Miles City/ Montana

Shrimp Fried Rice

The Crossroads Inn

3424 Valley Drive East
Miles City, Montana

1941 – 1984

Sometime in the 1930s, Joseph H. (Joe) Caulk began dreaming of building “a first-class nightclub” just outside of Miles City, Montana, a booming town in the southeastern corner of the state. Caulk, who was regarded as the local dance impresario as well as an authority on horses and horse racing, envisioned a mammoth log building with a stage and orchestra pit, a dance floor grand enough to be called a ballroom, a huge fireplace built from native stone, the longest bar anywhere near Miles City, and a large dining room flanked by a couple of private dining rooms. He even had a name for the place: The Jockey Club.

By 1940 Caulk had not only rounded up a partner or two but also found the perfect location for his nightclub at the intersection of U.S. Routes 10 and 12. (By one account, Ed Love, a local automobile dealer, invested in the enterprise so that his two daughters would have a place to dance.) Caulk hired Bluford Bly of Big Timber, some 200 miles to the west of Miles City, to build his roadhouse, and Byron Weldy, also of Big Timber, to build the rustic tables and chairs that would furnish its dining rooms. Bly had huge lodgepole-pine logs from the Gallatin Canyon cut especially for the project, including the eight massive tree trunks that, with two enormous truss beams, would support the roof.

Somewhere along the way Caulk settled on a new name for his nightclub—the Crossroads Inn—and ordered the 50-foot, two-face neon sign, said to be the largest in Montana, that would sit atop the building and beckon travelers on both highways.

The Crossroads Inn opened on June 27, 1941. The 60-seat dining room wasn’t yet finished, but the dance floor was a thing of beauty, built from solid maple and as smooth as a bowling alley. Caulk hired Orlando “Dutch” Vittorie, a native of Marseilles, France, as chef, and it was his food that helped to make the Crossroads Inn famous.

World War II brought big changes to Miles City. In 1942 Caulk traveled to Washington, D.C., with the president of the Miles City Chamber of Commerce and a group of local businesspeople to testify before members of the Senate Select Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business. He related how the owner of the Blue Ribbon Bakery in Miles City had been forced to shut down his business and apply to enlist in the U.S. Navy because all the bakers had been drafted into service. As a result, Caulk said, he had been forced to have his baked goods trucked in from Lewiston, Montana. “Does that alone—trucking bread 220 miles—fit into the scheme of savings tires?” Caulk asked the senators.

The war eventually would turn Caulk’s life upside-down. In 1946 he divorced his wife, moved to Silver Gate, and remarried. He put the Crossroads Inn up for sale, advertising it as the “most beautiful nightclub in Montana, and in 1947 Eddie J. Nicholson became its new owner. (Caulk went on to open Caulk’s Timberline Lodges at the Silver Gate entrance to Yellowstone National Park in 1948.)

In 1949 William F. Olsen, a local agent for the New York Life Insurance Company, bought the Crossroads Inn from Nicholson. (Nicholson went on to run the Roco Club in Hamilton, Montana, with Bruce Blahnik.) But by 1960 Olsen and his wife, Velma, had tired of operating the restaurant and put “Eastern Montana’s Finest Night Club,” as they described it, up for sale with an asking price of $100,000 for the entire property, land and all. While the Crossroads Inn was taking in an average of $200,000 a year, a classified ad they placed in the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune offered this blunt reason for the sale: “Husband not interested in money or night club business.”

In 1961 the Olsens sold the Crossroads Inn to Lloyd and Francie Mackin, who operated it until 1974, when they sold it to Bob and Marlys Koehler. The Koehlers brought on Bill Coughlin (a fine chef in his own right) as general manager, and their children helped out at the restaurant, too. “As a kid, I bused tables, washed dishes, helped prepare salads and shrimp, and coat-checked,” Debbie Koehler Jurad recalls today. “Everyone dressed up, and the women wore fur coats. Those were the days!” The Koehlers operated the Crossroads Inn until 1980, when they sold it to Dale and Joanne Groskopf, who, just a few years later, would sell it to Rod Walter.

On October 20, 1984, the Crossroads Inn fell victim to an early morning fire that left little but charred timbers behind. The following day, a detective with the local police department received an anonymous tip to the effect that Walter had paid someone $8,000 to set the fire, and that cash registers had been removed from the inn before the fire was set. The tips led the detective and a colleague to the Pumpkin Creek Bridge, where they found several items that had come from the Crossroads Inn, including some receipts from its cash register. A jury later found Patrick Cain guilty of conspiracy to commit arson, and the conviction was upheld on appeal. After obtaining a warrant to search Cain’s car, the detectives found additional items from the Crossroads Inn. Cain confessed to burglarizing the Inn but denied that he had anything to do with the fire that destroyed it.

The Crossroads Inn was never rebuilt, and today the site it occupied is mostly an empty lot. But for many years afterward people in and around Miles City have reminisced about the Crossroads Inn with no small measure of reverence. “What a place it was,” one of them wrote in an online forum in 2005. “As long as I can recall the family went to the Crossroads every Sunday for the chuck wagon buffet. Then my grandmother would make me dance with her to the live music. I was responsible for the chits for the coat check. My grandfather would give me a half dollar to tip the check girl when I retrieved the coats. It was a wonderful place.”

February 9, 2023 By
5
Media/ Pennsylvania

Pumpkin Pie

Lima Farms Restaurant

1151 West Baltimore Pike
Media, Pennsylvania

1942 – 1966

Soon after Ray D. King and his wife, Bertha, moved from the Philadelphia area to Lima, Pennsylvania, in 1939, they began scouting for just the right spot there to open a roadside restaurant. In relatively short order they found such a place along U.S. Route 1, about two miles west of the nearby community of Media, and in 1942 they opened Lima Farms Restaurant at 1151 West Baltimore Pike, just east of Oriole Avenue. “GOOD FOOD,” the big oval sign they put out front said, and by all accounts that’s exactly what patrons of the restaurant got.

Lima Farms Restaurant was nothing fancy, but it was an inviting and comfortable place with homestyle food, an attractive dining room, a lower section with a lunch counter and stools, and some cabins out back for tourists and other travelers who might want to spend the night. (The Kings also maintained a farm next to the restaurant and operated a trailer court behind it.) Lots of people stopped by just to get some Ice cream, which was one of the restaurant’s specialties.

