbook — shared, Clark wrote, by Royce Eileen herself. Royce Eileen Adamson Tindall Sipe died in 2006 at age 89.

Print Recipe

Chocolate Angel Pie

(No Ratings Yet)

1 (9-inch) pie; 8 servings

In 1934 Royce and Neva Adamson opened the Royce Cafe in Edmond, Oklahoma, on a corner where the traffic moving along Route 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles, and north and south on U.S. 77, passed right by their front door. The cafe stayed open around the clock and quickly became known for steaks, hot biscuits and Neva's home-baked pies. In 1940 Duncan Hines, the era’s most trusted arbiter of roadside eating, added the Royce Cafe to his guidebook Adventures in Good Eating, and in 1953 he used his nationally syndicated column to praise the cafe's Chocolate Angel Pie as a confection "fit for the gods," singling out its unusual nut-studded meringue shell.

Ingredients

Unsalted butter, for the pie plate
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 large egg whites, at room temperature
1/2 cup pecans or other nuts, coarsely broken or chopped
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips or finely chopped semisweet chocolate
3 tablespoons hot water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup heavy cream, cold

Instructions

Heat the oven to 275 degrees. Generously butter a 9-inch pie plate.

Sift the sugar and cream of tartar together. In a clean bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry. With the mixer running, gradually add the sugar mixture and continue beating until the meringue is smooth and glossy.

Spread the meringue over the bottom and up the sides of the prepared pie plate, leaving the center hollow and keeping the meringue off the rim. Sprinkle the pecans or other nuts evenly over the meringue.

Bake for 1 hour, until delicately golden. Transfer the pie plate to a rack and cool the shell completely.

Put the chocolate in the top of a double boiler or in a heatproof bowl set over barely simmering water. Melt, stirring occasionally. Stir in the hot water and continue cooking and stirring until the mixture thickens. Remove from the heat, cool slightly, then stir in the vanilla.

Whip the cream until it holds soft-to-medium peaks. Fold the whipped cream into the chocolate mixture until no streaks remain.

Spoon the filling into the cooled meringue shell. Refrigerate for 3 to 4 hours, until thoroughly chilled and set, before slicing.

July 26, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Lexington/ Kentucky

Coach House Hot Brown

Capps Coach House

855 South Broadway
Lexington, Kentucky

1949 – 1967

Olen and Nancy Capps came to Lexington, Kentucky, for the same reason a great many horse people did in the late 1940s: for the show ring. The couple had made the trip from Camden, New Jersey, for the Junior League Horse Show, the saddlebred spectacle staged each summer on the red-clay oval of the Red Mile, and when the classes were finished they went looking for dinner. Nothing in town suited them. The Cappses were restaurateurs — they owned a place called the Chimney House in Camden, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, and another down the shore at Ocean City — and they knew a gap in a market when they tasted one. Before they left Lexington they had settled on the building they wanted and found a landlord willing to talk.

It was a stately, two-story brick house at 855 South Broadway, just one door south of Tattersalls Sales Stable, its windows looking out over the Lexington trotting track. It had lived several lives already. For years it had been a private residence — known around town at one point as the Jewell place — and before that a boarding house known as the Tattersall Inn. In 1932 it passed to A. C. Duke, a Maysville tobacco man and horseman, who let it serve as quarters for the manager and caretaker of Tattersalls. Then, in 1948, Tattersalls and the house next door changed hands together, both bought by Robert S. Eddy, Jr., and his son, F. Hathorn Eddy. When the Cappses asked Robert Eddy about leasing the old brick house, he agreed.

The terms were set down in a ten-year lease dated February 10, 1949, between Tattersalls, Inc., and Olen D. Capps — signed by him personally and in the name of the business he was about to bring into being: Capps Coach House. The rent came to $933.62 a month. What followed was a top-to-bottom renovation: the old house was gutted and reworked into a modern restaurant, with two rooms added, that could seat 300 guests in spaces ranging from quiet corners for parties of eight to banquet rooms holding 80. The kitchen was built to be shown off, open to any diner who cared to watch the cooks at work, and a bakery was tucked in behind it. The doors of Capps Coach House opened that spring, with a formal debut on April 17, 1949.

