Corn Pudding

El Rancho Restaurant

2843 MacCorkle Avenue
St. Albans, West Virginia

1952 – 1970

In 1949 Irene Evans opened the El Rancho Inn in St. Albans, Virginia, a small town 10 miles west of Charleston on U.S. Route 60, billing it a “Little of the West back East.” The El Rancho was so popular from the beginning that in 1950 Evans decided to expand it, and then, in 1952, she built a 125-seat restaurant right next to the inn, maintaining the western motif inside and out. In 1957 she expanded El Rancho once again, building a modern motel on the property.

All the while, Evans saw to it that the menu at the El Rancho Restaurant was several cuts above anything else in the area. The 1959 Thanksgiving menu, for example, featured Roast West Virginia Tom Turkey with Chestnut Dressing and Giblet Gravy ($2.25); Sliced Virginia Sugar-Cured Ham with Orange and Raisin Sauce ($2.45); Roast Prime Steer of Beef, Au Jus ($3.75); and a Combination Seafood Platter ($2.75). There was a choice of Lynnhaven Oyster Bisque or French Onion Soup, a relish tray, and ample offerings of sides, salads, and desserts.

In 1962 Evans married Dick Reid (born Richard H. Riedthaler), a radio and television star in Charleston. Soon after arriving at WKNA-TV (Channel 49) in 1951, Reid had developed a late-afternoon children’s show, The 49ers Club, that proved so popular that WCHS (Channel 8), a rival television station, lured him away before it went on the air in 1954. There Reid developed two immensely popular television shows—Lucky 8 Ranch for children and Dance Party for teenagers—and, in 1957, he created and began hosting Record Hop, a kind of West Virginia version of American Bandstand, the hugely popular television program hosted by Dick Clark. (In 1960 Reid even filled in for Clark at WFIL-TV in Philadelphia for ABC’s national broadcast of American Bandstand.)

In 1963 the Reids expanded the El Rancho Restaurant, adding three new dining areas—the Frontier, Thunderbird, and Patio Rooms—and bringing the total seating capacity to 325. They inaugurated Saturday night dinner dances featuring local bands in the Thunderbird Room, with Dick using the dances as the backdrop for a live radio show, and they hosted such special events as “Luau Nights” and “Chuck Wagon Buffets,” the latter with free pony rides for the “small cowboys and cowgirls.”

“When I was a kid, the El Rancho Motel and restaurant was one of the places to go for good food and fun,” recalls Jerry Waters, who maintains a website on the history of the Charleston area. “Everyone from celebrities to the state’s top brass visited the El Rancho. Part of the reason was Dick Reid’s live weekend broadcasts on WCHS radio. The show became so popular that there was always a waiting list to get in.”

In 1965 Dick left WCHS to help Irene run the El Rancho Restaurant and Motel, but the following year he fell ill and died after a three-week hospitalization. He was just 44 years old. Irene pushed forward, dubbing El Rancho “The Party Place” and introducing even more special events, such as a holiday-season “Joyland” with “our Popular Roast Beef Rodeo,” a “Bottomless Salad Bowl,” and, of course, an on-the-premises Santa Claus. But in 1970 Irene decided to sell the restaurant while continuing to run the motel, and soon the Rose City Cafeteria opened on the site of the El Rancho Restaurant at 2843 McCorkle Avenue. The cafeteria’s owner made sure that Irene would be part of the open-house ceremony, noting in a big newspaper ad that “she would love to greet her many friends and El Rancho guests that she has known over the years.” Just weeks later, however, a big fire swept through the kitchen of the Rose City Cafeteria, and it never reopened.

In future years the building would become home to the Kim Tiki Lounge and Restaurant, which served Polynesian and American food, and, much later, Flirts Nite Club.

Irene Evans Reid died in 2003 at age 85. She was the first woman ever elected to serve as the president of the Southern Innkeepers Association. Four years later Dick Reid was inducted into the West Virginia Broadcasting Hall of Fame.