In 1953 Bertha King became seriously ill, to the point where she could no longer help out in the restaurant. She died in 1956. Ray soldiered on, both at the farm and at the restaurant, but as he hit his mid-70s he apparently decided that he’d packed enough hard work into his life.

In 1963 King sold off a big chunk of his farm, and the following year he sold the restaurant and the trailer park behind it to Walter Carvin, Jr. One of Carvin’s first moves for Lima Farms was to hire Melvin Lebo, who’d been the executive chef at the Hotel Hershey in Hershey, Pennsylvania, some 80 miles to the west. He then launched a quirky advertising campaign that billed Lima Farms as “an out of this world restaurant for out of this world people,” among other such taglines, and highlighted its new “International & Continental Menus.” (Down-to-earth folks, though, could still get a breakfast of two eggs, home fries, toast, and coffee for just 49 cents.) Meanwhile, Carvin was forced to battle county tax assessments on the property—consisting of the restaurant, a garage, a second-floor apartment, and a small cottage–that had zoomed from $5,500 in 1963 to $25,000 in 1966. He managed to obtain a $3,000 reduction in the assessment, and in January 1966 he went to court to challenge the assessment that remained in place as “unjust.” Calvin’s efforts to rebrand the restaurant evidently didn’t work, either, and Lima Farms quietly closed its doors before the year was out.

In 1967 Carvin began trying to lease Lima Farms to someone else, variously advertising it as a “gold mine” or the “chance of a lifetime” at $350 a month. By the end of the year, he had dropped the asking price to $200 a month, but there still were no takers.

In 1969 Carvin sold the property for $200,000 to Walsh Ford Company, a local automobile dealership. It occupied the suite until 1980, when it went out of business.

Ray D. King died in 1974 at age 86 in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

February 6, 2023 By
0
Lansing/ Michigan

Bar-B-Que Sauce

Kitchin’s Drive-In

3812 South Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard
Lansing, Michigan

1948 – 1966

On May 1, 1948, Forrest H. Kitchin and his wife, Delores (Dee), opened a little drive-in restaurant at 3812 South Logan Street in Lansing, Michigan, advertising its specialties as hamburgers, hot dogs, root beer, and “thick malteds” and offering “free movies one night a week all summer.” But one thing apparently bedeviled the Kitchins from the very beginning: their last name.

Sometimes the restaurant was advertised as the Kitchen Drive-In, or Kitchen’s Drive-In, while other times it was the Kitchin Drive-In, or Kitchin’s Drive-In. (It would take nearly 20 years for the confusion to be resolved.) Nonetheless, the drive-in was a hit from the beginning, and by the early 1950s the Kitchins were offering curb service outside (with television every night instead of the weekly movie) and counter service inside, seven days a week, with “a complete line of foods” that included French fries, fried shrimp, fried chicken, and pies. “We Make Our Own Ice Cream,” newspaper ads for the drive-in said, which surely made its 29-cent banana splits even more tempting.

Kitchin’s Drive-In advertised hamburgers at 20 cents (“We serve them on fresh buns with plenty of mustard and onions,” the ads said), as were the foot-long hot dogs it called “Peeping Pups.”

In 1953, three years before Ray Kroc would begin to install Taylor milkshake machines in McDonald’s restaurants all over the country, Kitchin’s Drive-In was offering its customers “the New Soft Ice Cream,” as well as “Shrimp in a Basket” and “Chicken in a Basket,” with everything on the menu also available for takeout.

While ads for Kitchin’s listed Forrest as the owner, Dee, who had been cooking since she was a child, presided over its kitchen. She once told a reporter that her main hobbies were visiting restaurants and collecting recipes, adding that during the winter months, when the drive-in was closed, she would experiment with items she wanted to add to the menu.

In 1957 Kitchin’s Drive-In began offering home delivery of pizzas as well as shrimp and chicken dinners from 6 p.m. to midnight, and it soon introduced “electronic car service,” with two-way speakers replacing the car hops. But Forrest and Dee were apparently itching to do something different, and in 1966 they sold most of the equipment at the drive-in, completely remodeled the building, and opened the Bar-K Ranch Steak House in its place. A huge fiberglass steer stood atop the restaurant, and a life-size horse greeted patrons inside. Newspaper ads for the Bar-K Ranch Steak House described it, somewhat inexplicably, as the “the best thing to come along since Custer’s Last Stand!”)

There had been another big change: The Kitchins had officially, if not legally, become the Kitchens. They operated the Bar-K Ranch Steak House until 1974, when they put it up for immediate sale, citing “other business commitments,” and a franchised Perkins Pancake House—the city’s second—opened at the same location the following year. Forrest Kitchen went on to build a successful second career as a real estate agent, and in future years the site where Kitchin’s Drive-In once stood would become home to a Theio’s restaurant, Jackie’s Diner, and, most recently, Wing Heaven Sports Bar.

In 1994, after eight years of debate, Logan Street was renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

February 5, 2023 By
0
New York/ New York

Veal Chops Peter Zenger

Press Box

139 East 45th Street
New York, New York

1947 – 1990

In 1947 Henry Castello, who’d worked for many years alongside John C. Bruno at the Pen and Pencil Steak House in New York City, opened what would become a rival establishment just a block away, at 139 East 45th Street. His two partners in the venture were Harry Storm, a fellow bartender at the Pen and Pencil, and Fred O. Manfredi, a former waiter captain at Voisin. (The name came courtesy of Bob Considine, a prolific and adventure-seeking syndicated newspaper columnist.) Castello’s restaurant career had been interrupted by World War II, during which he saw service as a machine-gunner in the U.S. Army, but now, back in civilian action, he was determined to make the Press Box the newest success story on Steak Row, alongside such establishments as Danny’s Hide-a-way, The Editorial, Joe & Rose’s, and, of course, Bruno’s Pen and Pencil.

The formula for cooking steaks at the Press Box was about as simple as it gets: gas burners, no seasoning, and two pats of unsalted butter on each steak as it rested after cooking.

In 1949 Castello had the idea of honoring famous newspaper correspondents by establishing a “Hall of Fame” within the restaurant, with the first “inductee” being Ernie Pyle, the Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and war correspondent, who’d been killed by enemy fire during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.

In time Freddie Manfredi would return to his native Italy, leaving Castello and Storm at the helm of the restaurant. In 1958 they added the Peter Zenger Room, and that same year some scenes from film Bell, Book, and Candle, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, were shot in the restaurant. (By one account Castello himself scored an uncredited role as a ranch foreman in the 1959 film Escort West, starring Victor Mature.)

