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Bill Hogan

New York City/ New York

Espresso Flan

Restaurant Dano

34 Downing Street
New York, New York

1990 – 1991

Daniel Kobin was a successful dancer with the Alberta Ballet, Canada’s third-largest dance company, when he decided to give up the stage for a career as a chef. He moved to New York City and spent nearly five years working under the trailblazing Anne Rosenzweig at Vanessa and Arcadia. He also worked at La Grand Corniche, Gianni’s, Rosemarie’s, and Hudson HarBar, where he was executive chef.

But Kobin was eager to strike out his own, and in 1990 he opened the eponymous Restaurant Dano at the corner of Downing and Bedford streets in the West Village. (Years earlier Kobin had acquired his nickname, “Dano,” from the famous catchphrase of Hawaii Five-O, the hit television series.) The cozy, 40-seat restaurant had something of an Art Deco aura, with yellow walls under a deep-blue ceiling, etched glass, wood paneling, and an inviting little bar. “It is relaxed, sophisticated, and small enough that I can touch all four walls and every dish,” Kobin told a reviewer soon after the restaurant opened.

Restaurant Dano’s house-made breads, especially a pink and green peppercorn brioche, were an immediate hit. (“My motto is that a great meal starts with wonderful bread,” Kobin was quoted as saying.) Its desserts earned praise, too, especially a crispy-on-the-outside apple soufflé pancake.

Unfortunately, Kobin was forced to close Dano in 1991 just before a favorable write-up of the restaurant appeared in Gourmet magazine. In 1998 he brought the restaurant back to life in a different location and with a slightly different name (Dano 254, after its address at 254 Fifth Avenue), but it closed in 2006.

Here’s the recipe for the Espresso Flan that was served at Restaurant Dano.

February 1, 2022 By
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Murfreesboro/ Tennessee

Crème de Menthe Pie

Al Sullivan’s Restaurant

1150 Northwest Broad Street
Murfreesboro, Tennessee

1953 – 1968

In the early 1950s Alva Sullivan, Jr., could see the future of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and it was all about the New Nashville Highway.

Under the Housing Act of 1949 (part of President Harry S. Truman’s “Fair Deal” agenda), Murfreesboro had secured federal assistance to clear “The Bottoms,” an old, flood-prone section of the city filled with shacks and shanties that had no running water or plumbing, and relocate its residents, most of them African-Americans, into new housing projects elsewhere. As part of what was known as the Broad Street Project, State Route 41—the Nashville Highway—was rerouted around downtown Murfreesboro and straight through The Bottoms. The new strip of highway, situated some 30 miles southeast of Nashville, soon began filling up with gas stations, motels, and restaurants, and Al Sullivan was determined to have a piece of the action.

Sullivan already had a nice restaurant at the corner of North Maple and College Streets in downtown Murfreesboro. (“Try Al Sullivan’s Restaurant”, one of its newspaper ads said, “for that certain something extra you have been craving but haven’t been able to find.”) But in 1953 Sullivan found the perfect spot for the restaurant he had in mind on the New Nashville Highway—directly next to the 70-unit Motel Murfreesboro—and he set about building it. By October of that year he was ready to open his new restaurant, with a coffee shop, three other dining rooms (including the Frontier Room), and the slogan “Fine Food Is Our Specialty.”

In time Sullivan was billing his place “one of the South’s outstanding restaurants.” (He’d closed the downtown location in the late 1950s.) But by 1968 he and his wife, Mary, were ready to retire from the business. They sold their restaurant to Ira and Vivian Carpenter, the owners of the Cupboard Restaurant at the Ramada Inn in Murfreesboro, and George Berdanis, the owner of the Plantation Restaurant in Marietta, Georgia. They renamed it the Southern Diplomat Restaurant.

In 1974 an out-of-control blaze destroyed the restaurant and extensively damaged several of the motel units next door. It was never rebuilt.

Al Sullivan died in 1991 at age 82; Mary died in 2012 at age 94.

Here is the recipe for the Crème de Menthe Pie that for many years was a favorite item on the menu at Al Sullivan’s Restaurant.