November 17, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Chicken Rivel Soup

Green Gable Restaurant

4062 Massillon Road
Uniontown, Ohio

1946 – 1998

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

November 14, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Washington/ D.C.

Crab Imperial

Café Burgundy

5031 Connecticut Avenue Northwest
Washington, D.C.

1954 – 1989

Ray S. Walters opened Café Burgundy in Washington, D.C., on August 24, 1954. Its location at 5031 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., just below Nebraska Avenue, perfectly positioned it to become a bustling neighborhood restaurant, which it very quickly did.

The name of the restaurant had more to do with its décor — the walls of the main dining room were dressed in burgundy — than its cuisine. For the most part, in fact, the food was straightforward American fare.

“I’m from Paris,” Ray Walters liked to say by way of introduction, adding, after just the briefest pause, his punch line: “— that is, Paris, Tennessee.”

Walters clearly aimed for the role of bon vivant, putting his name on the neon sign above the restaurant’s entrance and nearly always being on hand to greet guests for lunch and dinner. Walters was also an active member of the Epicurean Club of Washington, at one point serving as its president. And in 1966 the 1,000 or so members of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington voted him “Restaurateur of the Year.”

But Walters’s wife, Anna, was every bit as essential to the restaurant’s success. She’d gotten her start in the business during the Great Depression, flipping pancakes at the griddle in the window of Childs’ restaurant in downtown Chicago. Ray worked there, too, first as a porter, then as a cook’s assistant, and finally as a manager. In time they married and moved to Washington, where, during World War II, Ray worked for the Office of Price Administration and Anna worked at a Navy yard as a riveter.

After the war the Walterses opened Napoleon’s Restaurant, at 2019 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., and then and then Café de la Paix in the Hotel Windsor Park, at 2300 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. “While Dad worked in the kitchen, Mom was the hostess and greeted some of Washington’s most famous people, including the Kennedys,” their son would later recall. “She had a wonderful personality and everyone loved her. They knew she would always make sure everything was perfect.”

After running Café Burgundy for two decades or so, the Walterses decided to sell it. But the 225-seat restaurant foundered without Ray and Anna at the helm and, in the late 1970s, briefly closed its doors. Then, suddenly, and much to the relief of its longtime patrons, Café Burgundy reopened with its founder back in charge. In 1978 you could get a complete dinner at the restaurant for $4.25, up slightly from the $2.95 you would have paid in 1971.

John Rosson, the restaurant critic for the Washington Star, named the restaurant’s crabcakes his favorite.

Once Café Burgundy was running as smoothly as it had in the old days, Walters left once again. It didn’t take long, however, for the aging restaurant to begin slowly slipping from its once-premier position in the neighborhood. Within just a couple of years, by one account, the kitchen was serving Mrs. Smith’s pies.

Café Burgundy closed its doors for the second and final time in July 1989. A few weeks later there was a farewell party for Nick and Fame Nicholas, the restaurant’s owners, but the Burgundy, as many had come to call it, was gone. (The following year Ray Walters died in Sarasota, Florida, at age 80; Anna Walters died there in 2000 at age 88.)

The space at 5031 Connecticut Avenue was soon taken over by Peacock, a restaurant that featured Nepalese, Kashmiri, and Punjabi cuisine, and then a succession of other restaurants, including, most recently, Buck’s Fishing & Camping.

November 13, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Waltham/ Massachusetts

Breast of Chicken à la Marsala

Piety Corner Gardens

260 Lexington Street
Waltham, Massachusetts

1954 – 1974

In 1948 Stephen Santamaria and his brother-in-law, Joseph Rando, opened a grocery store at 260 Lexington Street in Waltham, Massachusetts, right in the middle of the Piety Corner Historic District. After operating the grocery for a few years, however, they came up with a better—and bigger—idea: a restaurant and bar that would dwarf other such establishments in the city. So in 1954 they converted the one-story frame and concrete building that housed their grocery, Piety Corner Gardens, into a 140-seat restaurant with the same name.

