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Bill Hogan

Biloxi/ Mississippi

Log House Gumbo

Log House

162 Debuys Road
Biloxi, Mississippi

1970 – 1989

Jim and Mary Myers were already the best-known restaurateurs in Biloxi, Mississippi, when they opened the Log House on DeBuys Road in 1970. They’d owned and operated the famous Friendship House restaurant, roughly midway between Biloxi and Gulfport, from 1949 to 1964, when they sold it to the Brennan family of New Orleans, one of the nation’s best-known restaurant dynasties. Since then the Myerses had been itching to get back into the business.

With its homemade seafood dishes, Southern hospitality, and built-in gift shop, the Log House quickly became a popular stop for locals, hungry tourists, and anyone else driving along U.S. Highway 90. (Though it looked to be made of logs, the restaurant was cleverly constructed with a faux-log façade to resemble the real thing.)

In 1984 the Myerses turned over the day-to-day management of the restaurant to Susie Wilson, their daughter, and her husband, Jerry. Jim Myers died the following year, and not long after that Mary had a stroke.

The Log House closed in 1989. It sat vacant until 1995, when James B. Watts, Sr., a Chicago businessman who’d made a pile of money as a distributor of industrial chemicals and solvents, bought the restaurant from the Myers family and opened J’s Bar-B-Que there. His restaurant closed after just a few months, and the property once again sat vacant, this time until July 2000, when Mabus Walters, the owner of Dad’s BBQ in Slidell, Louisiana, opened the Log Cabin — a name he chose as a variation on the original — there. His restaurant closed a year later.

In 2002 the Gulf Coast Medical Center in Biloxi, eyeing the unused three-quarter-acre tract next to it for some undesignated future use, a bought the property from Walters for $550,000. It had the Log House torn down on January 16, 2003. In late 2009 the 31-year-old hospital announced that it would be vacating Biloxi and moving somewhere north of Interstate 10.

May 1, 2020 By
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Boston/ Massachusetts

Small Meatballs with Onion Sauce

Ola Restaurant

14 Charles Street South
Boston, Massachusetts

1934 – 1966

In 1934 Lucie Keyser Frolich and her husband, Bernhard, decided to open into a restaurant near Boston’s Park Square, even though neither had any experience in the business. Here’s how Lucie Frolich would later tell the story:  

“The great depression of 1929-1933 practically forced my late husband and me into the restaurant business. This is how it happened. A very discouraged Norwegian architect was sauntering along the streets of Boston one day. He stopped for a moment on Carver Street, struck by the rustic atmosphere of number fourteen. Ola was conceived right then and there, and in less than ten days the new restaurant was born.”

In the early days the restaurant, visible through an iron-gated entrance at 14 Carver Street, was Ola Kaffehus, signaling the Norwegian heritage of its owners (as well as their partners, Olaf and Sallie Amundsen). From almost the start Lucie was known as “Madame Ola” or “Mrs. Ola” and Bernhard—“a six-foot-two Viking,” as Lucie described him—as “Mr. Ola.” But when Bernhard died just three years after the restaurant opened, Lucie was thrust into the role of sole proprietor, a role in which she would remain for nearly 30 more years.   

As Ola Restaurant thrived, Lucie Frolich acquired quite a large following in Boston, and in 1946 she published Ola’s Norwegian Cook Book, which she sold in the restaurant and at the Norwegian Arts & Craft Shop on Beacon Street. “I dedicate this book to you good Bostonians who have favored and been faithful to my little Ola for more than ten years,” she wrote in the introduction to the book. “Depression, war, rationing—you came regardless, with pleasant smiles on your faces.”

One of those Bostonians was Alice Saltonstall, the wife of Leverett Saltonstall, a lawyer who served two terms as the governor of Massachusetts (from 1939 to 1945) and more than 20 years as a U.S. Senator (1945 to 1967). Her sewing circle dined on Mrs. Ola’s meatballs, which Mrs. Saltonstall proclaimed the “best in Boston,” every Wednesday for an entire year.

