Legendary Recipes – History Worth Tasting

Corn Fritters

Stone Ends Restaurant

9 Frontage Road
, New York

1955 – 2001

In May 1955, motorists on U.S. Route 9W a mile south of the Thruway exit in Glenmont, New York, began noticing an unusual construction crew at work just below Corning Hill Road. The men digging the foundations, mortaring fieldstone walls, and nailing up cedar clapboard were not builders by trade. They were restaurant men — Henry and Lou (Luciano) Junco, their brothers, and other relatives — erecting, with their own hands, the restaurant they intended to run. “We didn’t have any professional building experience,” Lou Junco told a reporter that year. “It was just sort of a sideline, a hobby with us.”

The Juncos were sons of Fernando and Franqualina Junco, a family of Spanish descent that had settled in Amsterdam, New York, west of Schenectady. By the mid-1950s the brothers were already veterans of the trade, having owned several restaurants, including one on State Street near the Capitol in Albany and another in Plattsburgh. Henry, born in 1925, had graduated from Albany Business College and worked his way up as a busboy, waiter, and kitchen hand in prominent restaurants in New York and Florida; he would later study at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and travel the world on gourmet tours. He had also served in the Army during World War II, from 1944 to 1946, and spent eight months as a prisoner of war. What the brothers wanted now was elbow room — a modern restaurant outside the city, with space to build and, just as important in the automobile age, a place for customers to park. They had been planning it for two years.

Their architects — Ernest N. Wright and Francis S. Woods, members of the architectural faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — drew up a one-story building organized around stone: flagstone floors, a white slag-stone roof, an open-beam cathedral ceiling over the dining room, a distinctive fireplace at the center of the dining room, banks of picture windows, and — the feature that gave the place its name — two end walls built entirely of fieldstone a foot thick. The Juncos gathered and hauled 25 truckloads of the stuff from the 19th-century mill hamlet of Alcove, in the Helderberg country south of Albany. The stone was Devonian-era Helderberg bluestone, laid down in seabeds hundreds of millions of years earlier, and for the next six decades it would prove more durable than any of the businesses it housed. The dining room, when Stone Ends opened its doors late in 1955, seated 52.

The restaurant announced itself modestly. An advertisement the following year promised “the finest of foods,” along with “all legal beverages,” at the top of Corning Hill. But the operation behind the ads was a genuine family enterprise, five brothers deep. Lou and Henry were the principals; Vincent worked the floor, eventually as maître d’hôtel; Anthony and Paul served as hosts at the bar. Around 1958 the kitchen introduced what would become the house’s most beloved eccentricity: a corn fritter, drenched in maple syrup, served as a “refresher course” between appetizer and entrée. “We kept it because it’s different,” Vincent Junco explained a quarter-century later. “The majority of people eat them, so they must like them.”

The brothers were building more than a dining room. In August 1958 Henry and Lou opened the 14-unit Stone Ends Motel on the adjoining property — a single-story, modern structure — and announced plans for 38 additional units by September 1959. A few months later they opened Junco’s Stone Ends Gift Shop in the motel’s spacious lobby, advertising imports from Europe and Scandinavia in the spirit of “all that’s modern but in the tradition of fine taste.” The complex atop Corning Hill was becoming a destination in its own right.

Through the 1960s, Stone Ends built its reputation on a kind of dining that was already becoming scarce: Continental cooking with theatrical, tableside flourish. Henry Junco demonstrated the chafing-dish arts at local cooking programs; the restaurant advertised its “Intimate Quarry Lounge,” a nod to the stone all around; and Vincent won local renown for his tableside Caesar salad, mixed from a service cart stocked with garlic, anchovies, Worcestershire, oil, and vinegar — the glamorous dish, as one account of his demonstrations put it, that Hollywood stars were forever ordering in the movies. The menu ran to genuine exotica: antelope, buffalo, pheasant, rabbit, and venison shared space with the standards, and an hors d’oeuvre cart circulated for adventurous appetites.

The family was expanding, too. In 1965 the Juncos broke ground at 1400 Central Avenue in Colonie for Junco’s Golden Fox Steak House, a $250,000 project with seating for 200 — nearly four times the capacity of the Stone Ends dining room. The brothers were prospering enough that in the summer of 1968 Lou and his wife departed on a six-week grand tour behind the Iron Curtain and back — Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest, Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, and London — seen off by friends at the airport.

The crowning moment came on July 14, 1969. On what the Juncos would remember as the most beautiful July afternoon they had ever seen, corks and flashbulbs popped, the patio fountain splashed, and strolling musicians played Latin melodies for hundreds of guests as a representative of the Curtis Circulation Company presented the five brothers — Lou, Henry, Vincent, Anthony, and Paul — with Holiday Magazine’s dining award, formally placing the restaurant they had built with their own hands among the finest restaurants in North America. “Stone Ends,” the magazine declared, “is a fine American restaurant of the kind that is fast disappearing.” Holiday’s judgment was rendered by anonymous gastronomic experts on three inflexible criteria — exceptional food, an inviting atmosphere, and polished service — and the Juncos took it as the reward for some 15 years of devotion to all three.