In 1967 Castello decided to retire, and Mike Wayne and Harry Lewin, the owners of the Old Homestead restaurant at 56 Ninth Avenue, added the Press Box to their holdings. (Lewin, Wayne’s brother-in-law, had purchased the venerable steakhouse in New York City’s meat-packing district in 1951 and later given up his law practice to devote all his time to the restaurant business.)  In 1972 Wayne and Lewin unveiled the Graziano Room at the Press Box, so named in honor Florence Graziano, the artist from whom the restaurant had bought some two dozen paintings over the years.

By 1975 Wayne reportedly was buying a million pounds of meat a year for the Press Box, whose beef locker could store more than 8,000 pounds of meat. But in 1976 Benjamin R. Weinberg, Wayne’s father and the chairman of the restaurant’s parent company died, and the Press Box was soon sold to Fred Brunhard, a Polish-American restaurateur who added such dishes as sour borscht and stuffed cabbage rolls to the menu. He rebranded the 30-year-old establishment as the “Polonez Press Box Restaurant,” a move that was almost certainly ill-advised, as Brunhard soon dropped the “Polonez” like a hot pierogi.

The Press Box quietly went out of business in 1990. The space was later taken over by King Hunan, a Chinese restaurant, and today is home Hop Won Express, a fast-food-style Chinese restaurant, and, on the second floor, Uncle Charlie’s Piano Lounge.

January 31, 2023 By
0
Williston/ Vermont

Maple Rag-a-Muffin Dessert

Twist O’Hill Lodge

9505 Williston Road
Williston, Vermont

1931 – 1966

In 1918, two years after she’d graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in home economics and education, Marjorie E. Luce accepted a position with the university’s agricultural extension service that over the next decade or so would take her all over the state to talk and teach about everything from the best way to can liver to “Making Your Home Restful and Attractive.” Her work was in keeping with the mission of the “Country Life Movement,” which aimed to bring the benefits of city living to rural communities—and vice versa.

This movement had been fueled by the findings of a blue-ribbon commission appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt during his last full year in office. Its report, published in 1911, called, among other things, for the construction of new and improved roads and the expansion of agricultural extension programs—just like the one that would come to employ Marjorie Luce. (In time Vermont would have its own Commission on Country Life

The tearoom movement was also taking hold across the nation in the 1920s, fueled on one hand by the Great Depression and by Prohibition on the other. Luce, seeing opportunity in the convergence of these two movements, began talking with her two sisters about building a roadside tearoom and summer hotel on the concrete road from Burlington to Montpelier. Barbara M. Luce worked for Luce Brothers, Inc., the family’s well-established clothing store in Waterbury, and Anna Luce Maxwell was the matron of the Vermont State Hospital, also in Waterbury, and all three women planned to keep their respective jobs while tending to the lodge in season with the help of an on-premises manager. In 1930 the three women settled on the perfect spot for their establishment—the “twist” in U.S. Route 2 at the top of French Hill in Williston—and construction began in October of that year.

Twist O’Hill Lodge opened on June 10, 1931. It offered breathtaking views of Vermont’s Green Mountains, with the Winooski Valley in the foreground and Mount Mansfield, the state’s highest mountain, in the background), eight “sleeping rooms,” and a combination dining and living room with hardwood floors for dancing. The lodge, furnished throughout with antiques, was surrounded by screened-in porches wide enough to accommodate tables for leisurely lunches and tea—even dancing.  But that wasn’t all. The three Luce sisters also built a three-car garage for the use of guests, a four-bedroom house for the lodge’s employees, and two small tourist cabins with more planned for the future.

At the time it opened, Twist O’Hill Lodge could accommodate 50 guests at a time. Its first “Special Sunday Dinner” offered a veritable cornucopia of food for the Depression-friendly price at $1.00. Diners had their choice of chicken consommé or a small tray of sweet-pickle chips, celery, and cut cantaloupe and, as entrées, a minute steak with mushroom sauce, Southern-style roast ham, or fried chicken (25 cents extra). These were served with mashed potatoes, fresh asparagus, an assortment of jellied fruit salads, white and whole-wheat bread, Parker House rolls, and, for dessert, a choice of butterscotch pie, strawberry shortcake, ice cream with a fresh fruit sauce, and assorted cakes. Tea, coffee, and milk were served with the meal.

In 1931, with expansion in mind, the Luce sisters bought a house across the road and an additional nine acres, and three years later they built an addition to Twist O’Hill Lodge that included a new kitchen and dining room, three large fireplaces and three large porches, eight more sleeping rooms, and a downstairs recreation room. They also extended their season by three weeks.

Twist O’Hill Lodge prospered through the 1930s, 1940s (with a break in operation during World War II), and 1950s, even though it had no shortage of competition. There were big hotels in Bread Loaf, Middlebury, Morrisville, Richmond, and Waterbury, and a multitude of other camps, resorts, taverns, and tearooms catering to tourists and travelers.  But the Luce sisters found a big fan in Duncan Hines, America’s leading where-to-eat expert, who gushed about their place in his syndicated newspaper column. “Cheerfully burning fireplaces, interesting and inviting furnishings, spacious dining porches, magnificent views, and good food,” Hines wrote, “are some of the things that lure many hungry visitors to Twist O’Hill Lodge at Williston, Vermont.”

In 1959 Marjorie Luce retired after 41 years with the Vermont Extension Service, 35 of them as the state’s home demonstration leader (a position she’d created in 1924). But things soon began slowing down at Twist O’Hill Lodge, and its last full summer season came in 1964. It quietly closed for good after the 1966 season, and in 1968 Marjorie Luce sold the property to W. Howard Delano and Gardner Hopwood, who converted it into the Pine Ridge School, a private boarding school for teenage boys with learning disabilities, which opened later that year.

As for the Luce sisters, Barbara died in 1975 at age 74, Anna in 1978 at age 86, and Marjorie in 1989 at age 94. In 2009 the Pine Ridge School, faced with declining enrollment and saddled with a mountain of debt, closed. Five years later a reporter observed that many of the buildings on the 128-acre campus looked “tailor-made for shooting a zombie apocalypse movie.” The property was eventually purchased by the New England Theological Seminary’s Institute for Church Planting for $1.5 million—$2 million under the initial asking price.

