Bill Hogan – Page 5 – Legendary Recipes

Lobster à la Newburg

Gray Fox Restaurant

38 Chinquapin Road
Pinehurst, North Carolina

1940 – 1976

In 1941 Charles Frederick Herman, carrying all his belongings in a single bag, arrived in Pinehurst, North Carolina, to take a job at the Gray Fox Restaurant, which had opened with considerable fanfare the previous year. Until recently Herman, an Austrian-born chef, had been in charge of the kitchen at Tony’s Trouville, a favorite café-society hangout on East 52nd Street in New York City. But now his mission was to replace the larger-than-life man who just the year before had created the Gray Fox: Bucharest-born Alexandru (Alex) Papană, who’d earned fame as a world-class bobsledder and member of the Romanian bobsled team in the 1932 and 1936 Winter Olympic Games, as a captain in the Romanian Royal Air Force, and as a daring pilot and stunt flier who in 1938 had been christened “The Rumanian Lindbergh” by newspapers all over the United States.

In the summer of 1940 Mr. and Mrs. Livingston Biddle II had been introduced to Papană in New York City, and they persuaded him to visit Pinehurst, where they spent every winter, to see if he might be interested in taking over the Village Court Grill, which they had opened two years earlier. Papană, having recently damaged his plane on the runway of the Chicago Municipal Airport, decided to take the Biddles up on their offer. His first step was to engage a French-Algerian chef who most recently had worked at the exclusive Yeamans Hall Club in Hanahan, South Carolina, just outside Charleston. Then he renamed the restaurant, installed one of his largest aviation trophies in a conspicuous spot, and placed ads in the local newspaper that said: “Lunch—Tea—Bridge—Dinner. French Chef, French Cuisine.”

Papană’s first season at the Gray Fox, however, would turn out to be his last. In 1942 he started playing in amateur tennis tournaments and then resumed his career as a stunt pilot, appearing in air shows across the country, often getting top billing. He also had his eye on Hollywood, and he would go on to have tiny and typically uncredited parts in at least eight major motion pictures, including Above Suspicion (1943), The Song of Bernadette (1943), and Passage to Marseilles (1944).

Meanwhile, with the United States having entered World War II, Pinehurst was booming in a big way. The city served as a support area for neighboring Fort Bragg, which was being transformed from a small artillery training post into one of the nation’s most important military installations. Construction workers poured into the region from all over the state, and at one point they were completing new buildings at Fort Bragg at a rate of one every 32 minutes. Many of them came into Pinehurst at night for dinner, drinks, and dancing, and the USO Club in the Pinehurst Theater was also a magnet for military personnel and their spouses or guests.

With Papană out of the picture, the Biddles settled on Herman to replace him, and he was soon as his way to Pinehurst to be the restaurant’s chef when it opened for the season in October 1941. (Papană’s life came to a tragic end in 1946 when, despondent over the state of his weeks-old marriage, he disappeared into the desert 16 miles south of Las Vegas, parking his car off the highway and walking some three miles to a ravine, where he ingested a lethal dose of poison. The sheriff’s office found his body a week, along with two suicide notes, one in his coupe and the other in his pocket, that lamented the couple’s “lost love,” saying, “We could have been so very happy.”)

The Biddles aimed to make the Gray Fox a first-class, fashionable French restaurant where they could entertain dozens of friends at a time. As chef, Herman obliged. The menu for his 1941 “Gala Christmas Dinner” featured (in this order): cream of mushroom soup or casaba melon; celery, radishes, and olives; roast turkey with cranberry sauce, candied sweet potatoes, creamed pearl onions, and fresh string beans; the “Gray Fox Salad Bowl”; hot rolls; for dessert, a choice of frozen cream puffs with chocolate sauce, mince pie, English fruitcake, or pumpkin pie; and coffee. This extravagant dinner was served from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. for $1.75.