In 1960 the restaurant acquired a little mascot of sorts when Frolich got a little puppy—part beagle, part cocker spaniel—she named Bimbo. When Bimbo went missing one day, she offered an award for his return through an ad in the Boston Globe’s lost-and-found classifieds, but it’s not clear if they were ever reunited.

After Frolich died at age 65 in 1964, two longtime customers took over as the owners, but Ola’s Restaurant closed in 1966 and a new restaurant, Dante’s, opened in the same space. The building at 14 Carver Street and the houses on both sides of it were demolished in 1979 as a massive redevelopment project rearranged the street pattern in Park Square and the South Cove. What remained of Carver Street was renamed Charles Street South.

Here’s the recipe for one of Restaurant Ola’s most popular dishes: Meatballs with Onion Sauce. The secret? “I always put sugar in my potato salad, in my meatballs, too,” Lucie Frolich once explained to a reporter. “Sugar brings out the full flavor of meats and vegetables. Housewives of Norway keep their seasoning simple—salt, pepper, a little onion and sugar, always sugar.”

April 29, 2020 By
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Newport Beach/ California

Garlic Cream Dressing

Dillman’s

801 East Balboa Boulevard
Newport Beach, California

1958 – 1999

Bill Dillman stepped into the restaurant business in the 1950s as a partner with James Karam in Karam’s, the classiest restaurant on the Balboa Peninsula of Newport Beach, California. Karam, a Lebanese-American restaurateur from Long Island, New York, had opened the eponymous establishment with his wife, Lucille, in 1952, and it was an instant hit. Every night, at the corner of Main Street and Balboa Boulevard, Karam’s tuxedoed parking valets attended to the cars of Newport Beach’s wealthy and well-to-do, and inside the restaurant’s patrons could dine and drink in similar style. Prime rib was the specialty, with three different cuts on the menu and a huge slab of well-marbled beef prominently displayed in a case in the dining room.

In 1958 Dillman bought out Karam and affixed his own name to the restaurant. (Jimmy Karam would go on to open a brand-new Karam’s in a strikingly modern building at 501 30th Street.) Prime rib was the specialty at Dillman’s, with three different cuts on the menu and a huge slab of well-marbled beef prominently displayed in a case in the dining room.

From the start Dillman’s was a family operation. Bill’s son, Max, had been involved in the restaurant from the beginning, and he took over when his father died in 1976. (Some years later Max would put his son, Jim, in charge.)

With its circular see-and-be-seen bar and clubby atmosphere (aquarium, leatherette booths, and nautical pictures on the brick walls), Dillman’s was one of Newport Beach’s choicest hangouts, with lots and lots of regulars and a fair number of celebrities dropping in from time to time (chief among them actor John Wayne, whose lived just across Newport Bay on Bayshore Drive).

Until the late 1980s Dillman’s featured “Wild Game Nights” on the first Friday and Saturday of each month, with dishes made from such exotic meats as bear, buffalo, hippopotamus, llama, lion, wild boar, and wild turkey as well as alligator, chuka (a type of partridge), guinea hen, mallard duck, pheasant, quail, rattlesnake, and venison. (When a reporter once asked Max Dillman about the menu items, he offered that the lion meat tasted “a lot like pork” and that the hippopotamus steaks were “pretty tough.”

The Dillman family bowed out of the business in 1995 when Michael Kim became the restaurant’s new owner. Four years later it became the ShoreHouse Cafe, which remained there until 2012, when it closed its doors less than a year after filing for bankruptcy. It later became the Newport Beach outpost of Cruisers, a pizza restaurant.

A longtime favorite at Dillman’s was the Garlic Cream Dressing it served with salads. Here’s the recipe.

