In 1934 Lucie Keyser Frolich and her husband, Bernhard, decided to open into a restaurant near Boston’s Park Square, even though neither had any experience in the business. Here’s how Lucie Frolich would later tell the story:
“The great depression of 1929-1933 practically forced my late husband and me into the restaurant business. This is how it happened. A very discouraged Norwegian architect was sauntering along the streets of Boston one day. He stopped for a moment on Carver Street, struck by the rustic atmosphere of number fourteen. Ola was conceived right then and there, and in less than ten days the new restaurant was born.”
In the early days the restaurant, visible through an iron-gated entrance at 14 Carver Street, was Ola Kaffehus, signaling the Norwegian heritage of its owners (as well as their partners, Olaf and Sallie Amundsen). From almost the start Lucie was known as “Madame Ola” or “Mrs. Ola” and Bernhard—“a six-foot-two Viking,” as Lucie described him—as “Mr. Ola.” But when Bernhard died just three years after the restaurant opened, Lucie was thrust into the role of sole proprietor, a role in which she would remain for nearly 30 more years.
As Ola Restaurant thrived, Lucie Frolich acquired quite a large following in Boston, and in 1946 she published Ola’s Norwegian Cook Book, which she sold in the restaurant and at the Norwegian Arts & Craft Shop on Beacon Street. “I dedicate this book to you good Bostonians who have favored and been faithful to my little Ola for more than ten years,” she wrote in the introduction to the book. “Depression, war, rationing—you came regardless, with pleasant smiles on your faces.”
One of those Bostonians was Alice Saltonstall, the wife of Leverett Saltonstall, a lawyer who served two terms as the governor of Massachusetts (from 1939 to 1945) and more than 20 years as a U.S. Senator (1945 to 1967). Her sewing circle dined on Mrs. Ola’s meatballs, which Mrs. Saltonstall proclaimed the “best in Boston,” every Wednesday for an entire year.
In 1960 the restaurant acquired a little mascot of sorts when Frolich got a little puppy—part beagle, part cocker spaniel—she named Bimbo. When Bimbo went missing one day, she offered an award for his return through an ad in the Boston Globe’s lost-and-found classifieds, but it’s not clear if they were ever reunited.
After Frolich died at age 65 in 1964, two longtime customers took over as the owners, but Ola’s Restaurant closed in 1966 and a new restaurant, Dante’s, opened in the same space. The building at 14 Carver Street and the houses on both sides of it were demolished in 1979 as a massive redevelopment project rearranged the street pattern in Park Square and the South Cove. What remained of Carver Street was renamed Charles Street South.
Here’s the recipe for one of Restaurant Ola’s most popular dishes: Meatballs with Onion Sauce. The secret? “I always put sugar in my potato salad, in my meatballs, too,” Lucie Frolich once explained to a reporter. “Sugar brings out the full flavor of meats and vegetables. Housewives of Norway keep their seasoning simple—salt, pepper, a little onion and sugar, always sugar.”