The magazine’s elegy for a disappearing breed proved prophetic, though the disappearance took decades. Through the 1970s, Stone Ends clung happily to its traditions. A 1978 survey of the region’s restaurants found the dining room grown to 92 seats, the menu still the most extensive and exotic in the area. Suckling pig for ten could be had for $135 with ten days’ notice, and the menu promised that, by reservation, the chef “will be delighted to prepare any Continental dish.” Ladies received menus without prices (a quaint courtesy, the writer noted, then under growing attack in the name of women’s liberation), a wine steward selected agreeable bottles, and male waiters remained adept at tableside theatrics.

By the 1980s, Henry Junco was gradually stepping back. In 1981 he and James (Jimmy) Scalzo, a member of the Albany Common Council, acquired Quintessence, a chrome-fixtured 1948 diner in Albany that they ran as an Art Deco restaurant and nightspot. In 1985 the Golden Fox closed after 20 years in Colonie, with the family continuing to operate Stone Ends, Quintessence, and Ozzie’s in Albany. The following year Henry sold Stone Ends to an ambitious young chef named Dale Miller and his partners, Jerry and Ginger Menagias, the owners of Schenectady’s Olympic diner. “We bought it for its reputation,” Miller said, “and its potential for being a beautiful restaurant again.”

The transition, at first, was gentle. When B. A. Nilsson, a restaurant critic for a local magazine, visited in August 1986, he found a dining room out of another era — orange lanterns, copper chafing dishes, flagstone underfoot — and pronounced it, approvingly, “a restaurant with fins, and proud of it.” The new executive chef, Roger Herwerth, had trimmed the classic Fifties menu by about a third and modernized it without stooping to nachos or fried potato skins. Every table still received a complimentary warm-up of curried chicken salad with walnuts; soup was ladled tableside; the corn fritter intermezzo arrived thick with maple syrup; and the captain running the floor that night, flaming veal cutlets in Calvados over a copper chafing dish, was none other than Vincent Junco.

Miller was not a man to leave things gentle for long. Raised in a farming family in Tribes Hill, near Amsterdam — the Juncos’ own hometown territory — he had started cooking at his mother’s side at age 5, bought himself a set of Wilton cake pans when he was 11 or 12 to earn money decorating wedding and birthday cakes, and lied about his age at 15 to get hired at the Red Barn restaurant in Amsterdam, working everything from the front counter to the grill. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America — the CIA of Hyde Park, New York — in 1979 near the top of his class and cooked at the Albany Marriott Hotel in Colonie and the Tavern on the Square in Schenectady before buying Stone Ends. “I’ve been dreaming about this since I was 10 years old,” he said. “When I walked in that door I just knew this was the place.” In the summer of 1987 he bought out his partners and became the restaurant’s sole chef-owner, fortifying his kitchen with Wallace Foster, a Cordon Bleu graduate, and William Hohenstein, a veteran of Chaucer’s Restaurant in Clifton Park as well as Tavern on the Square. Asked to explain the drive behind his turnaround of the old house, Miller was blunt: “When somebody says, ‘You can’t,’ I will. I like to prove people wrong.”

The old guard, meanwhile, was passing: Luciano Junco, a founder of Stone Ends and president of the Golden Fox from 1967 until his retirement in 1976, died in February 1988 at age 69.

Under Miller, Stone Ends became the standard-bearer of fine dining in the Capital Region, championing what he called “progressive American cuisine” with an international accent. He obsessed over details, down to buying and arranging the flowers himself, and kept renovating: By 1990 his brother, an interior designer, had spent months on the restaurant’s appearance, with carpenters completely refurbishing the lounge and the upstairs. The piano bar he had imagined when he first set eyes on Stone Ends materialized, and local lore would later hold that Liberace himself once stroked its keys. In 1996 Miller passed the grueling examination to become a Certified Master Chef, at the time one of only about 55 in the United States.

The honor, paradoxically, helped kill the restaurant. Job offers began streaming in from around the country, just as the arithmetic of the old building turned merciless. “We had a steady clientele, we never declined in revenues, but we didn’t grow enough to keep up with increasing utility bills and food costs,” Miller told a reporter for the Schenectady Gazette after he closed the restaurant in August 1997, ending an 11-year run. He had poured nearly $300,000 into the 42-year-old structure, and the repairs devoured whatever the dining room earned. “More and more money went into the building,” he said—and then, the clinching question: “Why would I continue to struggle when other attractive offers are coming in?” Within weeks, Jack’s Oyster House in Albany had recruited him as managing partner and executive chef. But as the president of Stone Ends LLC, Miller had personally guaranteed much of the restaurant’s debt, including the mortgage, and that autumn he filed for personal bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Albany.