Business was good enough that in early 1960 Santamaria and Rando enlarged their restaurant by opening a new wing. But four months later a two-alarm fire swept through the entire establishment (two dining rooms, a lounge, and a bar), causing some $150,000 in damage. The tragedy was compounded when, later that year, Rando died suddenly.

Santamaria, with the help of other family members, kept Piety Corner Gardens going strong through the 1960s. The restaurant could seat about 400 in the main dining room plus another 630 in its small private Ebony Cocktail Lounge and two large banquet rooms. “Mr. Steve Santamaria, your congenial host, has spared no effort to bring you a most delightful evening of dancing and dining,” a menu from the era said. “Here, under one roof, are the facilities for which you’ve been looking: superb cuisine, courteous waitresses, fast service, delightful atmosphere, and most important, sufficient space for your clubs, banquets, or functions.” The restaurant’s parking area, the menu went on to note, could “easily accommodate six hundred cars.”

Piety Corner Gardens featured plenty of Italian specialties, including pizzas of nearly every variety and pasta with more than a dozen different sauces, along with steaks and chops, chicken, and seafood. If you could think of something you wanted to eat, whether a hamburger, a jumbo filet mignon, or a paidr of stuffed lobsters, chances are you could find it on the menu.

In those days Piety Corner Gardens was also known as something of a jazz venue. Mamie Lee, a Boston singer who’d just formed her own jazz trio, the Swingmen, with pianist Carlton Schroeder, drummer Peter Donald, and bassist Phil Morrison, headlined there in 1966. (Lee is best known for her 1967 hit song, “I Can Feel Him Slipping Away,” for MGM Records.

In 1969 Santamaria was struck with tragedy again when his 24-year-old son, who’d worked in the restaurant since he was a teenager, died of injuries he sustained in an automobile accident.

Santamaria closed Piety Corner Gardens in 1974, and the Chesterbook Restaurant soon opened in the same space. But the Chesterbook never hit its stride, and the property went on the auction block in 1978 and again in 1980. Today a self-storage business occupies the site. Santamaria died in 2008 at age 90.

September 21, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Bellville/ Ohio

Dutch Apple Dessert

San-Dar Smorgasbord

100 Main Street
Bellville, Ohio

1950 – 1994

All roads didn’t lead to the San-Dar Smorgasbord in Bellville, Ohio, but at times it certainly seemed that way.

The big draw: a buffet table that just never seemed to end. Most times you could find 150 or so different foods—soups and salads, main dishes and sides, and an eye-opening array of desserts (including the one below)—laid out for the feasting hordes. Roast beef and frog legs daily. Prime rib on Friday nights.

The sprawling, 300-seat operation traced its beginnings to February 1948, when Eugene and Dorothy Banks opened Banks’ Soda Grill on Main Street in downtown Bellville. This was a small place, with seating for just 26, and the demand for tables often exceeded the supply. In 1950 they expanded the establishment, renaming it the San-Dar Dining Room (a combination of the first syllables of the names of their two children, Sandy and Darrell). As the reputation of the restaurant spread, so did the need for space, and by 1954 it had expanded into the San-Dar Smorgasbord.

And so it went until 1981, when Gene and Dorothy Banks sold the business to their son, Darrell. Along the way Gene had gotten hooked on golf, to the point of building an 18-hole executive layout in Bellville, just a little ways past the restaurant. It opened as San-Dar Acres Golf Course on May 10, 1976, but in 1983 he sold it, too. (Today it’s known as Little Apple Golf Course.)