Patrons could dine either indoors or in an intimate courtyard, and Herman elevated the culinary stature of the Gray Fox to the point where the Raleigh News and Observer dubbed it “Pinehurst’s pièce de résistance to the gourmets of both the Army and civilian groups.” The restaurant was packed every night, inside and in the courtyard, with soldiers and their wives or dates. Harmon (Ham) Nelson, a musician who was best known as actress Bette Davis’s high-school sweetheart and first husband (they divorced in 1938), was stationed at Fort Bragg and became a regular at the Gray Fox, where after dinner he invariably ended up playing the piano for his own pleasure and that of the other patrons.

In 1945 Herman bought the Gray Fox from the Biddles, and at some point he also acquired a one-fourth interest in Village Court Company, Inc., which owned the building the restaurant occupied. Herman had once owned a restaurant in Chicago that went belly-up during the Great Depression, and he was determined not to let the Gray Fox fall victim to the same fate. Year by year the restaurant’s reputation grew. The only blip came in 1948, when state and county ABC agents put Pinehurst in their crosshairs, taking aim at “swanky night clubs and restaurants that are known to residents in all parts of the United States,” as the Raleigh News and Observer put it. “Officers said that some of the establishments sold drinks openly and in plentiful quantities,” the newspaper went on to report, and Herman, snared in a surprise nighttime raid, was one of more than 30 defendants charged with violating state liquor laws. (The enforcement drive soon petered out, even though the sale of liquor by the drink wouldn’t become legal in North Carolina until 1978.)

Herman, more than anyone else, made the Gray Fox into a Pinehurst institution—so much so that Marion Brown included several of his recipes in The Southern Cookbook, the wildly popular and still-in-print title that was originally published in 1951. Herman, however, didn’t confine himself to such high-end dishes as Lobster Newburg, which had been on his menus from the beginning. In 1959 the Gray Fox advertised “pizza pies to take out” in assorted sizes.

Herman died in October 1965 when he was pinned inside his wrecked car following an accident near the Moore County Airport. He was 77. He had no surviving relatives and left his $40,000 estate to charity, with most of it going to establish the Charles F. Herman Memorial Fund. His will stipulated that the fund was “to be used exclusively for educational purposes to assist needy and/or deserving persons of the Pinehurst School District in attending college or institutions of higher learning or schools or technical training.”

The Gray Fox closed with Herman’s death, but it reopened the following month with a new owner, Roy E. Babbin, who had acquired the restaurant from Herman’s estate and taken over its lease in the Village Court Building. Babbin, described in one newspaper account as “a professional opener of new food and beverage businesses,” specialized in flipping restaurants, which was evidently his plan for the Gray Fox. He restyled the restaurant as “The House of the Gray Fox” and the lounge inside as “The English Pub.”

But Babbin’s plan did go as expected, and in 1967 Livingston Biddle leased the Gray Fox to C.L. Worsham, Jr., Raymond Lee Williams, and Warwick Fay Neville. Worsham owned a supermarket and delicatessen in Pinehurst as well as a bakery and deli in nearby Southern Pines, and Williams, a butcher by trade, was the head of the supermarket’s meat department. (Neville, who’d begun his career as an investment banker with the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company in New York City, appears to have been a silent partner in the venture.)

But the restaurant business may have proved too much a challenge for Worsham and Williams. In 1970 they sold the Gray Fox to Wilma J. Cunningham, who had previously owned a restaurant in Akron, Ohio. The following year the Gray Fox changed hands yet again when Cunningham and her daughter sold it restaurant in 1971 to Thomas K. McNeil of New Jersey.

It was clear by now that the Gray Fox just wasn’t the same without Charlie Herman. Some said that most of the people visiting Pinehurst were choosing to eat meals at the hotels in which they were staying, but that explanation was only part of it. The churning after Herman’s death had clearly taken a big toll. In 1975 Bob Moore, the latest in the Gray Fox’s succession of owners, told a reporter that business at the restaurant was off about 40 percent over the previous years, saying, “It ain’t what it has been.”

The Gray Fox Restaurant closed its doors the following year. The space was then occupied by a gift shop, and when the gift shop closed it reopened once again as a restaurant. Later, Theo’s Taverna occupied the space for nearly 30 years before it closed in 2021.

