Bill Hogan

Some 20 years before he went into the restaurant business, Robert C. (Bob) Tritton had already made a name for himself as a professional baseball player. Tritton, who was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, was recruited by St. Albans School in Roanoke, a powerhouse in college sports, and while there he played right end on the football team for three years and was a standout pitcher each season on the baseball team. In his senior year at St. Albans the baseball team, which he captained, won 14 of the 15 games it played, and four were shutouts. “The only game lost was to Hampden-Sidney [College], by a score of 7 to 6,” a sportswriter for the Richmond Daily Dispatch noted, “and this defeat was due to the broken-down condition of the team and Tritton’s torn fore-finger.”

On graduating from St. Albans Tritton briefly played for minor-league baseball teams in Jacksonville, Florida, and Augusta, Georgia. He then played for two major-league teams in Alabama, pitching for the Birmingham Barons in 1903 and the Montgomery Senators in 1904.

Tritton had also been an equestrian at St. Albans, and in 1904 he left Richmond to become an assistant manager of the American Horse Exchange in New York City, a mammoth thoroughbred-trading center built by William K. Vanderbilt and a group of investors that included some of the city’s leading millionaire-horsemen. (These were “gentlemen of vast means,” as the New York Times observed, to whom profits were “of no consequence.”)

But in time Tritton moved back to Richmond, and in 1918 he opened the Capital Auto Supply Company at 218 East Ninth Street. In 1924 he joined the Autocar Company of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, an innovative manufacturer of both gasoline and electric vehicles, as the manager of its company-owned dealership in Norfolk. But the business may not have fully suited Tritton, an avid fisherman and all-around outdoorsman, and in 1926 he and his wife, Helen, opened Montague Cottage, a small summer hotel in Virginia Beach at Atlantic Avenue and 16th Street, right off the boardwalk and just two blocks from the New Ocean Casino, which had opened the previous year. (Montague was the middle name Helen’s parents had given her.) Helen Tritton managed Montague Cottage, where the main draw, as summarized in its newspaper ads, was a “variety of sea food served every day.”

But the Trittons had their eyes on something bigger, and on November 20, 1931, they opened Bob’s Sea Food Grill at 115 North Fifth Street in Richmond. This was a prize location, right next door to the Hotel John Marshall, that aimed to serve its customers prize catch. “Not Just Another Restaurant—All Sea Foods Are Dependent for Their Appetizing Flavor and Food Value Upon Their Freshness and Quality,” its opening-day ad in the Richmond Times-Dispatch began. “It will be the constant aim and determination of this management to supply the freshest and finest of all varieties.”

And, oh, the varieties. There were oysters and clams from handpicked beds on the Lynnhaven River; lobsters and scallops from Portland, Maine; shrimp and turtle from Florida; and a bountiful assortment of crabmeat and fish from local waters. These were served in all manner of styles, and “for those who do not care for sea foods,” as the menu put it, there was pan-fried chicken, broiled chicken, and chicken salad as well as steaks and chops and such specialties as “Turkey Hash and Old Virginia Waffles,” “Chicken Brunswick Stew,” and “Smithfield Ham Steaks.” Hot buttermilk biscuits were served with each meal and there were two kinds of pie—apple and sweet potato—for dessert.

The restaurant’s main dining room might well have been nicknamed “Bob’s Fishing Museum.” A framed mural on one wall was designed to look like a huge aquarium, and all around the room were dozens of mounted fish from Tritton’s deep-sea catches, most of them in Florida waters, as well as some that friends had presented to him. A massive marlin hung directly above the faux aquarium, and diners could also see a barracuda, a bonefish, a dolphin, a giant grouper, a sea bass, a tuna, and a ladyfish, among others. In time Tritton would display various other artifacts and trophies, from the eight-and-a-half-inch-long shell of a Chesapeake Bay oyster that had been delivered to the restaurant in a barrel of mammoths to a nine-and-a-half-foot-long sailfish that he’d recently hooked on one of his Florida fishing trips.

Every order is individually prepared; nothing served that was cooked in advance in large quantities. The walls are decorated with many unusual trophies and some particularly fine specimens of seep sea fish can be seen “in person.”

By 1936 Tritton had squeezed the words “Sea” and “Food” into one in the name of the restaurant and adopted a motto—“Out of Sea, Into Pan”—that was as alluring as it was succinct. In 1939, with the restaurant running smoothly and his wife was still managing the Montague Cottage in Virginia Beach every summer, Tritton spent $125,000 to open the Virginia Fried Chicken Restaurant at the New York World’s Fair, serving its namesake dinner—half of a milk-fed chicken, fried, with candied yams, string beans, Louisiana rice with giblet gravy, bread and butter ice cream or sherbet, cake,  and coffee or tea—for just 90 cents, and a similarly robust “Cold Virginia Smithfield Ham Platter for the same price. An “Old Virginia Mint Julep” was 50 cents, and for this menu selection Tritton had bushels of fresh mint flown to the World’s Fair every day.

In 1942 Tritton decided to sell Bob’s Seafood Grill to Louis Byram, a former steward at Richmond’s ultra-private Commonwealth Club. But the following year Byram was presented the opportunity to buy Daley’s, an old-line steakhouse at 703 East Broad Street, and so he sold Bob’s Seafood Grill to William R. McGeorge, a former manager of the Country Club of Virginia.

In 1946 Tritton joined Alfred L. Blake & Sons, Inc., a Richmond-based real estate firm, where he specializes in the sale of farms, waterfront properties, and hunting and fishing preserves. He was widowed in 1958 when Helen died at age 76.

McGeorge would stay at the helm of Bob’s Seafood Grill much longer than its founder had, and the restaurant’s reputation was such that he never tampered with the name. But in the early 1960s things were changing in Richmond, as they were all over the South, and McGeorge, evidently, was none too happy about it.

On August 24, 1963, in a statement he gave to the local newspapers, McGeorge let Richmond know that he’d had enough. “To our many friends who have favored us with their patronage during the past 20 years,” it said, “we regret to announce that due to conditions beyond our control we have decided to discontinue business immediately.”

Pressed by reporters the next day, McGeorge said that “a combination of things” had led him to retire. For starters, he said, eating habits were changing, with people ordering much lighter meals than they used to, particularly at lunch. (“I think it is due to the fact,” he’d theorized earlier that year, “that they don’t take sufficient exercise.”)

But the slump in business wasn’t the main reason he’d decided to closed the restaurant, McGeorge told a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “The lack of parking space and the labor situation have also made things difficult,” he explained. “But the straw that broke the camel’s back was integration. I couldn’t submit to that.”

The newspaper’s editorial page, however, made no mention of McGeorge’s reason for closing in a goodbye paean titled “Farewell to Bob’s,” though it noted that he had been complaining for years, among other things, that “the colored kitchen help was unreliable.”

Two weeks later, George and Philip Shaheen opened Philip’s Restaurant in the space where Bob’s Seafood Grill had been, but in 1965 the two brothers sold their operation to Shoney’s Big Boy Restaurants. Today a parking lot occupies the site.

In 1968 Bob Tritton died at age 87 during a visit in Jacksonville, Florida.