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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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March 12, 2022 By 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 Bill Hogan

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 Bill Hogan

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 Bill Hogan

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 Bill Hogan

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 Bill Hogan

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 Bill Hogan

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