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January 19, 2023 By Bill Hogan

Las Vegas/ Nevada

Plum Pudding

Swiss Village Restaurant

116 Las Vegas Boulevard North
Las Vegas, Nevada

1946 – 1954

In the mid-1920s Walter Fredrick Wolfinger left his family in Switzerland to come to the United States and pursue his career as a chef, which before long would bring him to the fast-growing city of Las Vegas. Back then a big sign was strung across Fremont Street that read “Welcome to Las Vegas—The Gateway to Boulder Dam,” the massive federal construction project that had made the little railroad town Depression-proof. By the time the dam was officially rechristened Hoover Dam in 1947, Las Vegas was well on its way to way to becoming a gambling mecca.

In 1941 the city’s first hotel-casino, El Rancho Vegas, had opened on a stretch of Highway 91, the two-lane road that led all the way to Los Angeles. Five years later Guy McAfee, the proprietor of the Golden Nugget casino, nicknamed this area, directly south of the Las Vegas city limits, “The Strip.” Meanwhile, other hotel-casinos sprouted up on Fremont Street, which the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce promptly dubbed “Glitter Gulch.”

Wolfinger, called into the U.S. military during World War II, spent two years as a steward on the S.S. Clark Howell, one of the 2,711 “liberty ships” built by the U.S. Maritime Commission for wartime service. On returning to Las Vegas Wolfinger easily found work, and in 1944 the 38-year-old chef found a bride: Ruby Wilma Johnson, six years younger. The newlywed couple briefly operated a cafe on South 5th Street, and in 1945 Wolfinger took charge of the dining room at the The Players, a supper club on Highway 91, which billed him in its newspaper ads as a “World Famous Chef.”

But the Wolfingers clearly had greater ambitions, and on August 9, 1946, they opened the Swiss Village in a two-story building at 116 North Fifth Street that had once housed a construction company. (In 1959 Fifth Street would be renamed Las Vegas Boulevard.) They’d hired Richard Porter of Desert Designers to decorate the 100-seat restaurant, and he came through by painting large murals featuring famous Swiss scenes (including one of the Matterhorn) for the walls, installing glass-fronted “chalets” on the backbar behind the counter, and building an “Edelweiss Room” for private parties on a mezzanine above the kitchen. The waitresses wore Tyrolean costumes. The slot machines in the front of the restaurant didn’t exactly fit the restaurant’s Swiss theme, but no matter—they gave patrons something to do with their spare change.

Just months after the Swiss Chalet opened Wolfinger offered a special Thanksgiving dinner with these entrees: Roast Young Tom Turkey with Cornbread Dressing, Cranberry Sauce, and Giblet Gravy ($2.75); Baked Sugar-Cured Ham with Champagne Sauce ($3.00), and a New York Cut Sirloin Steak with Mushroom Sauce ($3.50). The dinner included an assortment of salted nuts, hearts of celery, scallions, radishes, and California fruit cocktail; cream of tomato or onion soup; a mixed green salad with French dressing; sweet potatoes; succotash or creamed pearl onions; and, for dessert, hot mince pie with brandy sauce, pumpkin pie, fresh strawberry cream pie, or fresh fruit.

In 1947 Wolfinger traveled to Switzerland to see his family for the first time in 21 years. Wilma didn’t go with him. An account of his trip in the Las Vegas Review-Journal noted that she had been “stricken with illness at the last moment and canceled her plans to go with her husband,” adding that “the couple plan another trip in the spring together.” But that may not have been the real story, as the following year Wilma was granted a divorce from Walter, who made no appearance in court. In a property settlement dated December 22, 1947, Wilma was given possession of the Swiss Chalet; Walter retained possession of a car and $1,000.

Soon after that Wilma sold the Swiss Village to Howard W. Gale, who brought in Paul Lollar to be its chef. Lollar made no radical changes in the menu. His 1951 Thanksgiving Day dinner menu, for example, included many of the same items that were among Wolfinger’s offerings five years earlier, from a “California Fruit Cup Grenadine” to the “Hot Mince Pie with Brandy Sauce.”