As the travel habits of Americans changed with the advent of the Interstate Highway System, the fortunes of the San-Dar Smorgasbord waned. The small towns like Bellville that travelers once had to drive through to get from here to there had become all but invisible from the superhighways, and the tour buses that once poured patrons into the San-Dar Smorgasbord seemed to be disappearing. In the early 1990s, faced with this decline, Darrell Banks decided to put the restaurant up for sale, but there were no takers. He closed it in December 1994 and auctioned off all the equipment the following month.

A newspaper story that contained news of the restaurant’s closing noted that in its 47-year history it sold more than three million frog legs, 700 tons of chicken, 300 tons of shrimp, 200 tons of scallops, and 300 tons of beef and pork.

Eugene Banks died in 2004 at age 84; Dorothy Banks died in 2006 at age 87. “Though her husband usually took the credit, it was Dorothy who was the idea lady,” her obituary said. “She patterned the concept after one she had seen in Florida. So in 1954, with $50 in seed money from her husband, Dorothy put on the first spread that birthed the San-Dar.”

Here’s the recipe for the Dutch Apple Dessert that was served at the San-Dar Smorgasbord.

Print Recipe

Dutch Apple Dessert

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Ingredients

1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for buttering the pans
4 apples, peeled, cored, and cut into thin slices
1 cup light brown sugar, divided
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 cup and 1 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour, divided
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup pecan halves

Instructions

Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter a 10-inch springform pan.

In a large bowl, combine the apples, 1/2 cup of the brown sugar, granulated sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, 1 1/2 tablespoons of the flour, and whipping cream. Mix well and pour into the pan.

Prepare topping: Combine 1/2 cup remaining brown sugar, 1 1/2 tablespoons butter, and 1/2 cup remaining flour and blend. Sprinkle over batter in pan and garnish with the pecan halves.

Bake for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake for an additional 40 minutes or until apples are tender.

Transfer to a wire rack and cool completely before releasing the sides of the pan and serving (at least 2 hours).

Serves 4-5.

Notes

This recipe has been scaled down from the original recipe used by the San-Dar Smorgasbord, which, to make two 10-inch-round desserts, called for double the amounts of these ingredients.

July 26, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Anaheim/ California

The Kettle Cheese Bread

The Kettle Restaurant

1776 West Lincoln Avenue
Anaheim, California

1950 – 1994

The Kettle Restaurant barely made a splash when it opened in 1956, but within just a couple of years it was billing itself as “Anaheim’s Landmark Devoted to Good Eating.” While there may have been a bit of hyperbole in the branding, the food at the Kettle could be adventurously different from the standard restaurant fare of the day.

This was mostly thanks to Frank “Doc” Bila, who owned and operated the Kettle Restaurant with his wife, Ruth. One newspaper columnist described him as a “gourmet’s gourmet.” In 1941 Doc had opened the Buckaroo nightclub in Bellflower, California, only to be called into military service following the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor later that year. Back in the business after the war, Doc and Ruth were dreaming up menus for the “International Nights” that packed patrons into the Kettle every Monday night. One week, for example, in a salute to “rich Danish gastronomy,” the Bilas served up such specialties as smørrebrød, brown bean soup, roast goose with apple and prune stuffing, red cabbage, browned potatoes, and Danish crescent rolls.

By 1959 the Kettle Restaurant was doing so well that Richard Duffy, the developer behind three of the newest “motor lodges” in Anaheim (the Peter Pan, the Alamo, and the Jack ’n Jill), designed and built the Kettle Motor Hotel next door, probably with Doc Bila as a part-owner. The following year Duffy sold his interest in the motel to focus on yet another, much larger, project, the Jolly Roger Inn.

The Bilas undertook a big remodeling of the restaurant in 1973 only to have a fire break out in its piano-bar area, damaging a collection of oil paintings and forcing them to close a couple of months for repairs.

In 1977 Doc was ready to retire, and the Bilas found buyers for the restaurant in Bill and Judy Van Solingen, the owners of the highly successful Captain’s Quarters restaurant in Long Beach. The Bilas went on to establish the Bila Legacy Fund at the Orange County Community Foundation to support the causes they cared about the most, and today, among other causes, it provides scholarships to students who are interested in pursuing careers in restaurant and hotel management. (Doc Bila would die in 1991 at age 89, Ruth in 1996 at age 85.)