April 25, 2020 By
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Arlington/ Virginia

Viltoft Dressing

Marriott Motor Hotel

333 Long Bridge Drive
Arlington, Virginia

1957 – 1998

Marriott International, Inc., the gigantic lodging and hospitality company, traces its beginnings to a nine-stool root beer stand that J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott opened in Washington, D.C., in 1927. Their little stand, with the addition of chili con carne and hot tamales to the menu, was renamed The Hot Shoppe, and eventually the Marriotts would oversee a sprawling empire of Hot Shoppes, one of which would lay claim to being the first drive-in restaurant east of the Mississippi.

In 1957 the company that the Marriotts had built entirely around food entered the hotel business. Its first Marriott Motor Hotel was in Arlington, Virginia, just across the 14th Street Bridge from Washington, D.C. It was just a big motel, really — 365 rooms, each with two double beds and a black-and-white television. “We had an outside check-in so we could see who was in the car,” W. (Bill) Marriott, Jr., the founder’s son, recalled many years later. “We got $8 a night for those rooms, and if there was an extra person in the car, we got $1 for every extra person. So when we were busy, we got as much as $12 for a room.”

The new Marriott Motor Hotel had its own Hot Shoppes Restaurant, but with something distinctively different: a creamy peppercorn salad dressing created especially for the Marriott hotels. It was the culinary handiwork of Danish-born Jorgen Viltoft, who before joining the Marriott company had worked at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, and as maitre d’hotel at the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis. In time Viltoft would become a senior vice president of Marriott Corporation and then return to Minneapolis to run the Radisson Hotel Corporation.

As for the Marriott Motor Hotel, it was later renamed the Twin Bridges Motor Hotel, and then the Twin Bridges Marriott. In 1998 Marriott announced its intention to give up the flagship, explaining through a spokesman that the property was no longer “representative of our current product,” and it was demolished two years later. The site is now being developed as a park.

The salad dressing, bearing the name of its creator, is all but forgotten today. At the time, though, it was such a hit that chefs all over the country made their own versions of it. Here is the original recipe for Viltoft Dressing, just as it was prepared at the Marriott Motor Hotel.

April 18, 2020 By
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New York City/ New York

Potato Pancakes Klube

Klube’s Restaurant

156 East 23rd Street
New York, New York

1911 – 1965

Walk past the Grand Saloon at 156 East 23rd Street in New York City and you can still see the ornate gold lettering of Klube’s Restaurant on the façade, even though it’s been gone since 1965.

Klube’s, it is said, was sometimes called “Little Luchow’s,” after the famous restaurant on East 14th Street, but certainly it held its own as a venerable mainstay of German cuisine in New York City.

It began as Klube’s Steak House in 1911, when Carl A. Klube and his brother-in-law, Henry Klinger, acquired the St. Blaise Hotel & Restaurant, an establishment known mostly as a brothel frequented by the likes of Diamond Jim Brady. Klube, who’d worked in Germany as a waiter, had immigrated to the United States in 1905, married Agnes Klinger in 1908, and become a naturalized citizen in 1911. Henry Klinger, a butcher by trade, presumably cut all the steaks at the restaurant; some years later he would go into business with Agnes’s brother and open a butcher shop at 1308 Second Avenue.

After the advent of Prohibition on January 16, 1920, Klube’s Restaurant became home to one of the city’s most popular speakeasies, which was no small feat, as it was estimated that by 1925 there were anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasies in New York City alone.

By 1950 the Klubes’s son, Carl H. Klube, was running the family restaurant, with chef Hans Nitzsche, whom his father had hired, still in charge of the kitchen. He kept running the restaurant into the 1960s but decided to close it after his mother died in January 1965 at the age of 77. Two months later the space was occupied by Walsh’s Steak House, which had been at First Avenue and 24th Street for the previous 24 years but was forced to move because of a redevelopment project.

From the day Klube’s opened at 156 East 23rd Street in New York City in 1911, potato pancakes were on the menu every Monday to accompany Boeuf à la Mode, one of the restaurant’s signatures dishes. Here’s the recipe, as provided by Carl H. Klube in 1950.