In 1952 Harry Farnow and Joe Schramm hired Wolfinger to be the chef of their new restaurant, Duffy’s Tavern, where he directed an open kitchen that was entirely visible to the patrons. Wolfinger, who’d remarried in 1949, didn’t stay long. Sometime that year he was back in the saddle at the Swiss Chalet with his second wife, Marion. They operated the Swiss Village until 1954, when the restaurant quietly closed its doors. The following year, after extensive renovations and remodeling, Bob Baskin and Garland Miner, the former operators of the Round-Up Drive In, opened Bob Baskin’s Restaurant in the same space.

Walt and Marion Wolfinger then moved to Cedar City, Utah, where in 1956 he bought Milt’s Stage Stop, a beer-and-sandwich place on Highway 14, and turned it into a family restaurant that served steaks and seafood. Four years later he opened a second restaurant, Walt’s Dinette, on South Main Street. He died in 1984 at age 78.

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January 14, 2023 By Bill Hogan

Beaverton/ Oregon

Chiles Rellenos (Stuffed Peppers)

Tico Taco

12525 Southwest Canyon Road
Beaverton, Oregon

1958 – 1962

Sometime in the 1950s, John H. Knox, who’d grown up in New Mexico, hit on the idea of bringing authentic Mexican food to Oregon, and in June 1957 he opened Tico Taco on the highway leading into Gearhart, a quiet little town nestled among the dunes that hug the Pacific Ocean along the state’s North Coast. One early patron was Bill Jenkins, the managing editor of the Klamath Falls Herald and News, who rated Knox’s new restaurant “highly recommended,” noting that “the tacos were good and the enchilada really out of this world for a commercial product.”

It wasn’t long, however, before Knox had set his sights on a bigger target: the city of Beaverton, just seven miles west of Portland in the Tualatin Valley. Knox and a partner, C. Donald Adams, spent some $65,000 to build a 2,700-square-foot, 100-seat place at what was then 120 N.W. Canyon Road. (Today, because of changes in Beaverton’s addressing grid, the address would be 12525 S.W. Canyon Road.) When the new Tico Taco opened on January 17, 1952, a big ad in the Portland Oregonian heralded it as “Oregon’s Finest Original Mexican Restaurant.”

Tico Taco featured Mexican folk dancers in its Fiesta Room, and the food was Mexican through and through, too, from the tortillas (“We Make Our Own,” the menu proudly announced) to more than a half-dozen combination dinners (No. 1, priced at $2, included albondiga soup; an enchilada, taco, and tamale; refried beans; and a “corn crispie”). The kitchen, headed by Harry Conzalles, a chef from a town near Mexico City, also served up such south-of-the-border staples as chili con carne, chile rellenos, huevos rancheros, Spanish-style and charbroiled steaks, tostadas, burritos, and guacamole salad. Then there was the chile sauce. “The sauce is very hot and some people can’t take it,” Knox told an interviewer soon after Tico Taco opened in Beaverton.

Knox’s restaurant, however, may have been before its time. Tico Taco closed on January 1, 1962, just a couple of weeks before what would have been its fourth anniversary. A few months later, after a $100,000 remodeling job, the Town and Country Restaurant opened at the same location, though it, too, would close the following year.

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January 7, 2023 By Bill Hogan

Colorado Springs/ Colorado

Apple Cream Pie

Johnny Appleseed Cottage

1114 South Nevada Avenue
Colorado Springs, Colorado

1951 – 1957

In 1951 George E. Snow, a Texas-born real estate salesman, and his wife, Ruth, opened a little restaurant in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that they called the Johnny Appleseed Cottage. No matter that their restaurant’s famed namesake—a.k.a. John Chapman, born in Massachusetts in 1774—never made it to Colorado, getting only as far west as Fort Wayne, Indiana, as he spent 50 years planting apple seeds and seedlings across a broad stretch of the American frontier.

The Snows’ new restaurant made its debut on August 22 in a little house at 1114 South Nevada Avenue that reportedly had once been owned by Frank Daily, a local underworld figure. There was an apple-shaped neon sign out front that beckoned diners with the promise of pit-barbecue dinners. There were little red apples painted on the eaves of the storybook-like cottage and on the white picket fence that surrounded it. The theme carried inside, where Ruth had seen to it that the walls of both dining rooms were covered with wallpaper depicting scenes in the life of Johnny Appleseed and that the draperies, tables, chairs, dishes, and napkins were in colors associated with different varieties of apples.

