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
0
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
0
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
1
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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Beaverton/ Oregon

Chiles Rellenos (Stuffed Peppers)

Tico Taco

12525 Southwest Canyon Road
Beaverton, Oregon

1958 – 1962

Sometime in the 1950s, John H. Knox, who’d grown up in New Mexico, hit on the idea of bringing authentic Mexican food to Oregon, and in June 1957 he opened Tico Taco on the highway leading into Gearhart, a quiet little town nestled among the dunes that hug the Pacific Ocean along the state’s North Coast. One early patron was Bill Jenkins, the managing editor of the Klamath Falls Herald and News, who rated Knox’s new restaurant “highly recommended,” noting that “the tacos were good and the enchilada really out of this world for a commercial product.”

It wasn’t long, however, before Knox had set his sights on a bigger target: the city of Beaverton, just seven miles west of Portland in the Tualatin Valley. Knox and a partner, C. Donald Adams, spent some $65,000 to build a 2,700-square-foot, 100-seat place at what was then 120 N.W. Canyon Road. (Today, because of changes in Beaverton’s addressing grid, the address would be 12525 S.W. Canyon Road.) When the new Tico Taco opened on January 17, 1952, a big ad in the Portland Oregonian heralded it as “Oregon’s Finest Original Mexican Restaurant.”

Tico Taco featured Mexican folk dancers in its Fiesta Room, and the food was Mexican through and through, too, from the tortillas (“We Make Our Own,” the menu proudly announced) to more than a half-dozen combination dinners (No. 1, priced at $2, included albondiga soup; an enchilada, taco, and tamale; refried beans; and a “corn crispie”). The kitchen, headed by Harry Conzalles, a chef from a town near Mexico City, also served up such south-of-the-border staples as chili con carne, chile rellenos, huevos rancheros, Spanish-style and charbroiled steaks, tostadas, burritos, and guacamole salad. Then there was the chile sauce. “The sauce is very hot and some people can’t take it,” Knox told an interviewer soon after Tico Taco opened in Beaverton.

Knox’s restaurant, however, may have been before its time. Tico Taco closed on January 1, 1962, just a couple of weeks before what would have been its fourth anniversary. A few months later, after a $100,000 remodeling job, the Town and Country Restaurant opened at the same location, though it, too, would close the following year.

January 7, 2023 By
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Colorado Springs/ Colorado

Apple Cream Pie

Johnny Appleseed Cottage

1114 South Nevada Avenue
Colorado Springs, Colorado

1951 – 1957

In 1951 George E. Snow, a Texas-born real estate salesman, and his wife, Ruth, opened a little restaurant in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that they called the Johnny Appleseed Cottage. No matter that their restaurant’s famed namesake—a.k.a.  John Chapman, born in Massachusetts in 1774—never made it to Colorado, getting only as far west as Fort Wayne, Indiana, as he spent 50 years planting apple seeds and seedlings across a broad stretch of the American frontier.

The Snows’ new restaurant made its debut on August 22 in a little house at 1114 South Nevada Avenue that reportedly had once been owned by Frank Daily, a local underworld figure. There was an apple-shaped neon sign out front that beckoned diners with the promise of pit-barbecue dinners. There were little red apples painted on the eaves of the storybook-like cottage and on the white picket fence that surrounded it. The theme carried inside, where Ruth had seen to it that the walls of both dining rooms were covered with wallpaper depicting scenes in the life of Johnny Appleseed and that the draperies, tables, chairs, dishes, and napkins were in colors associated with different varieties of apples.

As for the specialties of the house, the Snows wisely brought in Andrew Bender, a veteran barbecue man who also happened to be a Baptist minister. Bender, who’d earned his spurs in the kitchen of The Flaming Pit, a famous barbecue restaurant in Denver, slow-cooked all manner of meats in an open pit over applewood and also pork butt, ribs, ham, beef brisket and chicken, barbecued over an open pit using applewood and also turned out charcoal-broiled steaks and trout.

In 1954 a national magazine dubbed the Johnny Appleseed “justly famous,” citing its barbecued meats and excellent desserts. The star of the restaurant’s dessert menu was—what else?—a luscious Apple Cream Pie.

