Legendary Recipes – History Worth Tasting

Crabmeat Imperial

Glasgow Arms Restaurant

2409 Pulaski Highway
Newark, Delaware

1937 – 1994

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 8, 2026 By Bill Hogan

New York/ New York

Beef Stroganoff

Two Guitars

244 East 14th Street
New York, New York

1949 – 1969

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 8, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Chicago/ Illinois

Chicken Mushroom Soup

Johnstone’s Restaurant

4747 West Peterson Avenue
Chicago, Illinois

1952 – 1964

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 6, 2026 By Bill Hogan

St. Johnsbury/ Vermont

Maple Muffins

Maple Cabin

1052 Portland Street
St. Johnsbury, Vermont

1920 – 1951

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 5, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Chicago/ Illinois

Peanut Soup

The Creole House

3048 West Diversey Avenue
Chicago, Illinois

1966 – 1974

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 4, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Nashville/ Indiana

Bread

The Corner Cupboard

10 Artist Drive
Nashville, Indiana

1950 – 1963

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 4, 2026 By Bill Hogan

San Francisco/ California

Baby Tomato Salad

Charlotte’s Tavern

529 Powell Street
San Francisco, California

1927 – 1940

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 3, 2026 By Bill Hogan

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

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