As for the specialties of the house, the Snows wisely brought in Andrew Bender, a veteran barbecue man who also happened to be a Baptist minister. Bender, who’d earned his spurs in the kitchen of The Flaming Pit, a famous barbecue restaurant in Denver, slow-cooked all manner of meats in an open pit over applewood and also pork butt, ribs, ham, beef brisket and chicken, barbecued over an open pit using applewood and also turned out charcoal-broiled steaks and trout.

In 1954 a national magazine dubbed the Johnny Appleseed “justly famous,” citing its barbecued meats and excellent desserts. The star of the restaurant’s dessert menu was—what else?—a luscious Apple Cream Pie.

In 1957, for reasons that have been lost to history, the Johnny Appleseed quietly closed its doors, and the quaint little cottage sat vacant for three years. In 1961 Lee and Bonnie Coleman reopened it as the Johnny Appleseed Restaurant, but they apparently weren’t stay in business for more than a few months.

The Snows later moved to Denver, where Ruth died at age 74 in 1977 and George at age 83 in 1985.

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January 6, 2023 By Bill Hogan

Carlsbad/ New Mexico

Roquefort Dressing

The Red Barn

1408 North Canal Street
Carlsbad, New Mexico

1947 – 1963

In 1943 Marge and Bill Fowler bought a large ranch in Carlsbad, New Mexico, that had been built in 1918, six years after New Mexico became a state. The ranch, directly north of the La Huerta Bridge, was owned by C.A. Pierce, the general superintendent of the U.S. Potash Company, whose pioneering work had helped to make Carlsbad “the potash capital of the United States.” In 1941 Piece had built a red barn and stables on his ranch so large that during the early years of World War II pilots used it as a landmark, and it was mostly that feature that led the Fowlers to buy the property in 1943.

Several years later the Fowlers took over the Arrowhead Drive-In, a popular counter- and curb-service spot across from Carlsbad High School, but they were forced to go to court when the owner, Soda McLaughlin, tried to terminate their lease so that he could sell the restaurant for a higher price than the Fowlers were willing to pay. “Used to be where a landlord tried to keep a tenant in a building,” the Judge James B. McGhee said in ruling for the Fowlers. “Now it is where he is trying to get him out.”

But the Fowlers undoubtedly realized that their days at the Arrowhead Drive-In were numbered, and in 1946 they moved to the Old Barge Café, a relatively new restaurant right on the Pecos River at Lakeview Courts. Meanwhile, Don had been hosting open-to-the-public dances at the big barn on their property at 1408 North Canal Street, and soon they began converting it into a rustic restaurant they would call the Red Barn.

The Red Barn opened on April 6, 1947. At first the Fowlers offered only two entrees—charcoal-broiled steaks and country-fried chicken—in their small dining room. But they soon set about expanding their restaurants, and within the next couple of years it earned recommendations from the American Automobile Association, Duncan Hines, and Gourmet magazine. Each meal came with French fries or mashed potatoes, a salad, and, for a little extra, a slice from one of the pies baked by Pearl Hogan especially for the Red Barn. And, in the restaurant’s early years folks in Carlsbad could have a complete steak or chicken dinner delivered to their door for $3.00.

On entering the restaurant patrons saw a wall lined with menus from famous restaurants all over the world, and during the winter months the Fowlers kept a camp coffee pot over the fire in the Pine Room and served coffee to guests as they sat down. In 1954 the Red Barn was featured in Life magazine, which dubbed it “a favorite party spot” in Carlsbad.

In 1961 the Fowlers sold the Red Barn and moved to Taos, where the following year they opened the Hickory Tree, a barbecue place, on Santa Fe Road. The restaurant’s new owners were Donald E. Protz, who’d been a mining engineer with the Potash Corporation of America, and his wife, Mattie.