In 1957, for reasons that have been lost to history, the Johnny Appleseed quietly closed its doors, and the quaint little cottage sat vacant for three years. In 1961 Lee and Bonnie Coleman reopened it as the Johnny Appleseed Restaurant, but they apparently weren’t stay in business for more than a few months.

The Snows later moved to Denver, where Ruth died at age 74 in 1977 and George at age 83 in 1985.

January 6, 2023 By
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Carlsbad/ New Mexico

Roquefort Dressing

The Red Barn

1408 North Canal Street
Carlsbad, New Mexico

1947 – 1963

In 1943 Marge and Bill Fowler bought a large ranch in Carlsbad, New Mexico, that had been built in 1918, six years after New Mexico became a state. The ranch, directly north of the La Huerta Bridge, was owned by C.A. Pierce, the general superintendent of the U.S. Potash Company, whose pioneering work had helped to make Carlsbad “the potash capital of the United States.” In 1941 Piece had built a red barn and stables on his ranch so large that during the early years of World War II pilots used it as a landmark, and it was mostly that feature that led the Fowlers to buy the property in 1943.

Several years later the Fowlers took over the Arrowhead Drive-In, a popular counter- and curb-service spot across from Carlsbad High School, but they were forced to go to court when the owner, Soda McLaughlin, tried to terminate their lease so that he could sell the restaurant for a higher price than the Fowlers were willing to pay. “Used to be where a landlord tried to keep a tenant in a building,” the Judge James B. McGhee said in ruling for the Fowlers. “Now it is where he is trying to get him out.”

But the Fowlers undoubtedly realized that their days at the Arrowhead Drive-In were numbered, and in 1946 they moved to the Old Barge Café, a relatively new restaurant right on the Pecos River at Lakeview Courts. Meanwhile, Don had been hosting open-to-the-public dances at the big barn on their property at 1408 North Canal Street, and soon they began converting it into a rustic restaurant they would call the Red Barn.

The Red Barn opened on April 6, 1947. At first the Fowlers offered only two entrees—charcoal-broiled steaks and country-fried chicken—in their small dining room. But they soon set about expanding their restaurants, and within the next couple of years it earned recommendations from the American Automobile Association, Duncan Hines, and Gourmet magazine. Each meal came with French fries or mashed potatoes, a salad, and, for a little extra, a slice from one of the pies baked by Pearl Hogan especially for the Red Barn. And, in the restaurant’s early years folks in Carlsbad could have a complete steak or chicken dinner delivered to their door for $3.00.

On entering the restaurant patrons saw a wall lined with menus from famous restaurants all over the world, and during the winter months the Fowlers kept a camp coffee pot over the fire in the Pine Room and served coffee to guests as they sat down. In 1954 the Red Barn was featured in Life magazine, which dubbed it “a favorite party spot” in Carlsbad.

In 1961 the Fowlers sold the Red Barn and moved to Taos, where the following year they opened the Hickory Tree, a barbecue place, on Santa Fe Road. The restaurant’s new owners were Donald E. Protz, who’d been a mining engineer with the Potash Corporation of America, and his wife, Mattie.

The Protzes had been operating the Red Barn for about two and a half years when, on December 13, 1963, the restaurant burned to the ground after it had closed for the evening. Many attributed the loss to the lack of adequate firefighting capabilities in the area, and after the fire the Protzes spearheaded a successful drive to organize the La Huerta Volunteer Fire Department.

Don Protz died in 1976 at age 69; Mattie Protz died in 1994 at age 82.

The Fowlers went go on to open two other restaurants in Taos: the Doll House, where Marge Fowler displayed her magnificent collection of rare dolls, in 1965, and the Red Chimney Pit Bar-B-Q in 1983.

December 30, 2022 By
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Waverly/ Iowa

Apple Dumplings

Carver’s Restaurant

1600 West Bremer Avenue
Waverly, Iowa

1953 – 1987

In 1952 Robert L. Carver and his wife, Connie, gave up their home in Whittier, California, to move with their three daughters to Waverly, Iowa, where they planned to open a restaurant. They found a perfect location on the western edge of town at 1660 West Bremer Avenue, right at the intersection of U.S. Route 218 and State Highway 3, and in 1953 opened Carver’s Coffee Shop and Dining Room there.

