Sometime around 1916, soon after he arrived in the United States from Yugoslavia, Joseph Hahe made his way to northeastern Ohio, where he found work in Barberton, next door to Akron, as a stationary engineer with Columbia Chemical Company, a subsidiary of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. The firm had been formed in 1899 to produce synthetic soda ash to support its parent company’s glassmaking operations, and business at both operations would boom as the nation’s burgeoning automobile industry began using more and more glass.
But by the mid-1940s, with some 30 years at the company under his belt, Hahe began looking toward other pursuits. Specifically, he began looking up and down Massillon Road, the north-south state highway connecting Massillon, Canton, and a slew of smaller communities with Akron. In 1946 he and his wife, Mary, bought the Massillon Road Inn, five miles or south of the Akron Municipal Airport, and set about making it their own. “Here you can enjoy the finest food you ever had the pleasure of eating under the capable direction of Joseph Hahe, proprietor, who welcomes you to dine here,” an early ad said. “If you really want to know what a delicious meal tastes like, Massillon Road Inn is the place to go.” Before the year was out the Hahes renamed their place the Green Gable Restaurant.
For decades to come the Green Gable Restaurant was a popular destination for home-style comfort food, with chicken, ham, and steak dinners topping the list. A 1955 ad, for example, touted “Our Famous Chicken Dinner”—with mashed potatoes, French fries, vegetable, salad, hot roll, dessert, and coffee—for $1.65. (A smaller version of the same dinner was $1.15.) Also on the menu was a ham dinner at $1.40 and a T-bone steak dinner at $2.00.
In 1976 Joseph died at age 87 in Port Charlotte, Florida, where he and his wife typically spent the winters, and Mary continued as the owner of the restaurant until 1982. She died in 1992 at age 94. Their children—including son-in-law Ray Naehring and daughters Martha Yost and Karen Smith—carried on until 1998, when they closed the Green Gable, sold the property to a group of local investors (today’s it’s part of the Green Town Center), and auctioned off the restaurant’s contents. “It was just the time to sell,” Smith told a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal
Chicken Rivel Soup
(2 votes, average: 1.50 out of 5)
Loading...Here’s a recipe for the Chicken Rivel Soup was served at the Green Gable Restaurant in Uniontown, Ohio, until it closed in 1999. Rivels (sometimes spelled "rivals") are the Pennsylvania Dutch version of the light, plump, and slightly chewy egg noodles made by dripping bits of batter into boiling broth until they rise to the surface. In southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and other parts of Europe, rivels are known as spätzle. Martha Yost, a former owner of the Green Gable Restaurant, which her parents established in 1946, told a reporter in 1999 that this recipe was the one used at the restaurant by her mother, Mary Hahe. “Mama was very patient and could make the noodles in a very fine stream,” she said, “but sometimes I get impatient and mine are more like dumplings—but nevertheless good.”
Ingredients
- 8 to 10 cups chicken broth
- 4 eggs
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup flour
Instructions
Bring the broth to a slow boil in a large soup pot.
Meanwhile, make the batter for the rivels by combining the eggs and salt in a bowl. Whisk in the flour until no lumps remain. The batter should be thin enough to drip off the whisk.
Allow the batter to drip off the whisk into the slowly simmering broth, forming thin strings. Do not crowd the pot. When the rivels firm up, remove them from the broth with a skimmer or slotted spoon and immediately cool in ice water. Continue making rivels until all the batter has been used. Return the rivels to the pot and heat through. Serve, ladling some broth and rivels into each bowl.
Notes
A hint from Martha Yost: Avoid stirring the rivels after the batter is dripped into the broth.
No Comments