The Protzes had been operating the Red Barn for about two and a half years when, on December 13, 1963, the restaurant burned to the ground after it had closed for the evening. Many attributed the loss to the lack of adequate firefighting capabilities in the area, and after the fire the Protzes spearheaded a successful drive to organize the La Huerta Volunteer Fire Department.

Don Protz died in 1976 at age 69; Mattie Protz died in 1994 at age 82.

The Fowlers went go on to open two other restaurants in Taos: the Doll House, where Marge Fowler displayed her magnificent collection of rare dolls, in 1965, and the Red Chimney Pit Bar-B-Q in 1983.

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December 30, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Waverly/ Iowa

Apple Dumplings

Carver’s Restaurant

1600 West Bremer Avenue
Waverly, Iowa

1953 – 1987

In 1952 Robert L. Carver and his wife, Connie, gave up their home in Whittier, California, to move with their three daughters to Waverly, Iowa, where they planned to open a restaurant. They found a perfect location on the western edge of town at 1660 West Bremer Avenue, right at the intersection of U.S. Route 218 and State Highway 3, and in 1953 opened Carver’s Coffee Shop and Dining Room there.

Built in the style known today as midcentury modern, Carver’s looked as if it could have been imported directly from California. It was popular from the beginning, drawing customers from Minnesota and all over northeast Iowa who appreciated the attention Bob Carver lavished on the food he served there. By 1954 Carver’s was billing itself—with just a morsel of hyperbole—as “Iowa’s Finest Restaurant.”

In 1956 Carver decided to return to California to manage a chain of restaurants and supermarkets owned by F. Donald Nixon, the brother of Vice President Richard M. Nixon. (Carver would leave Nixon’s, Inc., a little over a year later to open Carver’s Coffee Shop in East Whittier.) The Carvers found a buyer for their Waverly restaurant in Robert L. Benck, who owned and operated a motel right next door. Benck announced his plans to keep the restaurant open seven days a week—it had been closed on Mondays—and to open earlier each day to accommodate customers in search of breakfast. The only thing Benck didn’t plan to change, he said, was the restaurant’s name, which by now was known simply as Carver’s.

For the most part the menu didn’t change, either. Top billing still went to Carver’s Deluxe Hamburger (“It’s love at first bite!”), but there was also a “Steak Night” every Saturday and a special turkey dinner every Sunday. And many customers would make a special trip just for a piece of Carver’s pecan pie.

In 1973 Carver’s Restaurant changed hands again when Otto Schnider, a Swiss-born restaurant manager who’d worked at the Des Moines Club in Des Moines, the Drake Hotel in Chicago, and the Pere Marquette Hotel in Peoria, bought it. For a while it became, confusingly, Otto Schnider’s Carver’s Restaurant, and then Otto’s Carver’s Restaurant. Schnider and his wife, Katie, introduced the Swiss Chateau Room, an “all-German smorgasbord,” multicourse “gourmet dinners” prepared by German-born chef Martin Vollmer on the last Tuesday of each month, and what was advertised as the “largest salad bar in northeast Iowa.”

In 1980 Carver’s changed hands once again when Larry Kussatz and his wife, Susan, became its new owners. Kussatz, a Waterloo native who’d previously been a music teacher at Waterloo Central High School, introduced “musical meals” served in a separate dining room by waiters and waitresses who doubled, between courses, as “Carver’s Singers.” And, for the Friday-night German buffet, there was Frank Lundak playing his “Yugoslavian Button Box”—a handmade five-row diatonic button accordion.

Carver’s 35-year run ended when the restaurant closed with little fanfare in 1987. It was replaced by a franchised Country Kitchen restaurant, part of a rapidly expanding chain of 250 or so outlets, most of them in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

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December 14, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Sedalia/ Missouri

Mel’s Salami Treat

Beverly’s Drive-In Restaurant

1705 West Broadway Boulevard
Sedalia, Missouri

1954 – 1986

Melvin H. (Mel) Carl wasted little time after news came on December 5, 1933, that Utah had become the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, officially ending Prohibition in the United States. Carl immediately began laying plans to open a tavern in his hometown of Sedalia, Kansas, even though the state had not ratified the 21st Amendment. In early 1935 he applied for a permit to sell liquor at 211 South Ohio Avenue, and as soon as he had the permit in hand he opened Mel Carl’s Tavern. Business was so good out of the gate that by 1936 he decided to expand and redecorate his establishment so as to provide, the Sedalia Democrat observed, “larger food accommodations for the patronage which his place enjoys.”