By the late 1980s, the Kettle had lost most of its luster as a restaurant that served “superb food in a quaint atmosphere,” and in time its patrons had to dance to recorded, rather than live, music. After it closed in 1994, the Mexi-Casa—an old-style Mexican restaurant in Anaheim—moved in. (It would close in 2021.)

While the Kettle Restaurant is long gone, the Kettle Motor Hotel is still in business next door.

Print Recipe

The Kettle Cheese Bread

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The Kettle's trademark Cheese Bread was a far cry from the exotic dishes prepared for the “International Nights” that packed patrons into the restaurant every Monday night, but nonetheless it was a long-remembered specialty of the house.

Ingredients

1/4 pound unsalted butter, softened
4 ounces grated Parmesan cheese
1 long loaf of French bread, cut into 3/4-inch-thick slices

Instructions

Cream the butter and gradually blend in the cheese.

Prepare the oven for using the broiler, adjusting the top rack so that the bread will be 4 to 6 inches from the heat.

Spread one side of each slice of bread with the butter-cheese mixture. Arrange the slices in a single layer on an ungreased baking sheet.

Slide the baking sheet into the oven on the top rack and broil for 3 to 5 minutes or until the slices are just golden brown and bubbly. (Watch carefully, as the slices can burn quickly once they start to brown.)

Remove from oven and serve hot.

July 23, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Springfield/ Illinois

Fresh Vegetable Casserole

Southern Air

3045 East Clear Lake Avenue
Springfield, Illinois

1948 – 1984

Venette Hullett often gazed at the old Colby estate on Clear Lake Avenue in Springfield, Illinois, thinking that it would be the perfect home for a restaurant, surrounded as it was by stately trees and some five acres of gardens. Vanette and her husband, James, lived just down the street from the mansion, which had been built in the mid-1800s by John McGredy, a Scottish immigrant who found success in Springfield as a nurseryman, and later owned by William H. Colby, a prominent lawyer and judge. (The mansion had also served for a few years in the 1920s as a home for “wayward” girls.) James, who’d made a career for himself with the Underwood Typewriter Company, was known in Springfield as the moving force behind the American Pioneer Guild, a small organization that, among other activities, sought to preserve, through phonograph recordings, the recollections of the few individuals still living who had known Abraham Lincoln. Vanette was something like a local version of Emily Post, dispensing such lessons on business etiquette as “Telling Qualities of a Secretary,” and “Dealing With the Public Over a Counter.” She dreamed of running a restaurant.

On January 24, 1948, Venette’s dream was realized when she and her husband opened Southern Air—a restaurant, the pre-opening newspaper ads promised, “where savory dishes of the South await your pleasure.” The ads further promised “Food you all will like,” including “Southern baked hams and yams,” “luscious chicken,” “steaks, “hot biscuits,” and “delicious home-made pies.” Venette was listed as the proprietress of the new restaurant, which now was also the Hulletts’ home.

Within just a few years Venette could justifiably claim that her restaurant was “Famous for Fine Foods.” It was blessed with an ideal location on Illinois Route 125, directly across from the Bergen Park and just a block west of the U.S. Route 66 Bypass. “True to its name,” a postcard for the restaurant from that era says, “an air of Southern hospitality abounds in this lovely and spacious mansion.”

But in January 1955, everything changed when James Hullett died unexpectedly at age 70. At year’s end Venette married John J. Oberly, an engineer with the U.S. Rubber Company in Chicago, and closed the restaurant for a month at the beginning of 1956 so that the two of them could take a honeymoon tour of France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. Venette reopened Southern Air on returning, but later that year the newly married couple decided to move from Springfield to Chicago, and Venette sold the restaurant to Jack and Hazel Crifasi.

