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.
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