April 17, 2020 By
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Medicine Lake/ Minnesota

Roquefort Dressing

Johantgen’s Country House

10715 South Shore Drive
Medicine Lake, Minnesota

1947 – 1974

Sometime in 1946 Lester B. Johantgen, the first mayor of Medicine Lake, Minnesota, got serious about going into the restaurant business. The village, which he had helped to incorporate just two years earlier, was so small that it had just one mile of road, on the large peninsula jutting out into Medicine Lake. Back then it was a “summer resort” nestled in the nestled in the western suburbs of the Twin Cities, just eight miles from downtown Minneapolis.

Johantgen and his wife, Arthemise (“Arch”), lived in a log cabin they had built in 1934 on the south shore of Medicine Lake, but nearly every day he commuted to the jewelry store that his father, George H. Johantgen, had opened in the West Broadway neighborhood of Minneapolis in 1920. George H. had started out manufacturing rings in downtown Minneapolis in 1896, but in the new store he sold and repaired watches and jewelry and his wife, Alma, sold ice cream.

Les Johantgen was just six years old when he first came to work at the family jewelry store. (“My old German father started me out early,” he once told an interviewer.) One day in 1935, when he was just 29, Les entered the store and found his 63-year-old father slumped at a table where he had been eating lunch, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Now he was at the helm of Johantgen Jewelers.

With the end of World War II Johantgen started thinking more seriously about building a dinner-and-dancing place near where he and Arch lived on Medicine Lake. Johantgen’s Country House—sometimes just “The Country House”—opened on October 20, 1947. It had been open for just a few weeks when a columnist for the Minneapolis Tribune, calling the Country House an “intimate little place . . . beautifully furnished in elegant taste,” observed that it “should become the mecca for those who prefer country dining.” His prediction was right on the money.

While the restaurant would remain in business for more than 25 years, Johantgen never left the jewelry business. By the 1960s he was buying large quantities of gems from mines all over the world—emeralds from Colombia, rubies from Burma, and sapphires from Thailand, for example—and selling them to brokers, manufacturing jewelers, and other buyers in the United States.

Johantgen died in 1972 at age 67, and the Country House did not stay in business much longer. It closed in 1974, to be replaced, in turn, by The Parthenon, The Godfather II, and The III G’s (which featured seminude dancers and video games and raised the hackles of local residents). All of them failed.

In 2003 came a proposal to build 33 townhouses on a 5.4-acre swath of Medicine Lakes, including the former site of Johantgen’s Country House, which sat vacant and boarded up. It was later born again as the Château at Medicine Lake, a venue for banquets, weddings, and other events, and, in 2017, as the Hutton House, a new 12,500-square-foot event space built on the site.

April 15, 2020 By
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New York City/ New York

Shrimp Antolotti

Antolotti’s Restaurant

337 East 49th Street
New York, New York

1953 – 1995

In 1953 John Antolotti opened a 60-seat Italian restaurant on East 49th Street in Manhattan, between First and Second Avenues. He worked the front of the house, greeting customers, taking reservations, and so forth; his wife, Mae, and his brother teamed up in the kitchen to turn out a variety of traditional family dishes from northern Italy, from veal breast with spinach stuffing to home-made rum cake.

Antolotti’s Restaurant did well from virtually the moment it opened its doors, and business boomed even more after Parade magazine, in the summer of 1957, featured Mae Antolotti’s recipe for Torta di Parma—which it described as “a delicious blend of chopped vegetables, cheese, and rice, baked in a special pastry”—as a perfect dish for American picnics.

Antolotti’s had its share of famous patrons, but none more loyal than Truman Capote, the novelist, short story writer, and literary celebrity. Capote lived just a block away on First Avenue, and for more than 20 years he was a regular fixture at Antolotti’s, always sitting in the same banquette along the restaurant’s east wall, directly across from the bar. A favorite dinner was minestrone, linguine with lobster sauce, and zabaglione with fresh strawberries. “He was a part of the family,” Joe Piscina, Antolotti’s bartender (and John and Mae’s son-in-law), told the New York Times a few weeks after Capote’s death in 1984. “He was here almost every day for lunch or dinner. He came here with Gina Lollobrigida, with Lee Radziwell, with lots of people. Everyone knew him. If he wasn’t here, they’d say, ‘Where’s Truman tonight?’ “

By the mid-1980s Louis “Sonny” Antolotti, John and Mae’s son, was running the running the restaurant, and its walls were decorated with autographed photos of the owners with celebrity patrons and pictures of thoroughbred horses the family bred had raised at its farm in upstate New York. Service was still intensely personal—just as it was in the early days. The menus that each waiter handed guests said, “If you don’t see what you want, tell me and the chef will prepare it.”