The whole family folded into the enterprise. Olen and Nancy Capps took an apartment on the second floor of the converted house. Their younger son, Robert, and his wife helped run the new establishment; the older son, William, minded the Ocean City restaurant back east, and the Chimney House in Camden they leased out to others. Olen Capps himself was a Pennsylvanian, formerly of Norristown, in the suburbs northwest of Philadelphia, and long devoted to horses of both stripes, thoroughbred and standardbred alike. He and his wife kept their own runners, a thoroughbred string racing under the name Nan-O-Lee Farms, then stabled at North Wales Stud, the storied thoroughbred estate near Warrenton, Virginia, owned in those years by the automotive heir Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.

That devotion became the restaurant’s entire visual language. Paintings and prints of horses crowded the bar, the lounge, and every dining room; a good many of the photographs of horses and riders on the walls were the work of photographer John L. “Johnny” Horst. When Ford Times, the Ford Motor Company’s pocket-sized travel magazine, wrote the place up in 1951, it caught the room exactly, calling it a restaurant with “a definitely ‘horsey’ atmosphere,” open every day but Monday and standing next to the world-famous Tattersalls, where horses had been sold for three-quarters of a century.

The address had earned the description. Tattersalls had been auctioning harness horses in Lexington since the late 19th century, its name borrowed from the great English sales house founded at Hyde Park Corner in 1766. The track the dining room overlooked was the Red Mile, the storied red-clay course whose Grand Circuit meeting, the Lexington Trots, closed the harness season each autumn.

The Coach House had been open barely half a year when it collected its most cinematic guest. That October John Huston, the famous motion-picture director, brought a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer crew into the Bluegrass to shoot the closing scene of The Asphalt Jungle, his hard-boiled heist picture, in which Sterling Hayden’s dying criminal makes it home to a Kentucky horse farm and drops in a pasture among the colts he had dreamed of buying back. (Cast in a small early role as a crooked lawyer’s young mistress was an all-but-unknown actress named Marilyn Monroe.) One evening the Lexington horseman John A. Clark took Huston to Capps Coach House and ordered for him — a plate of lamb fries, the local delicacy of breaded, fried lamb testicles served in cream gravy, a thing local menus listed without translation. Huston ate them, and liked them. “What are these?” he asked at last. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” Clark said.

In September 1954 Tattersalls — and the Coach House’s lease along with it — passed to Standardbred, Inc., a syndicate of harness breeders led by Frederick Van Lennep, the master of Castleton Farm and one of the two great powers of the American standardbred world. A month later the Cappses sold their Coach House for an undisclosed sum to two men with no restaurant experience whatsoever. Wendell Hall was a horse trainer; Charlie Webb sold cloth for the Fulton Bag and Cotton Company out of Atlanta. They had been circling the deal for some time, they said, and they liked their chances. “We both have been on the road quite a bit,” one of them told a reporter for the Lexington Leader, “and we think we know what the public wants.”

Hall and Webb took charge November 1. Olen Capps, meanwhile, announced that he was going home to Philadelphia; by 1956 he and Nancy were running Nanolen Farm at Collegeville, Pennsylvania, tending standardbreds instead of tables. Under Hall and Webb the restaurant kept its coach and dropped its Capps: it became, simply, The Coach House. The partnership held until 1960, when Webb bought out Hall’s interest and carried the dining room on alone.

That long run ended in the summer of 1967, when Webb sold the restaurant to Mr. and Mrs. Howard Melvin, the owners of the Heritage Restaurant in Cincinnati, who promptly branded their new acquisition with the same name. The horses stayed on the walls — the old Johnny Horst photographs of riders and mounts, donated years before, were simply left hanging — but the Coach House name, and the era it had carried since the spring of 1949, was finished.

In 1969 the building was taken over by restaurateur Stanley Demos, who revived the Coach House name and, over the next three decades, made it the grandest fine-dining room in Lexington: crystal chandeliers, gold-framed oils, a continental menu leaning French with Greek and Italian touches, and a lunch trade that read like a roll call of the Bluegrass. A fire early one morning in 1971 gutted the interior and consumed some 3,000 cookbooks; Demos rebuilt. His Coach House served its last dinner on April 7, 2001, and the building was pulled down in 2013. Demos himself lived to age 104, dying in 2024 — long enough to have outlasted, by better than half a century, the horse-show couple who first hung a coach lamp over the door of 855 South Broadway.