Carl’s next move came in 1949, when he opened Beverly’s Snack Shop (named for his 11-year-old daughter) at 520 South Ohio Avenue. The following year he renamed it Beverly’s Snack and Steak Shop and, then, Beverly’s Steak House.

Carl’s big break came in 1954, when he arranged to lease one of three available spaces in the brand-new Broadway Plaza Shopping Center at 1705 West Broadway Boulevard, which was anchored by a giant Kroger supermarket. Closing the operation on South Ohio Avenue, he spent some $40,000 to equip and furnish his new restaurant, which featured a 30-foot soda fountain and counter on one side of the room, seven sets of booths on the other, several tables in the middle, and a bar with 15 stools in the back, for a total seating capacity of about 90. As they’d done before, Carl and his wife, Emma, decided to name the new restaurant after their daughter, now 17 years old, and all three would work there in the years ahead.

Beverly’s Drive-in Restaurant made its debut on June 15, 1954, with Carl dubbing it “The House of Fine Foods” in newspaper ads for the grand opening.

In 1957 Carl suddenly found his name in the news when a sandwich recipe he entered in a competition sponsored by the National Restaurant Association and the Wheat Flour Institute was judged one of the top 20 out of more than 700 submitted. Soon his recipe for “Mel’s Salami Treat” appeared in newspapers all over the country.

In 1959, with Mel’s health in decline, the Carls announced that they had sold their restaurant to Thurlow and May Belle Puckett, who for many years had owned a cafe in Sedalia. Aside from dropping the “Drive-In” from the name of the restaurant, the Pucketts kept things pretty much as they had been from the beginning, with steak and fried chicken at the top of the menu, and an assortment of pies (made by pastry cook Isa Cayton) heading the dessert list.

There were daily specials galore, like this one described in a 1964 newspaper ad: “Stewed Chicken with Dumplings, Potatoes, and Salad. Choice of Two Vegetables, Hot Roll and Butter, Coffee or Tea. Complete Dinner, 95 cents.” Plus: “We serve the only Rum Cream Pie and the tastiest Fresh Strawberry Pie in the Sedalia area.”

Mel Carl died in 1966 at age 64. The Pucketts operated Beverly’s Restaurant until 1978, when they sold it to Tony and Pat Rimel, who restyled it as Beverly’s House of Fine Foods. The restaurant closed in 1986.

A footnote: The state of Kansas has never ratified the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

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December 13, 2022 By Bill Hogan

St. Petersburg/ Florida

Ambrosia Chiffon Pie

Molly’s Restaurant

5756 Central Avenue North
St. Petersburg, Florida

1950 – 1960

Lincoln L. Loper already had more than 25 years in the restaurant business under his belt—first in Milwaukee, then in Seattle, and then in several different cities in Iowa—when, in 1950, he and his wife, Florence, moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, bought a brand-new building at the corner of Central Avenue and 58th Street, remodeled it for their purposes, and opened Molly’s Restaurant.

The Lopers billed their restaurant as the “House of Good Food”—the legend emblazoned above the awning and on the big sign out front—as well as “The Best Place in Town to Eat Full Course Dinners.” The restaurant offered table, counter, and booth service, and customers could get their fill of comfort food at Molly’s without spending a lot of money. Weekday plate lunches, for example, were just 60 cents. Complete Sunday dinners ranged in price from $1.15 for “Fried Snapper Fingers” to $2.50 for a “Grilled Large T-Bone Steak”—served with chicken noodle soup or tomato or papaya juice, a combination salad with French dressing, and homemade rolls and butter—with a half-dozen other entrees in between. And in 1956 diners at Molly’s could get a full Thanksgiving dinner—roast turkey, roast Long Island duckling, or prime rib with soup or salad, side dishes, dessert, and beverage—for just $1.94.