In 1989, when he was in his mid-50s, Louis Antolotti stepped on his bathroom scale one day and saw that he weighed 272 pounds, even though he stood just 5 feet 9 1/2 inches tall. Hitting the panic button, he decided to check himself into the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica, California, for a four-week stay. “I couldn’t stop eating,” he explained to a reporter for Newsday. “I was drinking too much. It was one of those moments when I realized that if I didn’t change my ways, I would be a goner. I was a walking time bomb.” He lost 27 pounds at the center and another 19 after he got home, said goodbye to his blood-pressure pills, and started running on a treadmill every night. He even added some fat-free dishes from the Pritikin diet to the menu at Antolotti’s restaurant.

John Antolotti died in 1990, and the next few years were rough ones for the restaurant he’d founded nearly four decades earlier. In 1993 came an especially caustic review in the Daily News. “Certainly,” the newspaper’s restaurant critic wrote, “the place is no longer frequented by the many long-gone celebrities whose faded pictures adorn the entrance.”

A little more than a year later, Antolotti’s unceremoniously closed. Mae Antolotti died in 2002, and Louis Antolotti died at in 2006 at age 73 from injuries sustained in a motor vehicle accident.

Two other Italian restaurants would follow Antolotti’s at 337 East 49th: Mimosa, for a short run beginning in 1995, and then Il Postino, which opened there in January 1997.

Here’s the recipe for one of the signature dishes at Antolotti’s, as it was prepared in the 1970s: the eponymous, and delicious, Shrimp Antolotti.

April 14, 2020 By
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La Jolla/ California

Hungarian Goulash Soup

Rheinlander Haus

2182 Avenida De La Playa
San Diego, California

1955 – 1984

Al Williams and Ernst Kloeble opened Rheinlander Haus in La Jolla Shores, California, in 1955. Williams had met Kloeble, a German chef, while stationed with the Army in Germany in 1952, and in short order the two men decided to open a restaurant in America.

Rheinlander Haus, which quickly became known for home-style German cooking at reasonable prices, was a success from the get-go, and in 1958 Kloebel and Williams moved it to the address on Avenida de la Playa that it would occupy for the next quarter-century. A sign on the German-made wooden front door read: “Ohne Fleiss, Kein Preis”—roughly translated, “No Ambition, No Reward.”

Their restaurant, furnished in the style of a Bavarian farmhouse, featured a cozy interior with lots of stone, brick, and wood (including beamed ceilings) and an outdoor patio that featured café-style tables clustered around the San Diego area’s only redwood tree. (The tree later died from exposure to salt water when its roots reached sea level.)

By 1984, with their restaurant having achieved landmark status in La Jolla, Williams and Kloeble were ready to retire from the business, and things got serious when an agent for the owners of Gustaf Anders, a Scandinavian restaurant in Pacific Beach, approached them about selling Rheinlander Haus. Asked by a reporter to comment on the rumor, Kloeble said, “Everything is for sale for a price—even the Eiffel Tower.”

Rheinlander Haus closed on March 19, 1984. Inside the front door, on a chalkboard, was this message: “Danke schön to all our loyal customers and friends. Al and Ernie.”

The restaurant was gutted to make way for the new Gustaf Anders, which opened exactly four months later, with Williams and Kloeble in attendance. In 1988 Gustaf Anders would move again, and in 2004 it closed permanently. Today the space on Avenida de la Playa is occupied by Piatti Ristorante & Bar.