Print Recipe

Coach House Hot Brown

(No Ratings Yet)

Serves 4

Created in 1926 by Fred K. Schmidt, the chef of Louisville’s Brown Hotel, the original Hot Brown was an open-faced turkey-and-bacon sandwich covered with Mornay sauce and browned under the broiler. Schmidt devised it as a late-night alternative to ham and eggs for guests attending the hotel’s popular dinner dances. This riff on the classic Hot Brown was a fixture on the menu of Capps Coach House in Lexington, Kentucky. Its recipe allowed for either chicken or turkey and added fresh mushrooms, tomato, and paprika. A version of the restaurant's recipe designed for home cooks, published in 1951, listed "your favorite medium cream sauce" as an ingredient; this adaptation includes a classic preparation of the sauce.

Ingredients

For the medium cream sauce
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups whole milk, warmed
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
For the Hot Browns
8 slices bacon
4 large slices sturdy white sandwich bread
12 ounces thinly sliced cooked chicken or turkey
4 ounces white mushrooms, thinly sliced
3/4 cup finely grated Parmesan, plus more for sprinkling
1 medium ripe tomato, seeded and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
Sweet paprika, for sprinkling
4 small parsley sprigs, for serving

Instructions

Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Arrange the bacon in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet and bake until browned and nearly crisp, 12 to 16 minutes. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate. Heat the broiler with a rack about 6 inches from the heat source.

Meanwhile, toast the bread until golden and firm. Trim off the crusts and cut each slice diagonally into 2 triangles. Arrange the toast in a single layer in a broiler-safe 9-by-13-inch baking dish or on a rimmed sheet pan.

Prepare the cream sauce: Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and cook, whisking constantly, until smooth and bubbling but not browned, about 1 minute.

Gradually whisk in the warm milk. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook, whisking frequently, until the sauce has thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon, 4 to 6 minutes. Stir in the salt and pepper. Taste and add more salt as needed. The sauce should be thick but pourable; whisk in a little more milk if necessary.

Divide the chicken or turkey among the pieces of toast, covering them completely. Spoon the cream sauce evenly over the meat. Scatter the mushrooms on top, then sprinkle generously with Parmesan and lightly with paprika. Arrange the tomato pieces around the edges of the sandwiches.

Broil, watching closely, until the sauce is bubbling and the Parmesan is browned in spots, 2 to 4 minutes. Arrange 2 strips of bacon crosswise over each portion and broil until the bacon is crisp and the dish is very hot, about 1 minute more.

Garnish with parsley and serve immediately, taking care when handling the hot baking dish.

July 25, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Painesville/ Ohio

Cabbage and Cream Salad

Studio Inn

102 West Erie Street
Painesville, Ohio

1941 – 1968

The transaction that gave birth to the Studio Inn in Painesville, Ohio, was less a conventional real-estate sale than an exchange of dreams.

Grace Bond and Dorothy Moodey were operating an inn in Painesville that had been known as “The Tea Kettle” since its opening in 1911. Dorcas and Wendell Oliver, meanwhile, had begun their own improbable career as restaurateurs at the Octagon House—an eight-sided brick landmark just outside town that had been built by a local resident in 1840 as a sort of tribute to Thomas Jefferson. In 1941 Bond and Moodey took over the Octagon House and the Olivers moved to the Tea Kettle, renamed it the Studio Inn, and set about remaking nearly every room by hand.

The stately old house at 102 West Erie Street had been built sometime around 1870 as the family home of Zenuf “Zeke” Wilson. As the Studio Inn, its coach house and domestic arrangement of parlors, hallways, and stairs would give diners the sensation of being received in a private home rather than processed through a commercial dining room.

Dorcas Henderson Oliver brought her own Ohio pedigree to the Studio Inn. She was born and raised in Kenton, and her father was a prominent judge who had been the dean of the law school at Ohio Northern University. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied for two years in Paris with George Elmer Browne, an American painter and influential art teacher who in 1916 had founded the West End School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and regularly conducted classes in Europe. Before returning to Ohio, she worked as a commercial artist in New York City.

Wendell Oliver was likewise trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and spent two years at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. He worked in commercial art and interior decoration in Chicago and New York, traveled in Europe, and developed a serious enthusiasm for culinary exploration. His European travels sharpened both his palate and his confidence in the kitchen.

By their own account, the Olivers had grown tired of metropolitan life. They wanted room to travel, time to paint, and a livelihood that could be arranged around both. Painesville made practical sense to Dorcas: it stood between Chicago and New York, close enough to either city to maintain family ties and professional connections. Their solution was to combine Wendell’s interest in food with their shared command of color, composition, and design. They would make a restaurant that was also a gallery, gift shop, travel diary, and stage set.