May 24, 2020 By
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Chicago/ Illinois

Champs-Élysées Potatoes

Cameo

116 East Walton Place
Chicago, Illinois

1946 – 1956

For a decade the Cameo was the crème de la crème of Chicago restaurants, with a couple of deep-pocketed owners (Arthur Wirtz and James Norris, Sr.), a fabulously talented French chef (Jean Arnaudy), and customers who not only wanted the best but were more than happy to pay for it. Soon after it opened in 1946 the Cameo priced its inaugural New Year’s Eve celebration at $100 per person; it was thought to be the most expensive such party in the nation.

Wirtz, the driving force behind the Cameo, was a big man in a big city. He was an entrepreneur in the purest sense, amassing a fortune in the Depression by snapping up failed or failing businesses for next to nothing and then pulling them up to profitability. In 1929 he teamed up with Norris to buy the Detroit Falcons, a financially troubled franchise in the National Hockey League. They rebranded the team the Red Wings, built it into a success, and went on to buy Chicago Stadium, in 1936, and a controlling interest in another NHL team, the Chicago Black Hawks, in 1952. In 1949 Wirtz and Norris formed the International Boxing Club, which would be hugely profitable (promoting 47 of the 51 championship bouts held in the United States from 1955 to 1959). Wirtz and Norris, it was even reported, owned most of the stock in New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

Through most of this period Wirtz was also making lots of money with Sonja Henie, the Norwegian figure skater and movie star, producing her touring ice shows under the name “Hollywood Ice Revue” and also acting as her financial adviser. It was Wirtz, more than anyone else, who made figure skating and ice shows an established form of entertainment in the United States. Henie, at the height of her fame, was making as much as $2 million a year through her shows and tours, and on top of that had a slew of lucrative endorsement contracts. These activities made Henie, in her era, one of the wealthiest women in the world.

Henie split from Wirtz in 1950. It’s altogether possible that one of the investments Wirtz had arranged for her was in the Cameo, as it was later reported that Henie once owned a piece of the restaurant.

Norris died in 1952 at age 73, leaving an estate that was later valued at more than $4.2 million.

When the Cameo suddenly and quietly closed in mid-1956, Herb Lyon of the Chicago Tribune passed along the story that it was for “a summer of remodeling.” But within days Lyon learned the truth: The Cameo was for sale. A succession of suitors soon paraded through Lyons’s column in the Trib — Al Farber of the Loop Steak House, Sonny Kreda and Glenn Rodkin of the Prime Rib in Skokie, Herman Gittelson and Russ Kirkpatrick of the Embers — with the deal said to be “in the sizzle stage,” then “almost set,” then undone even as remodeling was underway, and then, finally, sealed. In December Lyon reported that Gittelson and Kirkpatrick would take over the Cameo, invest $100,000 in remodeling it, and open it the following March under a new name, which turned out to be “The Chase.”

Wirtz still had one big deal to make from the remains of the Cameo. In 1960 Hugh Hefner, the owner of Playboy magazine, was looking to open the world’s first Playboy Club in Chicago, and Wirtz managed to get the building at 116 East Walton Street in Hefner’s range of vision. Playboy was able to rent the building at a way-below-market rate with an agreement to give Wirtz a share of the profits. The Playboy Club remained in business there until 1986. Wirtz was said to have made far more in this way than the building was worth.

May 13, 2020 By
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New York City/ New York

Piccate di Vitello alla Gabriella

Mercurio Restaurant

106 West 52nd Street
New York, New York

1950 – 1983

After a successful fifteen-year run as the proprietor of Romeo’s Chianti Restaurant in Beverly Hills, California, Romeo Salta decided to move to New York City, where, in 1950, he opened Mercurio Restaurant at 106 West 52nd Street. In the beginning, lest there be no mistake that the two Saltas were one and the same, he appended “of Hollywood” to his name, but within a very short time, having managed to put Mercurio on the map as a top Manhattan restaurant, he saw fit to quietly drop the suffix.