In 1959 Loper bought a 100-acre of virgin land in western Brazil on the advice of his brother-in-law, who’d seen the tract while living in Sao Paolo. “He said the soil was rich and the climate was perfect,” Loper told a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times., adding that his grandfather had traveled west in a covered wagon during the California Gold Rush. “My wife and I plan to visit our ranch next summer. If we like it we may buy more and perhaps settle there.”

But Brazil, at least for the Lopers was not to be. In 1960 they announced that they had sold the building at 5756 Central Avenue to the I.C. Helmly Furniture Company, and Molly’s Restaurant closed on September 30 of that year. Lincoln Loper died in St. Petersburg in 1973 at age 79.

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December 9, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Milwaukee/ Wisconsin

Sour Cream Salad Dressing

Strucel’s Supper Club

8253 West Appleton Avenue
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

1963 – 1996

Stanley and Beatrice Strucel opened Strucel’s Supper Club in 1963, and within just a short time they would be advertising it, with only a bit of hyperbole, as “Milwaukee’s most exquisite restaurant and cocktail lounge.” Strucel’s was a grand place, and on most nights of the week the restaurant would be packed with patrons who kept coming back for its prime-rib and fish-fry dinners.

By the mid-1980s Stanley and Beatrice were ready to retire from the restaurant business, and in 1985 they sold Strucel’s to their son Jack and his wife, Barbara Jean (“BJ”). (Beatrice died four years later, and Stanley died at age 86 in 2005.) The younger Strucels ran the restaurant and bar for 11 years and watched the neighborhood around it gradually decline until, as Jack put it, “we made the very difficult decision to sell.”

Strucel’s closed on August 10, 1996. A little while after that it reopened with a new owner and a new name—Alondra’s Restaurant. Within a year, however, a fire put Alondra’s out of business, and the building at 8253 West Appleton Avenue has pretty much been a boarded-up shell ever since.

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December 8, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Skowhegan/ Maine

Indian Pudding

Gene’s

69 Water Street
Skowhegan, Maine

1929 – 1973

Eugene C. Tarbox started out as a cabinetmaker but decided in his early 40s to put down one set of tools for another and become a restaurateur. In 1929 he opened Gene’s at 69 Water Street in Skowhegan, Maine, a picturesque little town on the banks of the Kennebec River. Tarbox had no way of knowing that the Great Depression would begin that year, too, but his restaurant thrived under his management through the next decade, becoming a well-known stopping place for travelers on U.S. Route 2, the principal east–west route through the central portion of Maine.

At a time when many restaurants were cutting corners as they struggled to stay in business, Tarbox obsessed over the quality of everything served in the establishment that bore his name. All the milk and cream at Gene’s, for example, came from the herd of registered Jersey cows that Tarbox maintained at his own farm. Little wonder that the restaurant’s home-made ice cream was one of the things that made Gene’s, as its newspaper ads said, “A Delightful Place to Dine.”

In 1945 Tarbox brought on Stanley (Stan) T. Tyks, a former manager of the Hotel Oxford in Skowhegan, as a partner in his restaurant. In just a few years Tyks would be voted president of the Maine Restaurant Association, and Tarbox would go on, with his son, to establish another restaurant, the Three G’s, in Skowhegan. (Tarbox retired for good in 1960 and died at age 82 in 1966.)

In 1963 Edmund P. Branch, a veteran restaurant and hotel manager, joined Tyks as a partner in Gene’s, and he oversaw an extensive remodeling the following year. Expo ’67, as the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal was popularly known, offered the prospect of increased business, but it apparently was not to be, with Branch telling a reporter that the much-hyped world’s fair had proved “less than stimulating.”

In 1972 Branch moved to Northeast Harbor, Maine, where he converted the restaurant next to the Kimball Terrace Inn into the Mast and Rudder. That same year Tyks died in his home, at age 58, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and Gene’s restaurant closed soon after that.

The building that housed Gene’s for more than 40 years has since been home to a variety of businesses, including a pub, a pool hall, a clothing shop, and, most recently, Leakos’s Auction House & Gallery.

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December 8, 2022 By Bill Hogan

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