They did not arrive in Painesville as experienced innkeepers. At the West Erie Street house they cleaned, papered, painted, decorated, and trimmed, learning restaurant work the hard way. Yet inexperience may have freed them from convention. The Studio Inn did not look like a standardized dining room because the Olivers did not think like professional restaurateurs. They treated the old house as a series of compositions. Rooms acquired names—the Gingham Room, Trellis Hall, and the Blue Grass Room—each with its own decorative character. Plants, handblown glass, antiques, flowered paper, and Mexican objects shared space with an elegant cut-glass chandelier that Wendell had carried home from Paris. Mahogany banisters and the old house’s distinctive architecture remained part of the effect.

The Studio Inn’s name was literal. Art was not an accessory hung after the restaurant had been furnished; it was one of the reasons the restaurant existed. Dorcas and Wendell displayed their own work and made room for other artists. The Blue Grass Gift Shop in the old carriage house became Dorcas’s particular domain; there she mixed paintings, ceramics, and handmade jewelry by Cleveland-area artists with imports from Mexico, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. A 1948 advertisement distilled the Olivers’ theatrical salesmanship into a phrase: it was “divine to dine at Studio Inn.”

The couple also understood that a destination restaurant needed a sense of occasion. In 1949 they invited the public to a “Garden Sale of Art,” directed by Cleveland artist Kae Dorn Cass, a gifted watercolorist and longtime member of the faculty of the Cleveland School of Art. The Olivers encouraged clubs and sorority groups to make “a bus-ride for fun to our door.” Visitors could take tea while viewing paintings, then pass into rooms whose furnishings and merchandise blurred the line between restaurant, exhibition, and bazaar. Even Duncan Hines, whose guidebooks could make or break a roadside dining room, came to eat there in 1948 while attending the National Restaurant Association’s convention in Cleveland. The restaurant later advertised his recommendation, a powerful assurance to travelers on Route 20 that the eccentric old house also met his exacting standards of food and service.

The Studio Inn offered a menu as distinctive as its setting. A 1947 food column singled out its “Gorgeous Board,” an Americanized play on the Swedish smörgåsbord. A 1953 listing promised hot sweet rolls and cheese sticks, fresh shrimp, “pampered chicken,” steaks, lobster Newburg, green noodles, fresh vegetables, and rich desserts. Oven-fried chicken became one of the restaurant’s best-known dishes. Luncheon and dinner prices ranged from $1.25 to $3.75, with party meals offering “many extras.”

The Studio Inn was also a popular venue for parties and social gatherings. Its old rooms and layered decorations gave private meals a setting more personal than a hotel banquet room. Advertisements emphasized luncheons, dinners, and parties, “gay music,” candlelight, and air conditioning. The Olivers employed about twenty people at the height of the business, enough to sustain the elaborate service and the labor-intensive dishes that guests remembered.

No aspect of the Studio Inn mattered more to its identity than Mexico. For roughly a decade, the Olivers closed the restaurant around November 1, drove south, and spent about five months painting and traveling before returning to reopen in April. By 1953 they had logged some 75,000 miles on these annual journeys. They worked at their easels in Guadalajara, Taxco, San Miguel de Allende, Cuernavaca, Ajijic, and around Lake Pátzcuaro. Dorcas regarded Pátzcuaro and the island of Janitzio as the most beautiful place on earth and repeatedly painted the region’s Purépecha people, then commonly called Tarascans, in their local dress.

Their winter absences were not escapes from the restaurant so much as part of its production cycle. Mexico supplied paintings, textiles, silver, glass, jewelry, decorative ideas, and stories. Each spring the Studio Inn reopened replenished. In 1950 the couple returned in their yellow Studebaker Starlight two-door coupe stuffed with work from a four-month painting tour below the Rio Grande. A growing tree in the gift shop had been painted shocking pink, its branches hung with Mexican silver bracelets and concho belts.

That Easter, the Studio Inn opened its tenth season with an exhibition devoted to Mexican subjects. Dorcas showed watercolors of Ajijic on Lake Chapala, along with architectural studies, tropical flowers, and fruit; the works were displayed in the Gingham Room and Trellis Hall. Wendell contributed scenes of Cuernavaca’s Borda Gardens, churches at Ajijic, landscapes near Taxco, and views of Lake Chapala. Their work was joined by paintings from Irma René Koen, a Chicago artist who often worked in Cuernavaca, and Frederick Jennison, who had lived for years in Taxco. The exhibition transformed the annual reopening into an art event and made the winter journey visible in every corner of the inn.