January 29, 2023 By
0
Oakland/ California

Lobster Buccaneer

Mitch’s

529 17th Street
Oakland, California

1954 – 1969

In 1951, when a columnist for the Oakland Tribune christened Mitchell Hoffman “the popular prince of maitre dees,” he might well have added that Hoffman had been in training for that role his entire adult life.

Hoffman, who was born in 1920 in Winnipeg, Canada, became a full-fledged Californian four years later when his family moved to San Francisco. In high school he was a standout in swimming, water polo, and basketball, so much so that at the end of his senior year he won a spot in a field of 14 swimmers chosen to race from the Marin County shoreline to the rocks of Fort Point on May 7, 1937, as part of the Golden Gate Bridge’s massive opening-day celebration. That fall Hoffman enrolled in the City College of San Francisco, and on graduating four years later with a degree in hotel and restaurant management he took a job at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. In 1942, following the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served at the Presidio of Monterey.

Following his discharge from the army in 1946, Hoffman landed a job as the manager of the Hotel Senator in Sacramento. But then Dewey Bargiacchi, one of his army buddies at the Presidio, made him an offer he felt he couldn’t turn down. “Dewey asked me to come to Oakland,” Hoffman would later recall, ”and found a job for me in his family restaurant, the old Villa de la Paix.” In 1952 he took over management of Villa Lorenzo, a new restaurant in the planned community of San Lorenzo, but soon returned to Oakland to become the manager of New Milani’s on Grand Avenue. The following year he became the general manager of the newly opened Sea Wolf restaurant on Jack London Square.

In 1953 Sophie Gwerder, the proprietor of Sophie’s, a popular restaurant at 529 17th Street, learned that the Cotati Inn, in her hometown of Cotati, about 50 miles north of Oakland on U.S. Route 101, was for sale. She immediately bought it and renamed it Sophie’s Cotati Inn, and while she told reporters that she and her husband, Mike, intended to operate both restaurants, her professed determination didn’t last very long. Hoffman soon bought Sophie’s and completely remodeled and redecorated its interior. He opened Mitch’s there on January 12, 1954.

Hoffman, who favored custom-tailored suits and traded his horn-rimmed glasses for an identical pair without lenses whenever he was asked to pose for a photo, may have been the best-dressed restaurateur in Oakland. He greeted guests with gusto as they entered the restaurant, which offered four separate dining rooms, a large banquet room, and a cocktail lounge (with a piano bar) separated from the dining area by glass showcases filled with bottles of wine and glassware. Hoffman decorated his restaurant with original oil paintings (obtained through an uncle who owned a high-end art gallery in San Francisco) and an impressive collection of wood carvings by Emil Janel, a Swedish-born artist who lived and worked in Rio Nido, a resort community on the Russian River in Sonoma County.

In 1955 a fire closed Mitch’s for 79 days, but when Hoffman reopened the restaurant it seemed busier than ever. Part of the reason was Bob Viani, a well-known chef in the East Bay, who headed up the kitchen, but the bigger factor was Hoffman himself, an affable and gregarious host who seemed to know everyone in the by name. “Credit Mitch Hoffman, Oakland’s 17th Street restaurant tycoon, with doing the most outstanding job of the year,” Bob Tuttle, a columnist for the Contra Costa Times, wrote. “While many clubs are having trouble with the red ink, likeable Mitch just keeps smoking those Churchill cigars and building up his bank account.” For Hoffman, 1957 was also a banner year: In July he married Marian Vezzani.

In 1959 Hoffman was advertising Mitch’s as “The ‘Toots Shor’s’ of Oakland,” and in 1964 as “Oakland’s Favorite Downtown Dining Address.” There was a bit of hyperbole in both claims, but his restaurant was as well-known as any in downtown Oakland and a worthy destination for chops, charcoal-broiled steaks, roasts, fish, and specialty dishes like Beef Stroganoff and Lobster Buccaneer.

In 1965 Hoffman decided to sell Mitch’s so that he could take a position with Cal Neva Lodge in Crystal Bay, Nevada. The resort and casino, built on the shores of Lake Tahoe in 1926 and so named because it straddled the border between California and Nevada, had been owned since 1960 by Frank Sinatra and several other investors. (By one account it was Sinatra himself who lured Hoffman there.) But Hoffman clearly missed Oakland, going so far as to ask one newspaper columnist there to print his telephone number and encourage his friends to get in touch with him.

The new owner of Mitch’s, Homer C. Rose, brought on Sam “Hats” Gomora as chef and Russ Amato as maître d’. (Gomora had acquired his unusual nickname because he liked to wear brightly colored plaid, polka-dot, and paisley chef’s toques and matching kerchiefs rather than the traditional white versions and was said to keep some 48 different cap-and-kerchief sets in constant rotation.) But Mitch’s was never the same without Mitch, and year by year the restaurant declined with the rest of downtown Oakland. It closed and reopened at least once before it was quietly shuttered in 1969. A new restaurant, Mario’s, replaced it but didn’t last long there, as by 1971 Tommy’s Restaurant had taken over the space on 17th Street.

As for Hoffman, he’d returned to Oakland in 1967 and, with fellow restaurateur Jim Castello as a partner, opened the Sir Loin Restaurant at 3423 Grand Avenue. To many it seemed just like Mitch’s in a new location, from the oil paintings on the walls to the chops, steaks, and prime rib on the menu. In time Hoffman came to own the Sir Loin on his own and operated it until 1985, when he announced that he was retiring. But three years later he came out of retirement to become the night manager of Francesco’s Restaurant at 8520 Pardee Drive, near Oakland International Airport.

Hoffman died in Oakland in 2005 at age 85.

January 28, 2023 By
0
Richmond/ Virginia

Shrimp Creole

Bob’s Seafood Grill

115 North 5th Street
Richmond, Virginia

1931 – 1963

Some 20 years before he went into the restaurant business, Robert C. (Bob) Tritton had already made a name for himself as a professional baseball player. Tritton, who was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, was recruited by St. Albans School in Roanoke, a powerhouse in college sports, and while there he played right end on the football team for three years and was a standout pitcher each season on the baseball team. In his senior year at St. Albans the baseball team, which he captained, won 14 of the 15 games it played, and four were shutouts. “The only game lost was to Hampden-Sidney [College], by a score of 7 to 6,” a sportswriter for the Richmond Daily Dispatch noted, “and this defeat was due to the broken-down condition of the team and Tritton’s torn fore-finger.”

On graduating from St. Albans Tritton briefly played for minor-league baseball teams in Jacksonville, Florida, and Augusta, Georgia. He then played for two major-league teams in Alabama, pitching for the Birmingham Barons in 1903 and the Montgomery Senators in 1904.

