Bill Hogan

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November 19, 2022 By Bill Hogan

St. Albans/ West Virginia

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.

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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

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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.

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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 pair 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.