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

Detroit/ Michigan

Hungarian Goulash with Spätzle

Huck’s Redford Inn

25241 Grand River Avenue
Detroit, Michigan

1939 – 1961

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 30, 2026 By Bill Hogan

New York/ New York

Cappuccino Florentino

Cafe Borgia

185 Bleecker Street
New York, New York

1959 – 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 30, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Indianapolis/ Indiana

Dungeness Crab à la Maison

La Rue’s

1121 North Pennsylvania Street
Indianapolis, Indiana

1946 – 1962

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 28, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Edmond/ Oklahoma

Chocolate Angel Pie

Royce Cafe

400 South Broadway
Edmond, Oklahoma

1934 – 1970

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Print Recipe

Chocolate Angel Pie

(No Ratings Yet)

1 (9-inch) pie; 8 servings

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 26, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Lexington/ Kentucky

Coach House Hot Brown

Capps Coach House

855 South Broadway
Lexington, Kentucky

1949 – 1967

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Print Recipe

Coach House Hot Brown

(No Ratings Yet)

Serves 4

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 25, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Painesville/ Ohio

Cabbage and Cream Salad

Studio Inn

102 West Erie Street
Painesville, Ohio

1941 – 1968

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Print Recipe

Cabbage and Cream Salad

(No Ratings Yet)

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

July 13, 2026 By Bill Hogan

New York City/ New York

Bourbon Cheese Spread

Ma Bell’s

218 West 45th Street
New York, New York

1972 – 1983

When Ma Bell’s opened smack in the middle of New York City’s famed Shubert Alley in 1972, the concept was simple enough to explain in a sentence: Every table in the restaurant had a working telephone. Its spot at 218 West 45th Street was the epicenter of Broadway’s Theater District, where actors, producers, agents, stagehands, tourists, and after-show crowds crossed paths in a constant shuffle. Here, Restaurant Associates—the ambitious New York company behind such destination restaurants as Brasserie, La Fonda del Sol, The Forum of the XII Caesars, The Four Seasons, Mamma Leone’s, and Tavern-on-the-Green—turned the ordinary act of placing a phone call into part of the dining experience.

At Ma Bell’s a patron could sit down and use an old-fashioned candlestick telephone to place a call to another table or booth inside the restaurant or, for that matter, anywhere else. In a world without cellular phones—it would be decades before most people would have them—Ma Bell’s aimed to be more than just a restaurant with a gimmick. It aspired to be the social switchboard of Shubert Alley.

The concept behind Ma Bell’s has been credited to George Lois, the legendary advertising provocateur whose genius lay in stripping an idea down to its barest essence. (Lois was perhaps best known for the 90-plus covers he designed for Esquire magazine from 1962 to 1973.) Restaurant Associates, the company that retained him for its Shubert Alley project, had the dining-room machinery, the leasehold, the service systems, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for high-concept New York restaurants. Lois supplied the idea; Restaurant Associates knew how to turn it into an experience: a Broadway saloon built around the telephone, one of the most familiar objects in American life.

For years, Restaurant Associates had been helping to modernize the New York dining scene by creating restaurants that were complete environments—with names, graphics, architecture, uniforms, service rhythms, and moods. The newest restaurant in the company’s constellation would carry that philosophy into a looser, more playful, more Broadway-facing form. Ma Bell’s was for people with curtain times, people coming out of shows, people killing an hour near Broadway, people who did not want the night to end when the curtain fell.

The Ma Bell’s name came directly from the familiar nickname for the Bell System, and in 1972 that reference had not yet lost any of its cultural weight. The telephone was still fixed in place, wired into walls, governed by exchanges, operators, bills, etiquette, and long-distance charges. It was an instrument of business, romance, family duty, gossip, flirtation, and interruption. Now, at 218 West 45th Street, the telephone was no longer something that pulled a person away from a meal. Now, it was the meal’s central feature.

By 1973 Restaurant Associates was confident enough to boast that Ma Bell’s was “a winner the day it opened.” Newspaper ads for the restaurant promised a phone on every table, fast service, a menu that was neither too long nor too short, an eighty-foot bar, lunch, cocktails, dinner, theater-intermission service, and after-theater dining and drinking. A line at the bottom reduced the whole pitch to three words and a joke: “Food, Phones, and our Long Distance Bar.”