Tritton had also been an equestrian at St. Albans, and in 1904 he left Richmond to become an assistant manager of the American Horse Exchange in New York City, a mammoth thoroughbred-trading center built by William K. Vanderbilt and a group of investors that included some of the city’s leading millionaire-horsemen. (These were “gentlemen of vast means,” as the New York Times observed, to whom profits were “of no consequence.”)

But in time Tritton moved back to Richmond, and in 1918 he opened the Capital Auto Supply Company at 218 East Ninth Street. In 1924 he joined the Autocar Company of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, an innovative manufacturer of both gasoline and electric vehicles, as the manager of its company-owned dealership in Norfolk. But the business may not have fully suited Tritton, an avid fisherman and all-around outdoorsman, and in 1926 he and his wife, Helen, opened Montague Cottage, a small summer hotel in Virginia Beach at Atlantic Avenue and 16th Street, right off the boardwalk and just two blocks from the New Ocean Casino, which had opened the previous year. (Montague was the middle name Helen’s parents had given her.) Helen Tritton managed Montague Cottage, where the main draw, as summarized in its newspaper ads, was a “variety of sea food served every day.”

But the Trittons had their eyes on something bigger, and on November 20, 1931, they opened Bob’s Sea Food Grill at 115 North Fifth Street in Richmond. This was a prize location, right next door to the Hotel John Marshall, that aimed to serve its customers prize catch. “Not Just Another Restaurant—All Sea Foods Are Dependent for Their Appetizing Flavor and Food Value Upon Their Freshness and Quality,” its opening-day ad in the Richmond Times-Dispatch began. “It will be the constant aim and determination of this management to supply the freshest and finest of all varieties.”

And, oh, the varieties. There were oysters and clams from handpicked beds on the Lynnhaven River; lobsters and scallops from Portland, Maine; shrimp and turtle from Florida; and a bountiful assortment of crabmeat and fish from local waters. These were served in all manner of styles, and “for those who do not care for sea foods,” as the menu put it, there was pan-fried chicken, broiled chicken, and chicken salad as well as steaks and chops and such specialties as “Turkey Hash and Old Virginia Waffles,” “Chicken Brunswick Stew,” and “Smithfield Ham Steaks.” Hot buttermilk biscuits were served with each meal and there were two kinds of pie—apple and sweet potato—for dessert.

The restaurant’s main dining room might well have been nicknamed “Bob’s Fishing Museum.” A framed mural on one wall was designed to look like a huge aquarium, and all around the room were dozens of mounted fish from Tritton’s deep-sea catches, most of them in Florida waters, as well as some that friends had presented to him. A massive marlin hung directly above the faux aquarium, and diners could also see a barracuda, a bonefish, a dolphin, a giant grouper, a sea bass, a tuna, and a ladyfish, among others. In time Tritton would display various other artifacts and trophies, from the eight-and-a-half-inch-long shell of a Chesapeake Bay oyster that had been delivered to the restaurant in a barrel of mammoths to a nine-and-a-half-foot-long sailfish that he’d recently hooked on one of his Florida fishing trips.

Every order is individually prepared; nothing served that was cooked in advance in large quantities. The walls are decorated with many unusual trophies and some particularly fine specimens of seep sea fish can be seen “in person.”

By 1936 Tritton had squeezed the words “Sea” and “Food” into one in the name of the restaurant and adopted a motto—“Out of Sea, Into Pan”—that was as alluring as it was succinct. In 1939, with the restaurant running smoothly and his wife was still managing the Montague Cottage in Virginia Beach every summer, Tritton spent $125,000 to open the Virginia Fried Chicken Restaurant at the New York World’s Fair, serving its namesake dinner—half of a milk-fed chicken, fried, with candied yams, string beans, Louisiana rice with giblet gravy, bread and butter ice cream or sherbet, cake,  and coffee or tea—for just 90 cents, and a similarly robust “Cold Virginia Smithfield Ham Platter for the same price. An “Old Virginia Mint Julep” was 50 cents, and for this menu selection Tritton had bushels of fresh mint flown to the World’s Fair every day.

In 1942 Tritton decided to sell Bob’s Seafood Grill to Louis Byram, a former steward at Richmond’s ultra-private Commonwealth Club. But the following year Byram was presented the opportunity to buy Daley’s, an old-line steakhouse at 703 East Broad Street, and so he sold Bob’s Seafood Grill to William R. McGeorge, a former manager of the Country Club of Virginia.

In 1946 Tritton joined Alfred L. Blake & Sons, Inc., a Richmond-based real estate firm, where he specializes in the sale of farms, waterfront properties, and hunting and fishing preserves. He was widowed in 1958 when Helen died at age 76.

McGeorge would stay at the helm of Bob’s Seafood Grill much longer than its founder had, and the restaurant’s reputation was such that he never tampered with the name. But in the early 1960s things were changing in Richmond, as they were all over the South, and McGeorge, evidently, was none too happy about it.

On August 24, 1963, in a statement he gave to the local newspapers, McGeorge let Richmond know that he’d had enough. “To our many friends who have favored us with their patronage during the past 20 years,” it said, “we regret to announce that due to conditions beyond our control we have decided to discontinue business immediately.”

Pressed by reporters the next day, McGeorge said that “a combination of things” had led him to retire. For starters, he said, eating habits were changing, with people ordering much lighter meals than they used to, particularly at lunch. (“I think it is due to the fact,” he’d theorized earlier that year, “that they don’t take sufficient exercise.”)

But the slump in business wasn’t the main reason he’d decided to closed the restaurant, McGeorge told a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “The lack of parking space and the labor situation have also made things difficult,” he explained. “But the straw that broke the camel’s back was integration. I couldn’t submit to that.”

The newspaper’s editorial page, however, made no mention of McGeorge’s reason for closing in a goodbye paean titled “Farewell to Bob’s,” though it noted that he had been complaining for years, among other things, that “the colored kitchen help was unreliable.”

Two weeks later, George and Philip Shaheen opened Philip’s Restaurant in the space where Bob’s Seafood Grill had been, but in 1965 the two brothers sold their operation to Shoney’s Big Boy Restaurants. Today a parking lot occupies the site.

In 1968 Bob Tritton died at age 87 during a visit in Jacksonville, Florida.

