New York/ New York

Spaghetti and Clam Sauce Adano

Adano Italian Restaurant

115 West 48th Street
New York, New York

1945 – 1968

Nicholas (Nick) Toce was an experienced hand in the restaurant business by the time he and actor Albert Raymo opened Adano Italian Restaurant in New York City’s theater district in 1945. Through most of the 1930s Toce had owned and operated the Village Brewery, a lively restaurant and nightspot at 186 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village, and in 1938 he’d converted its main dining room into the golf-themed “19th Hole,” with pictures of famous golfers on the walls and an indoor driving range downstairs. in 1942 he’d relocated to Hartford, Connecticut, for a brief stint as the owner of the Colony Restaurant at 506 Farmington Avenue. But in 1945 Toce made his way back to New York City, bought Lorraine’s Restaurant at 115 West 48th Street, and, in partnership with Raymo, turned it into Adano.

Toce and Raymo drew the name for their restaurant from John Hersey’s novel, A Bell for Adano, which had been published in 1944 and made into a Broadway play the same year. It tells the story of an Italian-American officer in Sicily during World War II who wins the respect and admiration of the citizens of the small town of Adano (based on the real town of Licata) by helping them find a replacement for the town bell that Benito Mussolini’s Fascists had melted down for rifle barrels. Hersey’s book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1945 and that year was also made into a major motion picture.

The Broadway production of A Bell for Adano opened at the Cort Theatre on December 6, 1944. Fredric March was cast in the lead role as Major Victor Joppolo, and Raymo in a minor but important role as Pietro Afronti, a belligerent cart-driver. Adano, appropriately, was right across from the Cort (today the James Earl Jones Theatre) at 138 West 48th, and in all likelihood Raymo, who was also a talented artist, painted the mural-like scenes of Italy that decorated the restaurant’s walls. But Raymo seems to have gone his own way soon after A Bell for Adano closed ion Broadway in October 1945.

Toce, who was not yet even a teenager when he came to the United States from Italy in 1900, had served such distinctly American foods as fried chicken in the restaurants he’d previously owned. But with Adano he finally got the chance to go full-bore Italian. Approached in 1937 by the “Inquiring Photographer” of the New York Daily News, he’d made a case for the superiority of his native cuisine. “Italian food is most appetizing because it is cooked in good oils and is generally a blend of the finest ingredients,” he explained. “In other words, a good Italian cook is a good dietician.”

Toce saw to it that the generous assortment of antipasti awaiting guests as they entered Adano’s dining room—including fried zucchini, stuffed artichokes, stuffed mushrooms, and stuffed peppers—was prepared from scratch each morning. Likewise, he insisted that all the pasta served at the restaurant be made on the premises, and there were lots of pasta dishes to be had, including lasagna, manicotti, and spaghetti with either red or white clam sauce.  Other entrées included such Italian mainstays as Chicken Romano and Veal Rollatini. For dessert the best choice was always the house-made rum cake, an Adano specialty.

In 1951 Toce died at age 63 after what the New York Times described as “a long illness.” At that point his widow, Mamie, took over operations at Adano, backed by Claudio Stagnaro, the restaurant’s Genoa-born head chef.

Adano ambled through the years ahead  quite successfully, but as Mamie turned 70 in the mid-1960s she evidently began to think about retiring. In 1967 Craig Claiborne of the New York Times gave Adano a one-star review, writing that the menu was “by and large standard” and that the food was “prepared and seasoned with a somewhat heavy hand.”

Adano closed the following year, with its fixtures and furnishings sold at auction.

Mamie Toce died in New York City in 1982 at age 88.

February 18, 2023 By
0
Lafayette/ Indiana

Refrigerator Rolls

Johnson’s Jiffy Food Shop

2321 Wallace Avenue
Lafayette, Indiana

1949 – 1961

On August 11, 1949, Mr. and Mrs. Carl E. Johnson opened a novel “fast food” operation at 2321 Wallace Avenue in Lafayette, Indiana. This was the perfect location. It was directly across from the 3,152-seat Columbian Park Stadium, which since its construction in 1940 had been home to the city’s semipro baseball team, the Red Sox, and right next door to the Original Frozen Custard, which had been in business there since 1932.

Their idea was to offer all kinds of prepared foods that customers could either take home, eat on the premises in a little coffee shop, or have served to their guests at a catered party or other such event. They named their new business Johnson’s Jiffy Food Shop and came up with a menu that included delicatessen-style salads (potato, bean, or ham), chop suey (chicken or veal), and fried chicken cooked to order, as well as a variety of breads, home-made pies, and snack items. They also came up with a slogan: “Your Taste Will Tell You Why.”

The Johnsons, as it happened, were newlyweds, as they’d just gotten married in 1949. The plan was for Carl to keep his job with the Monon Railroad (also known as the Chicago, Indianapolis, and Louisville Railway), which operated almost entirely within the state of Indiana. He’d been a clerk for the railroad since the mid-1920s, and the position had seen him through the Great Depression and World War II. Marguerite Johnson (née Westfall), his new bride, would be the moving force behind the business.