Mercurio, with its trattoria-like ambience, wasn’t pretentious in any way. Each table was covered with a red-checkered tablecloth and set with a small vase of flowers and a green-glass bottle of mineral water. You might hear “Torna a Surriento” or another popular Italian song playing in the background.

For his part, Salta was a virtuoso host. Patrons who ordered a Caesar salad would soon find Salta at their table, commanding the attention of the entire dining room as he prepared it right in front of their eyes, the New York Times noted, “with flourishes worthy of a vaudeville magician.”

Indeed, Mercurio had a certain magic about it, and throughout the early 1950s the restaurant was a popular hangout for many of New York City’s top models, including a young Grace Kelly, who’d just embarked on her acting career.

Buoyed by his success with Mercurio, Salta began thinking about opening a bigger and grander restaurant, more of a white-tablecloth establishment. This he did in 1953, with the debut of his namesake restaurant on West 56th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. In short order Romeo Salta, one of the first restaurants in New York City to offer elegant Northern Italian cuisine, would become a favorite of celebrities and cosmetics-industry bigwigs.

Juggling the two restaurants apparently didn’t suit Salta, however, and in 1956 he sold Mercurio to restaurateur Frank Giambelli, who later would move it to 53 West 53rd Street. In 1982, with the building slated for demolition, Giambelli decided to close Mercurio and open a new restaurant, Giambelli 50th, at 46 East 50th Street. Mercurio served its last dinner, just ahead of the wrecker’s ball, in 1983.

Both Salta and Giambelli were in business for some years afterward. Salta died in 1998 at age 93; Giambelli died in 2006 at age 90.

Here is the recipe for Piccate di Vitello alla Gabriella as it was served at Mercurio Restaurant.

May 12, 2020 By
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Greenfield/ Massachusetts

Olga’s Famous Chocolate Cake

Alwin and Olga

16 Federal Street
Greenfield, Massachusetts

1936 – 1965

In 1936 Alwin and Olga Gebhardt, who’d been aiming to open a restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts, found a second-floor spot at 16 Federal Street that fit the bill just about perfectly. Before the year was out they had opened the eponymous Alwin and Olga, which quickly found a loyal clientele in town and among travelers heading north on U.S. Route 5 to New Hampshire and Vermont or south to Connecticut. Within just a few years the Gebhardts got lucky when the Duncan Hines, the peripatetic restaurant reviewer, stumbled on their place and gave it his unqualified endorsement.

“You’ll have to climb the stairs to find Alwin and Olga’s,” Hines wrote in the 1940 edition of Adventures in Good Eating, his widely trusted guidebook. “But they and their dinners are worth it. Olga makes a fine lobster Newburgh and a chocolate cake I know my grandmother never equaled.”

Unfortunately, at about the same time, a blaze that started in Greenfield’s old fire station swept through the block of Federal Street that contained No. 16, pretty much destroying the Gebhardts’ restaurant. Although Alwin somehow managed to save many of its most valuable items in the restaurant, he and Olga could only bide their time as a larger and more modern building went up in the same place.) When they finally reopened Alwin and Olga nearly a year later, business seemed better than ever.

Through the 1940s and early 1950s, the restaurant’s reputation spread throughout New England, and even across the nation, but by 1955 the Gephardts were ready to move on. That summer they put the restaurant up for auction with a minimum bid of $30,000, which, they estimated, was about a third of its actual value. “This restaurant is a going, prosperous, money-making concern,” large display ads that the auctioneer placed in the newspapers said. “In 1954 the business showed a net profit of $15,000. . . . The one and only reason for this sale is that the owners desire to retire.”

Richard and Winifred Whitney of Athol, Massachusetts, it was soon announced, were the new owners of Alvin and Olga. Richard Whitney had quite a bit of experience in the restaurant business, having operated a couple of diners with his brother before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, and then reopening one of them as well as starting Whitney’s Restaurant in Athol after the war. In 1960, though, after operating Alvin and Olga for just under five years, the Whitneys sold the restaurant to Dennis E. Slattery.