For much of the 1970s, that was enough. Most theme restaurants, however, live under the clock. A great dining room can age into dignity; a concept room can age into yesterday’s joke. By the early 1980s, the telephone itself was changing as a symbol. The Bell System was under legal and political pressure, and the monopoly that had put “Ma Bell” into the American vernacular would be broken into pieces as the result of a 1982 antitrust settlement with the U.S. Justice Department. In short, the table-phone gimmick that had seemed so fresh in 1972 had begun to lose its novelty.

By 1983 the ownership of Ma Bell’s had passed from Restaurant Associates to the Riese Organization, a New York City-based restaurant-and-real-estate company whose sprawling portfolio had once included such culinary landmarks as Longchamps and Schrafft’s. In 1983, with average weekly sales at Ma Bell’s reportedly down to just $18,000, the Riese Organization converted the restaurant into an outpost of its own restaurant brand, Charley O’s. Weekly sales soon rose to about $40,000, which was in keeping with what Dennis Riese, the company’s chief operating officer, called its “My Fair Lady” philosophy of restaurant operation. Riese liked to point out that when the musical My Fair Lady finished its original run on Broadway, the theater didn’t close with it; instead, the owners of the theater simply brought in a new show.

As Riese later put it to a trade publication, “Ma Bell’s was a concept that ran its course.” At least by Broadway standards, however, the restaurant had enjoyed a respectable run. For a little more than a decade, it was the only place in New York City where dinner came with a dial tone.

Print Recipe

Bourbon Cheese Spread

(No Ratings Yet)

This simple but potent cheese spread was a specialty of the house at Ma Bell’s, a telephone-themed Shubert Alley restaurant that made its debut in New York City’s Theater District in 1972. Use a sharp Cheddar, let it soften fully before mixing, and choose a bourbon you would be happy to drink; with so few ingredients, each one matters.

Ingredients

3 ounces sharp Cheddar cheese, finely grated and softened slightly at room temperature
1 ounce bourbon
Pinch of cayenne pepper, plus more to taste

Instructions

Place the Cheddar in a small bowl or the bowl of a food processor. Add the bourbon and cayenne.

Beat vigorously with a fork, hand mixer, or food processor until the mixture is smooth, lightened, and spreadable. If using a food processor, scrape down the bowl once or twice so the bourbon is evenly incorporated.

Taste and add another trace of cayenne if you want more heat.

Transfer the spread to a small crock or ramekin. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, until firm but still spreadable.

Notes

For the best texture, grate the cheese yourself rather than using pre-shredded Cheddar, which often contains anti-caking starches. Aged Cheddar gives the spread a sharper bite, while a younger sharp Cheddar makes it creamier. The bourbon should be present but not harsh; if the spread tastes too boozy immediately after mixing, chilling will mellow it slightly.

July 5, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Indianapolis/ Indiana

Shish Kebab on a Flaming Dagger

In 1924 John R. Murray and his wife, Elsie, opened a restaurant on the southwest corner of 38th Street and North Keystone Avenue in Indianapolis, just east of the Indiana State Fairgrounds, that they christened “Ye Log Cabin Barbecue.” John, who was born in 1886 in the seaside town of Weymouth, England, had come to the United States when he was just 14 years old and found his way to Indianapolis a few years later, where he met and married Elsie. The Murrays advertised their new place as “a delightfully cool, clean, first-class inn” specializing in steaks, chicken dinners, and, of course, “all kinds of barbecues.”

The “Ye,” which may have been a nod to Murray’s English roots, soon fell by the wayside. By 1926 the restaurant was being listed simply as Log Cabin Barbecue, and by 1934 it was appearing in advertisements as the Log Cabin Inn. Ads promised dining, dancing, and entertainment, including a singer from Louisville billed only as “Sadie” and The Three Sparks, a popular Indianapolis trio.

When John died in 1935 just before his 50th birthday, Elsie took over as the Log Cabin’s proprietor. She began booking local dance bands—and even a blues singer—to give the restaurant more of a nightclub or supper-club feel, and business was apparently so good that in 1938 she decided to have the parking lot enlarged. Not long after that Elsie decided to open another restaurant, which she dubbed the “Chicken Coop,” some three and a half miles north on Keystone Avenue. But just a few days it was set to open, a fire, thought to have been triggered by a stove explosion, destroyed the building that was to be its home. Elsie eventually managed to open the Chicken Coop in different quarters at 71st and Keystone, but in 1941 she was charged with violating local liquor laws and advertising a lottery.

