Through most of the 20th century, Bessie Miller’s place was the crown jewel of country-style dining in Cuyahoga County. To at least three generations of Clevelanders, the ride south to Parma would be rewarded with some of the best food anywhere —certainly something far, far better than standard roadhouse fare.
Bessie Bering was born in Hungary, in a little town outside of Budapest, in 1885. Sometime around the turn of the century she decided to emigrate to the United States, and, like many thousands of other Hungarians, found her way to Cleveland. (In time Cleveland would have the second-largest Hungarian population in the world.) She was seventeen.
Bering’s first job was as a dishwasher, but she clearly had bigger things in mind. In 1905 she married Fred Miller — a kindred spirit, born in Vienna, whom everyone called “Fritz” — and by 1913 the young couple had saved enough to buy the All Wien Social Club at 6048 Broadview Road in Parma. They renamed it the Broadview Club. It was pretty much a farmhouse with a sign out front, and the Millers, the story goes, served their first chicken dinners on the front porch by the light of coal oil lamps.
It was Bessie’s idea, when guests began to arrive in numbers, to have a horse-drawn carryall meet them where the streetcar line ended, at Broadview and Pearl. Suddenly business boomed as never before, and before long Bessie and Fritz branched out into catering. Tragically, however, in 1933, on the day the Millers were to have celebrated their twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, Fritz died, leaving Bessie a widow.
It was the worst point of the Great Depression. More than 11,000 of the nation’s 25,000 banks had failed. The national unemployment rate had reached 25 percent. But Bessie Miller made it through.
In 1935 Bessie married Edward W. Roski, and while she took her new husband’s last name the restaurant continued to be known, and advertised, as Bessie Miller’s Broadview Club. It achieved some measure of fame nationwide for its fried-chicken dinners and clambakes, but “The House of Fine Food and Liquors,” as it came to bill itself, also served steak, lobster, duck, and frog-leg dinners as well as homemade pastries that included, in keeping with Bessie’s Hungarian heritage, just about the best apple strudel anywhere. Most amazing of all, perhaps, was that Bessie Miller’s Broadview Club did so well as a seasonal operation, opening on May 1 each year and closing at the end of October.
Bessie Miller was ahead of her time in another way: When it came to the kitchen, at least, she was something of a feminist. “Naturally, my cooks are women,” she told a reporter in 1951. “Some have been with me from the start.” And what about men? “Men,” she explained just as matter-of-factly, “are all right to wash dishes and get dressed up to greet guests.”
Bessie and Eddie were doing well enough to travel abroad and winter each year one of their homes in Florida, where they took friends deep-sea fishing on their 35-motor launch and had, as one newspaper reporter described it, “a series of good times entertaining their friends — on boat or at home.” (The friends included Charlie Feldkamp, who owned the Chester Grill in Cleveland, and Bob and Millie Wertheim, who owned Wertheim’s Chick Inn in Northfield).
By the 1960s Bessie Miller had turned the operation of the restaurant over to her stepson, Earl Roski. Even in her 80s, though, she came up from Florida once a year to make sure, as one account put it, “that her original recipes are faithfully followed.” Edward Roski died in 1972, and Bessie died in 1976 at age TK.
In 1980 Bessie Miller’s Broadview Club was sold to new owners, who soon renamed it “Inn the Woods Restaurant & Lounge.”
Here’s the recipe for the Corn Fritters that were served at Bessie Miller’s Broadview Club:
Corn Fritters
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Loading...Ingredients
- 1 cup cream-style corn
- 5 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1 quart milk
- 4 eggs, separated
- 2 tablespoons baking powder
- Hot lard, for frying
Instructions
Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Mix corn, flour, salt, sugar, milk, egg yolks, and baking powder together until well blended.
Beat egg whites until fluffy and gently fold into batter mixture.
In a heavy iron skillet, heat lard, for frying, to a depth of at least one inch.
For each fritter, drop one tablespoon of batter into the hot lard. When fritters are brown on both sides, drain on paper towels or brown paper. Place in oven for about five minutes before serving.
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