Williams and Kloeble later moved to the resort city of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where they owned and operated Casa Fantasia, a bed-and-breakfast guest house a block from Los Muertos Beach.

April 12, 2020 By
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Beebe/ Arkansas

Egg Custard Pie

Anderson’s Restaurant

2003 West Dewitt Henry Drive
Beebe, Arkansas

1953 – 1985

Frank Anderson may not have realized it at the time, but he pretty much put the little town of Beebe, Arkansas, on the map when he and his wife, Margaret, opened Anderson’s Grill there, at the junction of U.S. Highways 64 and 67, in 1953. The tiny little place the Andersons built next to the motel they owned next door—the Bel-Mar, which they billed as “the friendliest stop in the South”—was too small almost from the beginning, but in time it would grow into a 9,000-square-foot seafood house that introduced much of Arkansas to fresh Gulf Coast fish and shrimp.

When Frank died in 1957, Margaret and her son Bruce took over the restaurant. But later Bruce turned to his attention to the much bigger market in Little Rock, where in 1974 he opened the hugely successful Cajun’s Wharf on the Arkansas River and in 1980 added Shorty Small’s Bar and Grill—the latter establishment named, he said, for a colorful character he knew while growing up in Beebe.

Anderson’s Restaurant was destroyed by fire on September 16, 1985, and never reopened. Two and a half months later the restaurant’s insurer, Missouri-based Transit Casualty Company, was declared insolvent in what was called “the Titanic of all insolvencies.” Anderson sued the restaurant’s insurance broker for more than $2.6 million in damages, alleging that it had failed to provide a reliable insurance company for the restaurant. Soon, with his health failing, Anderson began to sell off his other restaurant properties, and he died in 1992 at age 57.

From the beginning Anderson’s Restaurant was best known for its pies, which were baked over the years by Alberta Plummer and Carrie Pruitt. The most popular were lemon meringue, chocolate, coconut, and egg custard, the recipe for which follows.

April 11, 2020 By
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Aberdeen/ South Dakota

Diced Ham Fried Rice

Capitol Cafe and Lounge

420 South Main Street
Aberdeen, South Dakota

1939 – 1965

Howard Wong was born in Canton, China, in 1912 and came to the United States with his father, Sig Hong, when he was 12 years old. Sig Hong died just six months after that, and Wong was taken in by a family in Fargo, North Dakota. Later he moved in with cousins in Jamestown, North Dakota, where he learned to cook at the family’s restaurant.

In the 1930s Wong moved to Chicago, where he continued to cook. Somewhere along the way became a pilot, and he recruited other Chinese pilots to return to China and teach flying. After working in Minneapolis and Hutchinson, Minnesota, he returned to North Dakota to become the manager of the American Cafe in Fargo. In 1936 Wong met his wife, Beulah, and the couple moved to LaMoure, where he opened his first Chinese restaurant.

In 1939 Wong and his wife moved to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he opened the Capitol Cafe and Lounge. Its location on Main Street, just a block and a half north of the intersection of U.S. Highways 12 and 81, provided a steady stream of customers from morning to night, and the place offered something for everyone. “Truly the upper Midwest’s finest cafe and cocktail lounge,” an early postcard said, promising “a selection of tasty Chinese dishes” and “choice cuts of steak or sea food prepared to your liking,” as well as “a lift from a refreshing highball.”

Sometime in the early 1960s Wong decided that he wanted to build a larger place so that his two sons could become a part of the business. So in 1965 he closed the Capitol Cafe, disposed of its equipment and furnishings in a liquidation sale, and moved to Bloomington, Minnesota, where the following year, at a total cost of $600,000 he opened Howard Wong’s on a then-barren stretch of Interstate Highway 494. When Wong decided to retire in 1984, he sold the restaurant to Franklin Lee, the owner of the Mandarin Yen, a popular Chinese restaurant in Golden Valley, Minnesota, who renamed it Mandarin Yen South. Wong died in 1993 at age 81.

April 11, 2020 By
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