In 1942 Elsie sold the Log Cabin to Abraham “Abe” Silver (in later years he was also known by the nickname “Art”) and his wife, Alice. Almost immediately the Silvers launched a remodeling and expansion program that never quite seemed to stop. By the mid-1960s the Log Cabin’s upstairs dining rooms could serve about 200 patrons, and the lower-level “Silver Room” could accommodate about 100 people for banquets and other private functions.

In 1957 an African American officer at Fort Benjamin Harrison, a U.S. Army post in Indianapolis, sued the restaurant, alleging that he had been refused service because of his race. Abe Silver’s public response did little to soften the charge. “If he was refused service my help must have had good reason,” Silver told a reporter for the Indianapolis News, brushing aside the complaint. “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”

The Log Cabin’s longtime chef, Harold Carmack, was a Tennessee native who’d previously worked as the chef at the Anderson Country Club in Anderson, Indiana. Carmack, an avid angler who loved to tell jokes, was well-known for his barbecued ribs (the Log Cabin’s baby back ribs were imported from Canada). Among the restaurant’s dinner specials: Chateaubriand steak for two, prime ribs of beef au jus, baked sugar-cured ham with fruit sauce, stuffed veal birds with natural gravy, steamed knockwurst with sauerkraut, kosher-style corned beef with steamed cabbage, and Italian ravioli. Then there was the house spectacle: “Shish Kebab on a Flaming Dagger”—melt-in-your mouth cubes of beef tenderloin marinated in a wine sauce, broiled on skewers with mushrooms and other vegetables, and flambéed tableside before serving.

By the late 1960s the Log Cabin was being run by Abe and Alice’s son, Bernard. Contemporary accounts put Bernie Silver and his wife, Bernice (“Bunny”), in almost constant attendance at the restaurant, overseeing the continuity of an establishment whose loyal customers had watched it evolve from a roadside barbecue joint into a large, full-service restaurant.

Abe Silver died in Miami Beach in 1971 at age 76. The following year Alice sold the Log Cabin to Thomas A. “Tommy” Caito (whose father, Indianapolis wholesale-produce magnate August F. Caito, was known as the city’s “banana king”). Soon after that, however, the Log Cabin ran into trouble with the Indiana Alcoholic Beverage Commission for “failure to maintain a high and fine reputation, to wit, gambling on the permit premise,” which the Indianapolis News characterized as “a high stakes craps game.” Before the year was out the restaurant had been rebranded “The New Log Cabin” and, before long, “The End Zone.”

Alice Silver died in 1985 at age 81.

July 2, 2026 By Bill Hogan

New Bern/ North Carolina

Crabmeat Salad

Charles Manor

208 South Front Street
New Bern, North Carolina

1954 – 1965

Alta S. Braxton was in her mid-50s and twice widowed when she opened Charles Manor at 208 South Front Street in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1954. She had purchased the property as her home in 1941, a year after the death of her first husband, William H. Simons, at age 51. Simons had spent most of his career at S. Coplon & Sons, which billed itself as “North Carolina’s Biggest and Best Department Store,” where he’d started out as a “bundle wrapper” in 1910 and by 1922 had worked his way up to become its general manager. Alta remarried in 1950, but her second husband, Jesse Fountain Braxton, a widower, died just three months later at age 67.

Braxton beckoned diners with a streetside neon sign for Charles Manor that not only promised “Fine Foods” but noted that her 70-seat restaurant was air-conditioned—a big attraction in a city of warm and humid summers with average high temperatures that often hit the low 90s. This was also a grand old home with a grand view—namely, the picturesque waterfront of downtown New Bern near the confluence of the Trent and Neuse Rivers.

In 1959 the address of Charles Manor changed when, following the restoration of Tryon Palace, the original capitol of North Carolina, South Front Street was renamed Tryon Palace Drive, but the new name never quite stuck.