In 1963, when the editors of the Mobil Travel Guides selected the 45 restaurants in the United States that offered the best value for the money, Alwin and Olga was on the list. (Patrons who were used to its 99-cent specials every evening certainly wouldn’t have been surprised.

Alwin Gebhardt died the following year at age 64. In his retirement he had become an accomplished painter, exhibiting his works in stores, banks, the local library, and other venues. Olga would die in 1991 at age 89.

By 1965 Dennis Slattery decided to call it quits as a restaurateur, too. That November he placed a “Closed ‘Til Further Notice” ad in the local newspaper and soon shuttered Alwin and Olga permanently, citing a decline in business and his desire to have more free time. Early the next year the restaurant’s equipment, fixtures, and furnishings were sold at auction.

Less than a week before the auction the Greenfield Recorder-Gazette ran an editorial that was both an obituary for the restaurant and an homage to the couple who created it. “Whereas the successors to these two hard-working and skillful restaurateurs went at their tasks with determination to succeed, things were never quite the same without Alwin and Olga,” the newspaper said. “Greenfield will never have another [restaurant] like it. In almost no place will there ever be food or surrounds to beat Alwin and Olga’s in its golden days.

Now, from Alwin and Olga’s “golden days,” here’s the recipe for the chocolate cake that Duncan Hines made famous.

May 11, 2020 By
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Providence/ Rhode Island

Baked Oysters on the Half Shell

Johnson’s Hummocks Sea Food Grill

245 Allens Avenue
Providence, Rhode Island

1905 – 1970

Johnson’s Hummocks Sea Food Restaurant started out in 1905 as a clambake club on the shores of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. By the 1920s the club, founded by Frank Johnson and situated on a pork-chop-shaped peninsula of North Kingstown known as “The Hummocks,” had grown into a summertime attraction that could seat 1,400 people.

In 1925, however, Johnson’s restaurant was destroyed by fire. Johnson managed to rebuild it by August 1938 only to see it destroyed a month later by the New England Hurricane of 1938, the most powerful, costliest, and deadliest hurricane in the region’s history. Once again it was rebuilt. Then, in 1944, another hurricane ripped off the restaurant’s roof.

Henry Johnson, the son of the founder, who by then was operating the restaurant with his wife, Etta, wisely decided to abandon the site and move the restaurant to Providence. In time Johnson’s Hummocks became one of the most popular restaurants in Rhode Island. It was a favorite venue for political fund-raising events because it could seat 1,000 for dinner. Children loved the place because, on finishing their meals, they were always invited to select a toy from the large treasure chest at the front entrance. (One favorite was a plastic souvenir whistle, in the shape of an ocean liner, marked “U.S.S. Johnson’s Hummocks.”)

Some years after Henry Johnson died in 1955, Johnson’s Hummocks passed into the hands of Louis Capobianco, a longtime employee of the restaurant, who owned and operated it from 1963 to 1968,  and then to TX Industries, a Philadelphia-based conglomerate. But the new owner, apparently unable to make a go of it, closed Johnson’s Hummocks without warning on May 20, 1970, citing the old building, old equipment, and a generally undesirable location.

In recent years the building at 245 Allens Avenue has been the home of Cheaters, a strip club, and the Wild Zebra Gentleman’s Club.

The restaurant’s signature dish was a “Miniature Clambake” tray, shown here on the lower half of the postcard. And here is its recipe for Baked Oysters on Half Shell, as they were prepared right up until the restaurant’s closing.

May 9, 2020 By
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Tiverton/ Rhode Island

Indian Pudding

Sunderland’s

2753 Main Road
Tiverton, Rhode Island

1948 – 1987

In 1946 George and Nina Sunderland paid $10,000 for a magnificent Victorian home on eight acres of waterfront property in Tiverton, Rhode Island. The 1870s-era house, sited high up on a knoll above Nannaquaket Pond, offered pleasant views of lush woods and a quaint little cove—just perfect for the new restaurant they had in mind.