In 1950 Johnson’s Jiffy Food Shop began advertising that it would deliver, at no extra charge, its “piping hot steak or chicken dinners” to any customer who ordered at least three of them. A couple of years later Marguerite added shrimp baskets and shrimp dinners to the menu , as well as “Spaghetti, Italian Style.” By then the coffee shop had been upgraded to a “dining room,” and the “food shop” to a “delicatessen.”

Marguerite continued to build up the catering side of the business, advertising it as “Lafayette’s Only Complete Catering Service,” and in 1956 she developed a line of fresh “Johnson’s Jiffy Salads” for sale in local grocery stores.

In 1957 the Johnsons decided to sell their business to Robert J. Lannon, who’d previously owned and operated Stauffer’s Drive-In—which he eventually renamed R-J Drive-In—at 249 Main Street Levee (today 249 East State Street) in West Lafayette. Three years later Lannon built the Midtown Plaza shopping center on the site and relocated Johnson’s Jiffy Foods, as it now was known, there. (Lones Music Studio took over the space on Wallace Avenue.)

In 1961 Lannon sold Johnson’s Jiffy Foods in anticipation of being appointed by the Lafayette Board of Health to the $3,600-a-year position of city sanitary officer (he assumed the post in January 1962). The new owners of the business, Everett and Frances Goris, converted it into a catering-only operation and three years later sold it to Gerald A. (Jerry) Lemm, who merged it into his own catering firm, Jerry’s and Addie’s Catering.

Carl Johnson retired from his job with the Monon Railroad in 1966. He died in 1977 at age 76. Marguerite, who remarried some years later, died in 2017 in Bloomington, Indiana, at age 100.

February 17, 2023 By
0
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Soft-Shell Crabs with Amandine Sauce

Bush’s Steak House

100 Riverpark Drive
East St. Louis, Illinois

1946 – 1961

In 1946 Jerry Bush and two partners, Sam Magin and Jack Langer, opened Bush’s Steak House at 100 West Broadway Avenue in East St. Louis, Illinois. The three men were well-known in the area, Bush having been the manager of the clubhouse at Fairmount Race Track in nearby Collinsville and Magin and Langer the operators of the old Mounds Club, a notorious nightclub and casino that was a haven for gamblers and other high rollers in the area. The three men had taken over The Barn, a tavern whose owners had seen their liquor license suspended for serving drinks to two teenage girls, and spent more than $100,000 to turn it into a first-class restaurant with what they would tout as a stainless-steel “Kitchen of Tomorrow.”

In the years immediately after World War II, East St. Louis was home to more than 300 drinking establishments, from hole-in-the-wall joints to proper restaurants, with many of them on Illinois Highway 40 from just over the Eads Bridge—the huge arch bridge over the Mississippi River that connected St. Louis, Missouri, with East St. Louis—all the way to the Fairmount Race Track and beyond. But Bush’s Steak House, even with its three bars, stood out from the moment it opened on November 15, 1941. “This is one place where entertainment takes a back seat to the gustatory pleasures,” a columnist for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat observed a couple of weeks later. “And although the newness of the decorations doesn’t reach the ornate, the place in its surroundings stands out like a diamond in a pile of coal dust.”

In 1947 Bush’s Steak House was advertising lunch from 75 cents to $1.25 and dinner from $1.75 to $2.50, with steaks, chops, lobster, and other seafood heading the menu—all served in “the most sanitary restaurant in the Middle West.” The fact that it was just three minutes from downtown St. Louis over the Eads Bridge was a big boost, not to mention the craps tables and various other accoutrements of a casino tucked away inside. Yet another plus was the presence in the kitchen of German-born chef Joseph Ott, who’d made quite a name for himself from working in hotels and restaurants all over the world. (Ott had once even been the chief steward on John D. Rockefeller’s yacht.)

Within just a few years, however, Bush and his partners apparently were ready to let go of the restaurant. In 1950 they sold Bush’s Steak House to John T. (Jack) English, Sr., the former police commissioner of East St. Louis; his two sons, Edward and Jack Jr.; and Martin Miller, a family friend. They built it into an even more popular late-night hangout for politicians, musicians and other entertainers, and high rollers from the city’s illegal casinos.  “Our bar was open until 6 a.m., so it wasn’t unusual for show-business people to come to Bush’s to have a late dinner and just wind down,” Ed English would recall years later. “One night, the Ritz Brothers came by. At that time they were starring at the Chase Club, in the Hotel Chase. ‘They started clowning. Jimmy Ritz began working behind the bar with my brother, Jack. Harry put a towel over his arm and started waiting tables. Al took the stage as the emcee.”