January 24, 2023 By
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Elwood/ Indiana

Pecan Pie

Mangas Cafeteria

1436 Main Street
Elwood, Indiana

1946 – 1988

In 1916 Jack Mangas managed to make his way to America from the tiny village of Vordonia in southern Greece, a picturesque but poverty-stricken community at the base of Mount Taygetus. He had no knowledge of the English language and just $25 in his pocket. His destination was Elyria, Ohio, where, joining the relatives who had sponsored him to come and stay in the United States, he began working in an uncle’s candy and ice-cream shop. Mangas apparently learned the business so well that in just a few years he was able to open his own shop in New Albany, Indiana, a thriving city on the Ohio River just across from Louisville, Kentucky.

In 1922, just a few years after the end of World War I, Mangas was joined by his younger brother Jack, who’d left Greece with just $10 in his pocket. But the brothers grew restless in New Albany and began thinking about getting a fresh start elsewhere. One day a traveling salesman recommended Elwood, Indiana, some 150 miles or so due north, roughly halfway between Louisville and Chicago, with a passenger and freight depot operated by the Norfolk and Western Railway.

In 1928 the two brothers settled on Elwood as an ideal location for their new business and opened the Elwood Sweet Shoppe at 110 South Anderson Street, with George making the ice cream and Jack making the candy. For seven years they poured everything they made back into the business, which, despite the economic hardships of the Great Depression, was hugely successful.  

With the end of the Great Depression the Mangas brothers began thinking of building something bigger in Elwood. When they learned that Edward and Joseph DeHority were rebuilding a burned-out business complex on the corner of Anderson and Main Streets, they approached the other brothers about taking the lion’s share of space in the new building for a new cafeteria. This was not to be just any cafeteria, the Mangas brothers said, but a “super cafeteria” that could accommodate 150 patrons or more at a time.

The Mangas Cafeteria opened on November 14, 1941. It was ultramodern outside and in, with lots of stainless steel and chrome, a 42-foot counter along one side, and brightly colored Formica-topped tables. The average lunch was 75 cents, dinner $1. A slice of pie was 10 cents, and there were many varieties to choose from, including peach, raspberry, gooseberry, and a “mile high” lemon meringue. (The Mangas brothers would keep the Elwood Sweet Shoppe open until 1948.)

A month or so later, following the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, the cafeteria began offering free meals to those who donated blood, bought war bonds, or served overseas. And throughout the war the Mangas brothers, who were both beyond the age of service, backed the U.S. war effort in any way they could think of. They gave a free dinner for two to anyone who bought a $50 war bond, and in 1944, eight days after D-Day, they hosted an “Invasion Banquet” in the cafeteria. “Back the Attack,” their newspaper ads for the event said. “The purchase of a $100.00 war bond is your admittance!” (In future years, whenever uniformed service members or veterans who had served overseas came into the cafeteria, George Mangas, who manned the cash register, would not allow them to pay for their meals. “You served our country,” he’d tell them. “We’ll serve you.”)

In 1942 the Mangas brothers expanded the cafeteria by adding an annex to the side of the building. It featured scenic paintings by Ben Baker, a well-known Elwood artist. After the war they completely remodeled the inside, and in 1958 they expanded the cafeteria once again by adding the “Grecian Room” to the north side of the building. By now it could seat 400.

The Mangases closed the cafeteria every Wednesday so that they could travel to restaurants around Indiana to get ideas, visit with the owners, tour the kitchen facilities, and swap recipes. And on March 25 every year, the Mangas Cafeteria celebrated Greek Independence Day with authentic Greek dishes and music. And there were plenty of personal touches as well. The Mangases offered high-school graduates a free dinner or a large chocolate bar, and when parents came into the cafeteria with a new baby, the Mangases would give them a shiny silver dollar. Newly married couples could stop in for a complimentary meal, too, and George, who typically manned the cash register, handed every child leaving the cafeteria a tiny box containing two Chiclets. (He also loved to prank patrons with a couple of plastic ketchup and mustard bottles, loaded with red and yellow string, that he kept near the register, squeezing one of them to squirt a fake stream of the chosen condiment at his intended target.)

In 1976, after 48 years in business in Elwood, Jack and George Mangas, and their wives, decided to retire, turning the cafeteria operations over to Jack’s daughter, Georgia Skalkotos, and her husband, Nick. (Jack retired to Florida and died the following year at age 77.) The Skalkotoses kept the family cafeteria going until 1987, when Georgia decided to sell it to Forest Crawford. “It just struck me to buy it,” Crawford later recalled of his spur-of-the-moment decision, made when he and his wife started talking about the impending close of the cafeteria and decided to stop there to eat <on a trip to Ellwood for a church bazaar. Crawford remodeled and enlarged the cafeteria’s Grecian Room, turning it into Crawford’s Food Store, open 24 hours a day. The new business, however, never took off. “My idea was the grocery store and cafeteria would help each other, but it didn’t work out,” Crawford told a reporter for the local newspaper, saying that he aimed to sell the property. “I would have sworn it was a moneymaker….Obviously, it is not wanted or needed.” The Mangas Cafeteria closed December 11, 1988, and Crawford put it up for sale.

But soon the Mangas Cafeteria found a potential savior in Jerry Gillem, the owner of the Filling Station Tavern in nearby Kokomo, who bought the cafeteria from Crawford on contract for $300,000 and rehired its manager and cooks. Gillem had been in the restaurant business since 1958, when he introduced Kokomo to carryout pizza. The Mangas Cafeteria reopened March 3, 1989. Gillem had grand plans, saying that he wanted to expand it to hold more than 1,000 people. If he could get federal funding through the city, he said, he would combine the cafeteria with a vacant market that he also owned and turn the whole complex into a community center.

Things, however, didn’t work out that way. The Mangas Cafeteria closed for good on July 30, 1991, with Crawford telling reporters that Gillem had not been able to make payments on the property for the preceding six months.

In 1993 the building that for more than 50 years was home to the Mangas Cafeteria was demolished to make way for a new Hook’s drugstore. (It’s now a CVS Pharmacy.) Members of the Mangas family had paid the cafeteria a final visit before the demolition crew got started, and as the walls came down people plucked bricks and other objects from the rubble to keep as souvenirs.

George Mangas died in 2000 at age 97. Friends and other mourners passing by the casket at his memorial service were greeted with a basket full of the familiar little Chiclet boxes.