The empty building on Route 9W became an object of regional intrigue. Yono and Donna Purnomo, the owners of the acclaimed Yono’s in downtown Albany, offered $260,000 shortly after the bankruptcy filing but balked at the $300,000 asking price and went off to open restaurants at Albany’s new Armory Center instead. A second suitor, Lawrence Edinger, wanted to run the property as a banquet house, but financing snags stalled the deal past a July 1998 deadline. The holder of the mortgage, as it happened, was Henry Junco, and by November 1998 Junco’s patience was exhausted; his attorney moved to foreclose. “Henry Junco is going home again,” Jimmy Scalzo, who would be his partner in the venture, announced. The property went on the auction block on March 30, 1999, and before the end of the year Junco — then in his seventies — had his building back.

The restoration was a labor of filial piety toward the stone itself. Junco and Scalzo stripped away a decade of upscale overlays to expose the fieldstone and wood beneath. “All that natural beauty had been covered up,” Scalzo said. They installed the veteran Paul Persico as head chef over a moderately priced Northern Italian menu and reopened around the end of 1999. Even Miller, watching from Jack’s, paid tribute to Junco, his predecessor and successor: “He’s a legend. He’s a restaurant legend.” Scalzo put it more simply: “Henry picked the rock to build this place. That’s his baby.”

The third act was brief. William M. Dowd of the Albany Times Union, reviewing the reborn Stone Ends in January 2000, found a kitchen capable of an excellent lemon pepper shrimp stew and a heavenly chocolate pâté but prone to lapses — a strip steak sauced against explicit instructions, a stuffed chicken breast served partly raw and struck from the bill by Scalzo himself, working that night as maître d’. Two stars. The deeper problem was the ledger. Weekday sales sagged, and the region’s independents were falling around them: Within a single stretch of autumn 2001, the Old Daley Inn in Troy, the Cranberry Bog in Colonie, and the Allegro Cafe in Troy all went dark, squeezed by well-financed chains — Applebee’s, Olive Garden, Outback — that had added some 4,000 seats to the Wolf Road corridor alone in five years. In early October 2001, Stone Ends joined the casualty list. Gnocci, Inc., the restaurant’s operating company, shut the doors, and Scalzo conveyed the bad news to creditors. “Despite my diligent efforts,” he wrote, “the restaurant has not proved profitable.” Junco confirmed that a steep decline in weekday sales had forced the closing and moved nearly all of the restaurant’s 12 staff members to Quintessence.

Even shuttered, Stone Ends kept pulling its owners down. Scalzo later acknowledged that he had been draining the diner in Albany to prop up the operation in Glenmont. ”I used Quintessence to more or less keep Stone Ends alive,” he said when Quintessence itself filed for Chapter 11 protection in November 2002, listing $172,283 in liabilities against $147,750 in assets, most of it unpaid property, withholding, and sales taxes. “It’s very difficult to pay two restaurants’ bills with one restaurant.” A related company, Maccheroni Inc., followed into Chapter 11 in 2003, its attorney predicting that a sale of the Stone Ends property would clear the books. Quintessence served its last meal on December 31, 2004.

The stone, as ever, outlasted the misfortune. In the fall of 2004 a new owner, Robin Leyden, reopened the building as Stone Ends, with Persico back at the stove and John Burgess as sous chef. Dowd, returning that November, awarded it three stars and marveled that the place refused to die, enduring “like Banquo’s ghost in ‘Macbeth.’ ” That incarnation, too, eventually gave way, and the building at 9 Frontage Road cycled through a series of humbler lives — an Italian spot called Bella Bistro, a biker-friendly bar called Duke’s, and finally the Milestone Restaurant & Bar, opened in 2011 by the Mastrantuono family with their 21-year-old son Michael as chef, its interior still looking much as it always had between the soaring stone walls. Milestone closed in 2015, and the Helderberg bluestone that the Junco brothers hauled from Alcove some 60 years earlier stood empty beside Route 9W. Henry Junco did not live to see that last vacancy resolved. He died at age 86 on April 29, 2012, at the VA Hospital in Miami, survived by his companion of more than 65 years, Bertha Costas, his brothers Vincent and Paul, his sister Amelia, and, by one family count, more than 100 nieces and nephews.

August 5, 2026 By Bill Hogan

St. Johnsbury/ Vermont

Maple Muffins

Maple Cabin

1052 Portland Street
St. Johnsbury, Vermont

1920 – 1951

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 5, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Chicago/ Illinois

Peanut Soup

The Creole House

3048 West Diversey Avenue
Chicago, Illinois

1966 – 1974

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 4, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Nashville/ Indiana

Bread

The Corner Cupboard

10 Artist Drive
Nashville, Indiana

1950 – 1963

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 4, 2026 By Bill Hogan

San Francisco/ California

Baby Tomato Salad

Charlotte’s Tavern

529 Powell Street
San Francisco, California

1927 – 1940

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 3, 2026 By Bill Hogan

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

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