By 1961, with her establishment having become one of the most popular restaurants in New Bern, Braxton apparently was ready to retire. In August of that year a classified ad in the Raleigh News and Observer quietly announced that “The Charles Manor—Famous for Fine Foods” was for sale, citing the “owner’s health” as the reason. But Braxton had no takers, and in 1965 she placed another classified ad in the Raleigh newspaper that read: “Charles Manor Restaurant. In an old home. Seats about 70 people. Living quarters also. Will give lease or sell. Interested only in qualified persons. Closed due to ill health. Call Mrs. Alta Braxton, New Bern, N.C.”

It would take Braxton another three years to sell her restaurant. The buyer was the Trent Academy of Basic Education, which would operate from the house until a fire destroyed it in 1970.

Alta Braxton died in New Bern in 1975 shortly before her 76th birthday.

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February 8, 2025 By Bill Hogan

Elkhart/ Indiana

Sweet Charity Pie

Arthur’s

Midway Motor Lodge

300 South Main Street
Elkhart, Indiana

1980 – 1991

Arthur’s made its debut in 1980 as part of an ambitious initiative to revitalize the central business district of Elkhart, Indiana, a city widely known as the “Band Instrument Capital of the World.” Located at 300 Main Street in downtown Elkhart, the restaurant was joined to the Midway Motor Lodge, a $5.5 million hotel that was the cornerstone of the “City Centre” development that local leaders had devised in the late 1960s to attract visitors and stimulate the local economy.

The hotel—the 19th in the Midway chain—opened its doors on July 22, 1980, with Terry Carrick, the lead investor in its Milwaukee-based ownership group, announcing that 15,000 reservations for meals at Arthur’s were already on the books. Because of various construction delays, however, only a third of the hotel’s 180 rooms were ready for occupancy on opening day, and there were just three paying guests on the first night. Nonetheless, Carrick projected confidence about Elkhart’s future. “I don’t think your town as a whole is in that bad a shape,” he said that day. “I think your economy is more diversified than most people give it credit for.”

It would be another three months before Arthur’s—named for Arthur Aldendorf, the Wisconsin-based restaurateur chosen to operate it—opened its doors. The 19,500-square-foot restaurant had four separate dining areas, including a huge banquet hall, with seating for more than 700 patrons. Two adjoining venues, the Irish Pub and Aldie’s Show Lounge, pushed the total seating capacity to over 1,000.

Arthur’s got off to a very good start. Under a headline that branded it the “crown jewel” of the entire City Centre development, a reviewer for the daily newspaper in nearby South Bend gushed that the residents of Elkhart “have every reason to glow over a sharp, stylish restaurant that has returned gracious dining to a gastronomically undernourished downtown area.”

By the end of the decade, however, the Midway Motor Lodge was in financial trouble, with Arthur’s struggling in its wake. In May 1990 the hotel’s parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection—reporting assets of $4.3 million against debts of $5.5 million—to stave off a foreclosure action by Midwest Commerce Bank, which claimed that it had fallen more than $500,000 behind on its mortgage payments. The Midway Motor Lodge’s attorney argued that the business was fundamentally sound but had suffered at the hands of external economic factors, including the loss of commuter air service between Elkhart and Chicago O’Hare Airport. Others noted that the hotel had been the first and maybe the only in the Midway chain to be situated away from an interstate highway.

In March 1990 the judge presiding over the bankruptcy case appointed Marshall Management Inc., a Maryland-based company that specialized in rescuing financially troubled hotels, to be the receiver for the Midway Motor Lodge. This appointment, however, did not extend to Arthur’s, the Irish Pub, and Aldie’s Show Lounge, which continued to operate under the ownership of the company Carrick had originally set up as a tax shelter for its Milwaukee-area investors.

In 1991 Marshall Management rebranded Midway Motor Lodge as the Quality Hotel City Centre. It also undertook a “floor to ceiling” remodel of Arthur’s and announced that the restaurant would be renamed Plaza I.

Despite the renovations and rebranding, the hotel and restaurant continued to struggle. At one point the restaurant returned to operating under its original name, but after the Elkhart County Health Department briefly closed the reincarnated Arthur’s for numerous health code violations, a new owner reopened it under another name.

In the years to come the development would be seen as “a blight on the downtown,” as a reporter for the Elkhart Truth put it. The city of Elkhart eventually acquired the property in 1998 for $850,000 and demolished everything the following summer.

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January 13, 2025 By Bill Hogan

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