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.
Lobster Newburg
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Loading...Lobster Newburg arrived on the American dining scene at Delmonico's Restaurant in New York City, where legend dates the origin of the dish to 1876. Seventy years later it was among the most popular items at the Ship Grill restaurants in New York City. Adolph Roberts, the head chef of the Ship Grill at 400 East 57th Street, prepared this version in 1946 during a demonstration in the New York Times's kitchen, thickening the sauce in the French manner, with egg yolks rather than flour — a method that yields an especially delicate texture but demands low heat, constant stirring, and prompt serving.
Ingredients
- 1/4 cup unsalted butter
- 2 cups diced cooked lobster meat, about 1 pound
- 1/2 teaspoon paprika
- 1 dash Tabasco sauce
- 3 large egg yolks
- 1 cup light cream
- 1/2 cup dry sherry
- Salt, as needed
- Buttered toast, for serving
Instructions
Fill the bottom of a double boiler with water and heat it until hot but not boiling.
Melt the butter over low direct heat in the top of the double boiler. Toss the lobster with the paprika and Tabasco, then add it to the melted butter. Cook, stirring frequently, until the lobster is heated through, 4 to 5 minutes.
Place the pan over the hot water in the bottom of the double boiler. In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the cream until thoroughly combined.
Slowly pour the cream mixture into the lobster, stirring constantly. Cook, continuing to stir and never allowing the water beneath the pan to boil, until the sauce thickens, 5 to 7 minutes.
Stir in the sherry. Taste and season with salt, as needed. Serve immediately over buttered toast.
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