Two years later, in 1948, they opened Sunderland’s, which for nearly 40 years would reign as Tiverton’s top special-occasion restaurant. In the beginning, Mrs. Sunderland ran the kitchen; Mr. Sunderland tended bar. For $1.50 you could get a fried-clam dinner, complete with New England clam chowder, salad, homemade ice-cream cake, and coffee, and for $3.50 you could get broiled live lobster with the same accompaniments. Cocktails were 55 cents.

“We had regular customers who would all talk to each other,” Nancy Manchester, who for many years was the restaurant’s hostess, recalled in 1996.  “You could look around the dining rooms and the same people would be sitting at the same tables every Sunday.”

In 1987 the Sunderlands sold the restaurant that bore their name, and over the next decade it would be sold, resold, and fall into foreclosure proceedings. At one point there were plans to renovate the restaurant and reopen it as the Nannaquaket Inn, but they fell through, and the property went on the auction block in 1994. In May 1996 it became the Here & Now Tea Room, but later that year Judith Galloway bought the property for $175,000 and made it the new home for her gift and antiques shop, Past & Presents Place, which had been located a few miles to the south.

By then George and Nina Sunderland had passed away, but a reporter for the local newspaper tracked down Martha MacNaught, their only child. “About everybody in town worked there, or ate there, or both,” she recalled in an interview. “So I’m glad to see the building being taken care of. That was my home.”

In just a few years, however, the property that once was home to Sunderland’s was again back on the market. It sat vacant until 2017, when Stephen and Sandra Porridge bought it for $300,000 and converted the historic building into the Gathering Place Church.

Tiverton’s two other fine-dining venues—the Stone Bridge Inn and the Coachmen Restaurant—have also disappeared.

Here’s the recipe for the Indian Pudding that was served at Sunderland’s.

May 8, 2020 By
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Thibodaux/ Louisiana

Lobster à la Newburg

Bilello’s Restaurant and Lounge

535 Saint Mary Street
Thibodaux, Louisiana

1950 – 1987

Salvatore “Sam” Bilello, the founder and patriarch of Billello’s Restaurant, in Thibodaux, Louisiana, was the second of seven children born to Antonio and Vita Bilello—all of them boys. With his older brother assigned to work on the family’s farm, it fell to young Sam to help his mother cook and take care of the other children. Working alongside his mother in the Bilello kitchen, he developed a love for food and for cooking that would shape his life—and the lives of nearly everyone around him—for many decades to come.

For a while Antonio Bilello operated a bar and club that specialized in po’ boys, Louisiana’s trademark submarine-style sandwich, but it was Sam who went full-bore into business with the Venetian Bar and Donut Shop in downtown Thibodaux, a few miles off U.S. Highway 90. His donuts were so good that at times the line to get inside the place stretched down the block.

Sam had the touch.

In 1950, with his six brothers as co-owners, he opened Bilello’s Restaurant and Lounge on St. Mary Street. It quickly became a landmark on Bayou Lafourche. “We had people from all over the world to come to that place,” Bilello would recall many years later in an interview with the Daily Comet, the local newspaper. “When they came to Thibodaux, that is where they wanted to go. They couldn’t even pronounce the name, but they knew where they wanted to go.”

The restaurant’s menu was filled with Italian and French dishes at reasonable prices as well as such Cajun standbys as fried crawfish tails, crawfish étoufée, broiled oysters with bacon, and stuffed mirliton (a squash-like vegetable, also known as chayote, filled with shrimp and crabmeat).

Even when he turned the reins of the restaurant over to his son Donald, Sam was still there every day, working in the kitchen. In the early 1980s the Bilellos finally let go and sold the restaurant, but it didn’t last long under new ownership. It closed in 1987.

Sam Bilello died on December 27, 2005, at the age of 93. “He was always a cool gentleman, and if you had something to tell him, he’d listen to you,” Odel Zerinque, a longtime friend, recalled at the time. “He was a very, very nice guy.”

Today, Politz’s Restaurant occupies the building in Thibodaux that once was home to Bilello’s.

May 7, 2020 By
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Scottsdale/ Arizona

Campari Melon Salad

Aldo Baldo Ristorante

7014 East Camelback Road
Scottsdale, Arizona

1990 – 1998

Aldo Baldo Ristorante began as a figment of Lee Cohn’s imagination.