January 20, 2023 By
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Pinehurst/ North Carolina

Lobster à la Newburg

Gray Fox Restaurant

38 Chinquapin Road
Pinehurst, North Carolina

1940 – 1976

In 1941 Charles Frederick Herman, carrying all his belongings in a single bag, arrived in Pinehurst, North Carolina, to take a job at the Gray Fox Restaurant, which had opened with considerable fanfare the previous year. Until recently Herman, an Austrian-born chef, had been in charge of the kitchen at Tony’s Trouville, a favorite café-society hangout on East 52nd Street in New York City. But now his mission was to replace the larger-than-life man who just the year before had created the Gray Fox: Bucharest-born Alexandru (Alex) Papană, who’d earned fame as a world-class bobsledder and member of the Romanian bobsled team in the 1932 and 1936 Winter Olympic Games, as a captain in the Romanian Royal Air Force, and as a daring pilot and stunt flier who in 1938 had been christened “The Rumanian Lindbergh” by newspapers all over the United States.

In the summer of 1940 Mr. and Mrs. Livingston Biddle II had been introduced to Papană in New York City, and they persuaded him to visit Pinehurst, where they spent every winter, to see if he might be interested in taking over the Village Court Grill, which they had opened two years earlier. Papană, having recently damaged his plane on the runway of the Chicago Municipal Airport, decided to take the Biddles up on their offer. His first step was to engage a French-Algerian chef who most recently had worked at the exclusive Yeamans Hall Club in Hanahan, South Carolina, just outside Charleston. Then he renamed the restaurant, installed one of his largest aviation trophies in a conspicuous spot, and placed ads in the local newspaper that said: “Lunch—Tea—Bridge—Dinner. French Chef, French Cuisine.”

Papană’s first season at the Gray Fox, however, would turn out to be his last. In 1942 he started playing in amateur tennis tournaments and then resumed his career as a stunt pilot, appearing in air shows across the country, often getting top billing. He also had his eye on Hollywood, and he would go on to have tiny and typically uncredited parts in at least eight major motion pictures, including Above Suspicion (1943), The Song of Bernadette (1943), and Passage to Marseilles (1944).

Meanwhile, with the United States having entered World War II, Pinehurst was booming in a big way. The city served as a support area for neighboring Fort Bragg, which was being transformed from a small artillery training post into one of the nation’s most important military installations. Construction workers poured into the region from all over the state, and at one point they were completing new buildings at Fort Bragg at a rate of one every 32 minutes. Many of them came into Pinehurst at night for dinner, drinks, and dancing, and the USO Club in the Pinehurst Theater was also a magnet for military personnel and their spouses or guests.

With Papană out of the picture, the Biddles settled on Herman to replace him, and he was soon as his way to Pinehurst to be the restaurant’s chef when it opened for the season in October 1941. (Papană’s life came to a tragic end in 1946 when, despondent over the state of his weeks-old marriage, he disappeared into the desert 16 miles south of Las Vegas, parking his car off the highway and walking some three miles to a ravine, where he ingested a lethal dose of poison. The sheriff’s office found his body a week, along with two suicide notes, one in his coupe and the other in his pocket, that lamented the couple’s “lost love,” saying, “We could have been so very happy.”)

The Biddles aimed to make the Gray Fox a first-class, fashionable French restaurant where they could entertain dozens of friends at a time. As chef, Herman obliged. The menu for his 1941 “Gala Christmas Dinner” featured (in this order): cream of mushroom soup or casaba melon; celery, radishes, and olives; roast turkey with cranberry sauce, candied sweet potatoes, creamed pearl onions, and fresh string beans; the “Gray Fox Salad Bowl”; hot rolls; for dessert, a choice of frozen cream puffs with chocolate sauce, mince pie, English fruitcake, or pumpkin pie; and coffee. This extravagant dinner was served from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. for $1.75.

Patrons could dine either indoors or in an intimate courtyard, and Herman elevated the culinary stature of the Gray Fox to the point where the Raleigh News and Observer dubbed it “Pinehurst’s pièce de résistance to the gourmets of both the Army and civilian groups.” The restaurant was packed every night, inside and in the courtyard, with soldiers and their wives or dates. Harmon (Ham) Nelson, a musician who was best known as actress Bette Davis’s high-school sweetheart and first husband (they divorced in 1938), was stationed at Fort Bragg and became a regular at the Gray Fox, where after dinner he invariably ended up playing the piano for his own pleasure and that of the other patrons.

In 1945 Herman bought the Gray Fox from the Biddles, and at some point he also acquired a one-fourth interest in Village Court Company, Inc., which owned the building the restaurant occupied. Herman had once owned a restaurant in Chicago that went belly-up during the Great Depression, and he was determined not to let the Gray Fox fall victim to the same fate. Year by year the restaurant’s reputation grew. The only blip came in 1948, when state and county ABC agents put Pinehurst in their crosshairs, taking aim at “swanky night clubs and restaurants that are known to residents in all parts of the United States,” as the Raleigh News and Observer put it. “Officers said that some of the establishments sold drinks openly and in plentiful quantities,” the newspaper went on to report, and Herman, snared in a surprise nighttime raid, was one of more than 30 defendants charged with violating state liquor laws. (The enforcement drive soon petered out, even though the sale of liquor by the drink wouldn’t become legal in North Carolina until 1978.)

Herman, more than anyone else, made the Gray Fox into a Pinehurst institution—so much so that Marion Brown included several of his recipes in The Southern Cookbook, the wildly popular and still-in-print title that was originally published in 1951. Herman, however, didn’t confine himself to such high-end dishes as Lobster Newburg, which had been on his menus from the beginning. In 1959 the Gray Fox advertised “pizza pies to take out” in assorted sizes.

Herman died in October 1965 when he was pinned inside his wrecked car following an accident near the Moore County Airport. He was 77. He had no surviving relatives and left his $40,000 estate to charity, with most of it going to establish the Charles F. Herman Memorial Fund. His will stipulated that the fund was “to be used exclusively for educational purposes to assist needy and/or deserving persons of the Pinehurst School District in attending college or institutions of higher learning or schools or technical training.”

The Gray Fox closed with Herman’s death, but it reopened the following month with a new owner, Roy E. Babbin, who had acquired the restaurant from Herman’s estate and taken over its lease in the Village Court Building. Babbin, described in one newspaper account as “a professional opener of new food and beverage businesses,” specialized in flipping restaurants, which was evidently his plan for the Gray Fox. He restyled the restaurant as “The House of the Gray Fox” and the lounge inside as “The English Pub.”