The Crifasis undertook an extensive remodeling and expansion of the restaurant and reopened it on January 20, 1957. “No Change in the Southern Air’s Famous Menu,” the Crifasis promised in a newspaper ad for the restaurant’s grand opening. “We wish to emphasize that the Southern Air will continue serving the matchless food for which it has become famous.” There was, however, a brand-new cocktail lounge featuring a mammoth mural of the historic Orton Plantation in Winnabow, North Carolina. The Crifasis would go on to run the restaurant for so many years that most people in Springfield assumed that they had started it.

By 1974 Southern Air was in the hands of the Crifasis’ two sons and daughter. “It took us a long time to get here,” Jack Crifasi Jr. told a reporter for the local newspaper. “My parents almost went bankrupt 500 times it seems.” The reporter went on to note that the restaurant had “one of the biggest kitchens in town” and was “one of the most successful eateries in Springfield.”

By the early 1980s, however, things had dramatically changed. The restaurant was rumored to be in financial trouble, and in 1984 patrons noticed that its menu was shrinking—desserts were no longer offered, for example—and were told that they now had to pay in cash. In December of that year, the Southern Air closed with no explanation. Early the following year the Small Business Administration ordered the restaurant’s equipment to be sold at auction as partial payment on a foreclosed SBA loan, and a couple of months later the Illinois Department of Revenue filed suit against the restaurant and its owners for more than $11,000 in sales taxes that it said had not been paid since March 1984.

In February 1985 Dennis “Denny” Joslin bought the Southern Air and reopened it as the New England Lobster House. Joslin had worked in restaurants since he was 13, but it was his wife, Carole, who had her eye on the foreclosed property. “My wife liked this place,” Joslin recalled in an interview in 1993. “I hated it, but I got a heck of a good deal. I was making a low offer and I got it.”

A couple of years after buying the restaurant, Joslin changed the name to Chesapeake Seafood House, which it remains today.

Print Recipe

Fresh Vegetable Casserole

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This Fresh Vegetable Casserole, one of the Southern Air's most popular dishes in the early 1950s, was probably developed by Emma Seymour, who was in charge of the kitchen at the restaurant from the time it opened in 1948.

Ingredients

1 small cauliflower
Salt
8 small new potatoes, quartered
8 baby carrots, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup baby lima beans
1 cup fresh peas
3 celery stalks, chopped
2 small onions, chopped
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups half-and-half (or 1 cup each whole milk and heavy cream)
1/2 pound processed cheese, sliced
Pepper
1 tablespoon grated Parmesan or other cheese
Chopped fresh parsley leaves for garnish

Instructions

With a paring knife, cut the cauliflower into florets.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the cauliflower, potatoes, carrots, and lima beans and return to a boil. Then cover the pot, lower the heat to a steady simmer, and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, or until the vegetables are fork-tender but still firm. Drain well, add the peas, and set aside.

Make the celery and onion broth: Put the celery and onion in a small saucepan, add enough water to cover them, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes. Strain.

Make the cream sauce: Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Whisk in the flour and cook, whisking constantly until smooth, 1 to 2 minutes. Still whisking constantly, slowly add the half-and-half. Raise the heat to high and bring to a simmer, whisking all the while, then immediately reduce the heat to continue simmering, now whisking occasionally, until the sauce thickens to the consistency of gravy, 10 to 20 minutes. Season generously with salt and pepper. Remove the cream sauce from the heat, add the processed cheese to hot cream sauce, and stir until melted.

Meanwhile, heat oven to 350 degrees.

Whisk the broth into the cream sauce and spread half a cup or so of the mixture on the bottom of the baking dish. Transfer the vegetables to the baking dish. Add the remaining sauce, stirring to coat all the vegetables.

Bake the assembled casserole for about 30 minutes or until hot and bubbly. Remove from oven, sprinkle with grated cheese, and let stand for 10 minutes to thicken and set.