The Studio Inn continued to host notable painters. Later in 1950, Kae Dorn Cass exhibited watercolors selected from trips through the American West, Mexico, the Gaspé Peninsula, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, and New England, as well as earlier European travel. Cass had taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art for more than 25 years and had participated repeatedly in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show. Dorcas and Wendell directed the exhibition and received visitors with her. The Blue Grass Gift Room thus functioned not merely as a souvenir shop but as a small regional gallery capable of presenting serious professional work.

The Olivers’ life looked enviably unconventional, but it was governed by discipline. They ran an inn for seven months, closed it, drove thousands of miles, painted intensively, acquired stock, and returned to begin again. Dorcas explained the philosophy behind the schedule: “We have the feeling that people should live as they go along. Why wait until you retire to do the things you want to do? So many people are afraid of the word ‘retire.’ They wouldn’t be if they knew how to try new worlds of experience. To do that makes you more interesting and enthusiastic as you grow older instead of the opposite.”

The arrangement also gave the Studio Inn the rhythm of a summer resort even though it stood on a principal highway in an Ohio county seat. Each reopening could bring new paintings, new imports, and visual surprise. Guests did not simply return for another meal; they came to see what the Olivers had brought back.

In early 1954 the Olivers sold the Studio Inn to Karl Griffith Sasse of Princeton, New Jersey. Sasse, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business and Finance at the University of Pennsylvania and a Navy veteran of World War II, had spent four years as assistant manager of the Nassau Tavern in Princeton.

The Olivers’ departure ended the Studio Inn’s most inventive period, but not the restaurant itself. Under Sasse, who retained the established name, the inn generally operated from May through October, while the gift shop remained open in winter. Sasse’s unexpected death at age 67 in 1968, however, forced the Studio Inn’s closing.

The final transformation of the Studio Inn came quickly. Sasse’s heirs sold the property to Red Barn, Inc., a rapidly expanding fast-food chain founded in Springfield, Ohio, that was known for barn-shaped restaurant buildings as well as its hamburgers and fried chicken. The inn’s contents were sold at auction in October 1968, with buyers carrying away the French chandelier, mahogany banisters, and antique fixtures and furnishings that had made its rooms so distinctive.

In 1969 wrecking crews moved onto 102 West Erie Street. The Studio Inn’s flower-papered walls and timbers were burned; its old bricks went to the yard of a local excavating company. A reporter for a local newspaper who covered the demolition began her story with a wistful recollection of the Studio Inn. “It was,” a former patron recalled, “the finest dining place around.”

Print Recipe

Cabbage and Cream Salad

(No Ratings Yet)

Dorcas and Wendell Oliver opened the Studio Inn in 1941, transforming an old house in Painesville, Ohio, into a distinctive combination of restaurant, art gallery, and gift shop. Their restaurant quickly became known for such dishes as oven-fried chicken and this distinctive cabbage slaw. Its reputation received important boosts when Duncan Hines, the influential American restaurant critic and author of widely read dining guides, praised the Studio Inn and published two of its recipes in his syndicated newspaper column, introducing the dishes to home cooks far beyond northeastern Ohio. "If you are lucky enough to be at the inn the day they are also serving their cabbage and cream salad," Hines wrote in 1950, "you can count on a real 'slaw treat' that is deliciously different."

Ingredients

1 medium green cabbage, about 2 pounds
Ice, as needed
1 cup mayonnaise
1 cup creamed cottage cheese
A few dashes hot sauce, or to taste
A few drops onion juice, or to taste
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
Lettuce leaves, for serving

Instructions

Remove any damaged outer leaves from the cabbage. Quarter the cabbage through the core, remove the core, and slice the leaves lengthwise into long, very thin shreds.

Transfer the cabbage to a large bowl and cover it with ice water. Let stand for 1 hour. Drain thoroughly, then pat or spin the cabbage dry. The cabbage should be as dry as possible so the dressing will cling to it.

In a large serving bowl, whisk together the mayonnaise, cottage cheese, hot sauce, onion juice and caraway seeds until evenly combined.

Add the drained cabbage and toss gently until every strand is lightly and evenly coated.

Arrange lettuce leaves on a platter or individual plates. Spoon the salad into the lettuce cups and serve immediately, or refrigerate briefly before serving.

Notes

Onion juice is available in bottled form, but to make your own for this recipe, finely grate a piece of peeled onion and press the pulp through a fine-mesh sieve, collecting the juice.

July 13, 2026 By Bill Hogan

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