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.
Roquefort Dressing
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Loading...The Roquefort Dressing at Johantgen's Country House in Medicine Lake, Minnesota, was so good that it kept quite a few diners returning to the restaurant just for its salads. Here's the recipe.
Ingredients
- 1 cup sour cream
- 1/2 cup buttermilk
- 8 ounces Roquefort or other blue cheese, crumbled
- 1 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper
- 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- 4 cups mayonnaise
Instructions
In a mixing bowl, combine sour cream, buttermilk, cheese, garlic powder, salt, white pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice and blend with a wire whisk.
Add mayonnaise and whisk to blend.
Notes
The chef at Johantgen's Country House advised against using an electric mixer to prepare this dressing, warning that it would break down the cheese too much.
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