Garnish with parsley and serve.

Notes

This recipe has been adapted from the restaurant's original version, which did not specify whether the potatoes and carrots should be cut into pieces and simply called for adding the processed cheese to 2 cups of "medium cream sauce."

July 22, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Florence/ Alabama

Southern Spoon Bread

Town Club

612 North Wood Avenue
Florence, Alabama

1955 – 1969

When Margaret and Vernon Brown settled in Florence, Alabama, after World War II, they had something of an ulterior motive in choosing a three-story Queen Anne mansion on Wood Street as their new home. “I lived in Williamsburg [Virginia] during the war, and my ambition was to bring a little bit of Colonial Williamsburg to Florence,” Margaret Brown explained to an interviewer many years later. “I have always loved to cook and never tire of trying new recipes.”

Margaret Brown soon set about converting the ground floor of the 15-room mansion, which had been built in 1888, into a restaurant. It opened as the Town Club on April 18, 1955. There were three dining rooms—the Southern Room, the Williamsburg Room, and the New England Room—each with a mural painted by Hilda Mitchell, who was then teaching art at Florence State College. (The college would later become the University of North Alabama and Mitchell the chairman of its art department.)

Margaret Brown had filled the Town Club with antiques and fine appointments, and soon it became the virtual epicenter of social activity in Florence—the site of club meetings, parties, dinners, wedding receptions, and the like. It also began to acquire a national reputation.

Although it was briefly put up for sale in 1961, Margaret Brown operated the Town Club until her retirement in 1969. A year later her husband retired, too, and the Browns moved into a home on Palisade Drive in Florence.

Vernon Brown died in 1981, and a couple of years after that Margaret reminisced with a reporter for the local newspaper about her years as a restaurateur. “Even newcomers I meet tell me they’ve heard so much about the Town Club and they’re sorry I closed it,” she said. “It makes me feel kind of humble—and proud, too.”

Margaret Brown died in 1992 in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Today the mansion that once was the Town Club is once again a private residence.

Print Recipe

Southern Spoon Bread

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Here's the recipe for the Southern Spoon Bread that Margaret Brown served at the Town Club.

Ingredients

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup buttermilk

2 eggs

1 heaping tablespoon cornmeal

1/2 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons butter, melted

Instructions

1

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a small casserole or soufflé dish.

2

Add baking soda and baking powder to buttermilk. Beat eggs lightly and combine with buttermilk. Then add cornmeal, salt, and melted butter and mix well.

3

Pour batter into the casserole or soufflé dish. Bake for 20 minutes at 325 degrees and an additional 25 minutes at 350 degrees. The spoonbread is done when firm and brown. Serve immediately.

July 16, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Dallas/ Texas

Pecan Bread Pudding with Whiskey Sauce

Camellia Cafe

6617 Snider Plaza
Dallas, Texas

1991 – 1994

Camellia Cafe brought something novel to Dallas in 1991: New Orleans-style food—jambalaya, red beans and rice, muffalettas, and the like—at downright unbeatable prices. The food was outstanding, but the concept, billed as “counter-service Louisiana cuisine,” never quite took off. Camellia Cafe was tiny, with just nine tables and four booths, and some thought it to be a little too fast-foodish, as patrons had to queue up to order their food and then eat everything from paper plates and bowls.

The idea had been cooked up by Marc and Susan Hall, the owners of Amoré Italian Restaurant, Cisco Grill, and Peggy Sue BBQ, three other popular restaurants in Snider Plaza (an old-style shopping center that dates to 1927 and faces the campus of Southern Methodist University). Camellia Cafe was the only one of the four that didn’t last; Peggy Sue BBQ closed in 2020, and the other two are still in business.