When John T. English, Sr., died in April 1957, his two sons decided to sell Bush’s Steak House and pursue separate careers.

Sold their interest to Miller for $60,000 but later charged him with reneging on the deal.

 Jack bought the former Sinn’s Inn at 8629 West Main Street in nearby Belleville, Illinois, and renamed it Jack English’s Bar (in 1964 he moved it to 9735 West Main Street). Ed went into the insurance and real estate and becoming the moving force behind Dorchester Village, a sprawling subdivision of single-family homes and apartment buildings in Belleville.

In 1959 the new owners of Bush’s Steak House, John K. De Bernardi and Glenn Kennison, completely remodeled and refurbished the restaurant. That year, in keeping with the rough-and-tumble reputation of East St. Louis, one man was killed and another seriously wounded in an early-morning shooting at the restaurant. The following year Bush’s Steak House morphed into a full-fledged nightclub, with Kennison, who’d previously managed the Playdium Lounge in East St. Louis, booking the acts.

In June 1951, Bush’s Steak House closed without notice. On September 10, a fire swept through the 50-by-200-foot building that had been a landmark dining destination in East St. Louis, causing some $50,000 in damage. De Bernardi told officials of the fire department that the structure was not insured.

West Broadway Avenue was renamed Riverpark Drive in the 1990s.

February 17, 2023 By
0
Oakland/ California

Veal Piccata

Diamond Jim’s

245 West MacArthur Boulevard
Oakland, California

1965 – 1971

The city of Oakland, California, was ready to be wowed in a big way when the MacArthur-Broadway Center opened its doors on September 9, 1965. In advance of the opening, full-page newspaper ads breathlessly hyped the “space-age” indoor mall as “a whole century ahead of its time…the most fantastic one-stop shopping and dining extravaganza in the entire universe!”­ It did, in fact, seem like something right out of The Jetsons, the prime-time cartoon sitcom that had debuted on the ABC television network three years earlier. A “Space Ramp” would take customers from the mall to a landing area where “Space Cadets” would help them with their bags and bundles onto an “Astro-Bus” that would take them to the 1,100-car “Space Port” rooftop parking lot on the roof.

The mall’s promoters also promised “a star-studded galaxy” of shops, services, and places to eat, including more than a dozen specialty cafes and such in “The Hamlet,” an early iteration of the food court. But the star dining attraction, opening on the same day as the shopping center, was Diamond Jim’s, the newest of 32 restaurants owned by Associated Hosts, Inc., the Beverly Hills-based restaurant chain that Joseph Bulasky had developed from Coffee Dan’s, his first Los Angeles venture in 1945.

Bulasky’s company reportedly spent $350,000 on the opulent interior of Diamond Jim’s, in keeping with the style of its namesake, Diamond Jim Brady (1856-1917), a millionaire businessman and financier known as much for his appetite as his wealth. Among his many other reported excesses, one story goes, Brady liked to mash a pound of caviar into his baked potatoes. George Rector, the proprietor of one of Brady’s favorite restaurants in New York City and later a famous food columnist and author, once called Brady “the best 25 customers I ever had.”

The Diamond Jim’s at 245 West MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland had all the Victorian trappings of the Gilded Age in which Brady lived: antique brass coach lamps, dark mahogany paneling, deep-red velour wallpaper, crystal chandeliers, leather banquettes, and, on the walls, ornately framed oil paintings of nude women. The restaurant’s cocktail lounge featured a piano bar and nightly entertainment.

Diamond Jim’s was chiefly a steak house, though, in addition to the charcoal-broiled steaks, dishes such as Veal Piccata and Spaghetti Caruso made regular appearances as featured entrées. An unusual touch came toward the end of each meal, when a basket of fresh fruit would be brought to the table along with a wedge of cheese and an assortment of crackers.

For whatever reason, the Diamond Jim’s in Oakland never really caught on. In 1971 Associated Hosts redecorated and rebranded it as the Ponderosa House of Prime Rib, with a menu limited to a full-bone cut of prime rib and four other entrées. But the Ponderosa concept, which had proved successful in the Los Angeles area, didn’t work out so well, either, and Associated Brands soon changed the restaurant back to Diamond Jim’s. In 1972, for what seemed like the blink of an eye, it became the Marquis. Then Maury Bleuel, the owner of the MacArthur-Broadway Center, formed a partnership with restaurateur Jerry Mancus, the owner of Mancuso’s restaurant in Pleasant Hill, to open a second Mancuso’s where Diamond Jim’s had been. But in keeping with the seeming curse on the location, Mancuso’s was put up for sale in 1972 and the following year became The Fox.

In later years the MacArthur-Broadway Center would become a rundown and somewhat scary shadow of its former self, and in 1997 Kaiser Permanente bought the nearly vacant mall with an eye toward converting into an outpatient and walk-in medical center. It demolished the shopping mall in 2009 to make way for a new hospital.

February 12, 2023 By
0
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
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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
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