As “concept restaurants” hit it really big in the 1980s and 1990s, Cohn, the founder of Scottsdale-based Big 4 Restaurant Group, Inc., was cooking up new ones like there was no tomorrow: The American Grill. Arizona Terrace. Bigoli. Bssghetti. Cafe 66. Gill’s Grill. Kowabunga! Leo Restaurant & Bar. Lunt Avenue Marble Club. Oscar Taylor Butcher, Bakery, and Bar. The Oyster Grill. Stanley’s Grille. Steamers Genuine Seafood. Tom’s Tavern.

And, Aldo Baldo Ristorante.

This 135-seat, full-service restaurant, sited just outside the Palm Court of Scottsdale Fashion Square (an upscale shopping center), opened in 1990 and was described by the company as an “Italian food concept centered on a fictitious futurist inventor.” The imaginary Signore Baldo, said to be from the 1920s, was further described as having created practically everything useful as well as a certain number of not-so-useful things. Think of it as Leonardo da Vinci meets Back to the Future.

Cohn’s design team installed lots of black wood, polished metal, multilevel customer seating. A length-of-the-restaurant exhibition kitchen was intended to represent order, and sculptures of “Baldo’s” failed inventions were intended to represent chaos. “We wanted our own identity,” Cohn explained. “We didn’t want to be stuck in Northern Italy or Southern Italy. So we took the theme from the early 1900s and the futurist movement in Italy and expanded it to include everything.”

The concept worked quite well for a while, but by 1996 Cohn had decided to restyle Aldo Baldo as an Italian seafood restaurant. Though it played to positive reviews, the restaurant’s days were numbered.

Aldo Baldo closed in 1998. Its space at Scottsdale Fashion Square was taken over by Kona Grill, which still occupies it today.

Here is the recipe for the utterly simple—and utterly delightful—Campari Melon Salad that was served at Aldo Baldo.

May 5, 2020 By
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Salina/ Kansas

Swedish Baked Beans

The Swedish Diner

2401 South 9th Street
Salina, Kansas

1955 – 1960

It was big news in Salina when a new restaurant, the Swedish Diner, opened one mile south of town on May 8, 1955. It wasn’t really a diner (what with the white tablecloths and all), but it was Swedish, from the mural of a Swedish scene on one wall by Signe Larson, a well-known painter from nearby Lindsborg, and the smörgåsbord laid out every Sunday. (Lindsborg, which bills itself “Little Sweden USA,” has long been famous for its resident artists and art galleries and studios.)

The Swedish Diner was designed by the local architectural firm of Anderson–Srack–Johnson and built of brick and Haydite, a lightweight aggregate invented in Kansas City in the early 1900s by Stephen Hayde. The restaurant adjoined the Howard Johnson Motel, which had opened in 1953 on U.S. Highway 81. (The motel, which took the name of its local owners, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Johnson, wasn’t affiliated with the famous national chain.)

After a little more than four years in business, however, the Swedish Diner’s days were apparently numbered. In June 1959 came a new manager and a rechristening of the restaurant as “The New Swedish Diner.” In August came a remodeling of the restaurant and the arrival of yet another manager, this one a veteran of the vaunted Fred Harvey organization.

The Swedish Diner made it to January 31, 1960, when it served its last meal, a day-long, all-you-could-eat extravaganza that it billed as “A King’s Treat.” For just $2.25 you could get the smörgåsbord and all its Swedish standbys, from risgrynsgröt (rice porridge) and rag brod (rye bread) to köttbullar (meatballs) and lingonberry-topped ostkaka (cheesecake), as well as “many other choice foods.”

The next day there was a Keck’s Steak House where the Swedish Diner had been. Lou Keck had opened his first steakhouse in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1940, and then a second, in Topeka, in 1958. His third, in Salina, lasted just a few years.

Today a Verizon Wireless retail store occupies the site where the Swedish Diner once stood.

Here is the recipe for Swedish Baked Beans as they were prepared at the Swedish Diner in the 1950s.

May 5, 2020 By
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