In 1994 Randy DeWitt bought Camellia Cafe and two months later converted it into Michele’s Coffee Bar and Cafe (named for his fiancée). He’d recently ditched his career in commercial real estate and moved back to Dallas, his hometown, to get into the restaurant business. “I couldn’t believe it was for sale,” DeWitt told a reporter at the time. “The food was great and the space had such character. Camellia Cafe was one of those undiscovered gems that come around very rarely.”

The following year Michele’s morphed into Shell’s Oyster Bar and Grill, and then, under threat of a trademark-infringement lawsuit from a Florida outfit, into Half Shell’s Oyster Bar and Grill. More recently it was renamed Fish City Grill.

March 13, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Skokie/ Illinois

Princess Potatoes

Nautical Inn

3445 Dempster Street
Skokie, Illinois

1942 – 1962

In 1942 Kenneth Hoos and Leon Isbell opened Hoos-Isbell’s Nautical Inn on Dempster Street in Skokie, Illinois, a few blocks west of McCormick Boulevard. Hoos and Isbell had taken over space that had been occupied by Bob’s White Front, a neighborhood tavern, but the two men had bigger plans for their new establishment.

Hoos, the owner of Hoos Drugs in downtown Evanston, near Northwestern University, was the money man; Isbell, who’d operated the drugstore’s soda fountain and grill under a concession agreement, was the menu man and day-to-day manager. Isbell brought lots of food-service experience to the new enterprise. He also brought his wife, Nadine, whom he had met, and married, when she worked for him at the drugstore.

Isbell had already come a long way. Born on a farm in White Haven, Tennessee, south of Memphis, he was orphaned at an early age and, along with his two brothers, Marion and James, spent most of his youth in the care of orphanages or relatives. When the three Isbell boys were teenagers, and virtually penniless, they struck out for Chicago, where all three would eventually become restaurateurs.

Oddly, at the beginning the Nautical Inn’s menu wasn’t all that nautical. In 1945, for example, its advertised specialties included disjointed fried chicken (a style popularized by “Chicken in the Rough” franchisees all over the country), roast prime rib of beef, chicken livers with wild rice, and barbecue spareribs. For diners who couldn’t or didn’t want to drive to the restaurant, the Nautical Inn offered shuttle service, via station wagon, every hour from 6 p.m. till midnight from the Davis Street “L” station in Evanston.

Around this time Isbell was able to buy out his partner, and “Hoos-Isbell’s Nautical Inn” became “Leon Isbell’s Nautical Inn.” In 1947 he was the first of 13 restaurant and tavern owners in Skokie who refused to testify in a police corruption trial involving slot machines. “I refuse to testify,” he said, after giving his name and address, “because I don’t know anything, and anything I said might be used against me.” (All of those who followed Isbell to the witness chair invoked similar language, except for Albert Bose of the Silver Tray tavern, who refused to testify because, he said, “I might intimidate myself.”

These were years when restaurants in Skokie banded together to run ads in the big Chicago newspapers that urged city dwellers readers to “Dine in the Country.” As one such ad put it, “You’ll often find that a drive out to Skokie is faster, and far more enjoyable, than looking for a parking space in the city.” And by now the star attraction on the menu of the Nautical Inn’s Anchor Room was a “fisherman’s platter” with “lobster tail, filet of perch, and French fried shrimp.”

The Nautical Inn thrived through the 1950s, with Leon and Nadine, along with their son, George, keeping things running smoothly. But in January 1962 Leon Isbell died at age 54 after suffering a heart attack as he shoveled snow from the sidewalks in front of the restaurant, and Nadine decided against continuing in the business. (She would die in 2001 at age 88.) An elegant new restaurant, La Maisonette, soon opened in the same space but didn’t last very long. By 1991, in fact, a writer for the Chicago Tribune observed that the 3400 block of Dempster Street in Skokie “seemed to be a magnet for failure for a quarter century.”

Here’s the recipe for the Nautical Inn’s Princess Potatoes, as they were prepared in the early 1950s.

March 12, 2022 By Bill Hogan

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