But Babbin’s plan did go as expected, and in 1967 Livingston Biddle leased the Gray Fox to C.L. Worsham, Jr., Raymond Lee Williams, and Warwick Fay Neville. Worsham owned a supermarket and delicatessen in Pinehurst as well as a bakery and deli in nearby Southern Pines, and Williams, a butcher by trade, was the head of the supermarket’s meat department. (Neville, who’d begun his career as an investment banker with the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company in New York City, appears to have been a silent partner in the venture.)

But the restaurant business may have proved too much a challenge for Worsham and Williams. In 1970 they sold the Gray Fox to Wilma J. Cunningham, who had previously owned a restaurant in Akron, Ohio. The following year the Gray Fox changed hands yet again when Cunningham and her daughter sold it restaurant in 1971 to Thomas K. McNeil of New Jersey.

It was clear by now that the Gray Fox just wasn’t the same without Charlie Herman. Some said that most of the people visiting Pinehurst were choosing to eat meals at the hotels in which they were staying, but that explanation was only part of it. The churning after Herman’s death had clearly taken a big toll. In 1975 Bob Moore, the latest in the Gray Fox’s succession of owners, told a reporter that business at the restaurant was off about 40 percent over the previous years, saying, “It ain’t what it has been.”

The Gray Fox Restaurant closed its doors the following year. The space was then occupied by a gift shop, and when the gift shop closed it reopened once again as a restaurant. Later, Theo’s Taverna occupied the space for nearly 30 years before it closed in 2021.

January 19, 2023 By
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Las Vegas/ Nevada

Plum Pudding

Swiss Village Restaurant

116 Las Vegas Boulevard North
Las Vegas, Nevada

1946 – 1954

In the mid-1920s Walter Fredrick Wolfinger left his family in Switzerland to come to the United States and pursue his career as a chef, which before long would bring him to the fast-growing city of Las Vegas. Back then a big sign was strung across Fremont Street that read “Welcome to Las Vegas—The Gateway to Boulder Dam,” the massive federal construction project that had made the little railroad town Depression-proof. By the time the dam was officially rechristened Hoover Dam in 1947, Las Vegas was well on its way to way to becoming a gambling mecca.

In 1941 the city’s first hotel-casino, El Rancho Vegas, had opened on a stretch of Highway 91, the two-lane road that led all the way to Los Angeles. Five years later Guy McAfee, the proprietor of the Golden Nugget casino, nicknamed this area, directly south of the Las Vegas city limits, “The Strip.” Meanwhile, other hotel-casinos sprouted up on Fremont Street, which the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce promptly dubbed “Glitter Gulch.”

Wolfinger, called into the U.S. military during World War II, spent two years as a steward on the S.S. Clark Howell, one of the 2,711 “liberty ships” built by the U.S. Maritime Commission for wartime service. On returning to Las Vegas Wolfinger easily found work, and in 1944 the 38-year-old chef found a bride: Ruby Wilma Johnson, six years younger. The newlywed couple briefly operated a cafe on South 5th Street, and in 1945 Wolfinger took charge of the dining room at the The Players, a supper club on Highway 91, which billed him in its newspaper ads as a “World Famous Chef.”

But the Wolfingers clearly had greater ambitions, and on August 9, 1946, they opened the Swiss Village in a two-story building at 116 North Fifth Street that had once housed a construction company. (In 1959 Fifth Street would be renamed Las Vegas Boulevard.) They’d hired Richard Porter of Desert Designers to decorate the 100-seat restaurant, and he came through by painting large murals featuring famous Swiss scenes (including one of the Matterhorn) for the walls, installing glass-fronted “chalets” on the backbar behind the counter, and building an “Edelweiss Room” for private parties on a mezzanine above the kitchen. The waitresses wore Tyrolean costumes. The slot machines in the front of the restaurant didn’t exactly fit the restaurant’s Swiss theme, but no matter—they gave patrons something to do with their spare change.

Just months after the Swiss Chalet opened Wolfinger offered a special Thanksgiving dinner with these entrees: Roast Young Tom Turkey with Cornbread Dressing, Cranberry Sauce, and Giblet Gravy ($2.75); Baked Sugar-Cured Ham with Champagne Sauce ($3.00), and a New York Cut Sirloin Steak with Mushroom Sauce ($3.50). The dinner included an assortment of salted nuts, hearts of celery, scallions, radishes, and California fruit cocktail; cream of tomato or onion soup; a mixed green salad with French dressing; sweet potatoes; succotash or creamed pearl onions; and, for dessert, hot mince pie with brandy sauce, pumpkin pie, fresh strawberry cream pie, or fresh fruit.

In 1947 Wolfinger traveled to Switzerland to see his family for the first time in 21 years. Wilma didn’t go with him. An account of his trip in the Las Vegas Review-Journal noted that she had been “stricken with illness at the last moment and canceled her plans to go with her husband,” adding that “the couple plan another trip in the spring together.” But that may not have been the real story, as the following year Wilma was granted a divorce from Walter, who made no appearance in court. In a property settlement dated December 22, 1947, Wilma was given possession of the Swiss Chalet; Walter retained possession of a car and $1,000.

Soon after that Wilma sold the Swiss Village to Howard W. Gale, who brought in Paul Lollar to be its chef. Lollar made no radical changes in the menu. His 1951 Thanksgiving Day dinner menu, for example, included many of the same items that were among Wolfinger’s offerings five years earlier, from a “California Fruit Cup Grenadine” to the “Hot Mince Pie with Brandy Sauce.”

In 1952 Harry Farnow and Joe Schramm hired Wolfinger to be the chef of their new restaurant, Duffy’s Tavern, where he directed an open kitchen that was entirely visible to the patrons. Wolfinger, who’d remarried in 1949, didn’t stay long. Sometime that year he was back in the saddle at the Swiss Chalet with his second wife, Marion. They operated the Swiss Village until 1954, when the restaurant quietly closed its doors. The following year, after extensive renovations and remodeling, Bob Baskin and Garland Miner, the former operators of the Round-Up Drive In, opened Bob Baskin’s Restaurant in the same space.

Walt and Marion Wolfinger then moved to Cedar City, Utah, where in 1956 he bought Milt’s Stage Stop, a beer-and-sandwich place on Highway 14, and turned it into a family restaurant that served steaks and seafood. Four years later he opened a second restaurant, Walt’s Dinette, on South Main Street. He died in 1984 at age 78.

January 14, 2023 By
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