Built in the style known today as midcentury modern, Carver’s looked as if it could have been imported directly from California. It was popular from the beginning, drawing customers from Minnesota and all over northeast Iowa who appreciated the attention Bob Carver lavished on the food he served there. By 1954 Carver’s was billing itself—with just a morsel of hyperbole—as “Iowa’s Finest Restaurant.”

In 1956 Carver decided to return to California to manage a chain of restaurants and supermarkets owned by F. Donald Nixon, the brother of Vice President Richard M. Nixon. (Carver would leave Nixon’s, Inc., a little over a year later to open Carver’s Coffee Shop in East Whittier.) The Carvers found a buyer for their Waverly restaurant in Robert L. Benck, who owned and operated a motel right next door. Benck announced his plans to keep the restaurant open seven days a week—it had been closed on Mondays—and to open earlier each day to accommodate customers in search of breakfast. The only thing Benck didn’t plan to change, he said, was the restaurant’s name, which by now was known simply as Carver’s.

For the most part the menu didn’t change, either. Top billing still went to Carver’s Deluxe Hamburger (“It’s love at first bite!”), but there was also a “Steak Night” every Saturday and a special turkey dinner every Sunday. And many customers would make a special trip just for a piece of Carver’s pecan pie.

In 1973 Carver’s Restaurant changed hands again when Otto Schnider, a Swiss-born restaurant manager who’d worked at the Des Moines Club in Des Moines, the Drake Hotel in Chicago, and the Pere Marquette Hotel in Peoria, bought it. For a while it became, confusingly, Otto Schnider’s Carver’s Restaurant, and then Otto’s Carver’s Restaurant. Schnider and his wife, Katie, introduced the Swiss Chateau Room, an “all-German smorgasbord,” multicourse “gourmet dinners” prepared by German-born chef Martin Vollmer on the last Tuesday of each month, and what was advertised as the “largest salad bar in northeast Iowa.”

In 1980 Carver’s changed hands once again when Larry Kussatz and his wife, Susan, became its new owners. Kussatz, a Waterloo native who’d previously been a music teacher at Waterloo Central High School, introduced “musical meals” served in a separate dining room by waiters and waitresses who doubled, between courses, as “Carver’s Singers.” And, for the Friday-night German buffet, there was Frank Lundak playing his “Yugoslavian Button Box”—a handmade five-row diatonic button accordion.

Carver’s 35-year run ended when the restaurant closed with little fanfare in 1987. It was replaced by a franchised Country Kitchen restaurant, part of a rapidly expanding chain of 250 or so outlets, most of them in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

December 14, 2022 By
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Sedalia/ Missouri

Mel’s Salami Treat

Beverly’s Drive-In Restaurant

1705 West Broadway Boulevard
Sedalia, Missouri

1954 – 1986

Melvin H. (Mel) Carl wasted little time after news came on December 5, 1933, that Utah had become the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, officially ending Prohibition in the United States. Carl immediately began laying plans to open a tavern in his hometown of Sedalia, Kansas, even though the state had not ratified the 21st Amendment. In early 1935 he applied for a permit to sell liquor at 211 South Ohio Avenue, and as soon as he had the permit in hand he opened Mel Carl’s Tavern. Business was so good out of the gate that by 1936 he decided to expand and redecorate his establishment so as to provide, the Sedalia Democrat observed, “larger food accommodations for the patronage which his place enjoys.”

Carl’s next move came in 1949, when he opened Beverly’s Snack Shop (named for his 11-year-old daughter) at 520 South Ohio Avenue. The following year he renamed it Beverly’s Snack and Steak Shop and, then, Beverly’s Steak House.

Carl’s big break came in 1954, when he arranged to lease one of three available spaces in the brand-new Broadway Plaza Shopping Center at 1705 West Broadway Boulevard, which was anchored by a giant Kroger supermarket. Closing the operation on South Ohio Avenue, he spent some $40,000 to equip and furnish his new restaurant, which featured a 30-foot soda fountain and counter on one side of the room, seven sets of booths on the other, several tables in the middle, and a bar with 15 stools in the back, for a total seating capacity of about 90. As they’d done before, Carl and his wife, Emma, decided to name the new restaurant after their daughter, now 17 years old, and all three would work there in the years ahead.

Beverly’s Drive-in Restaurant made its debut on June 15, 1954, with Carl dubbing it “The House of Fine Foods” in newspaper ads for the grand opening.

In 1957 Carl suddenly found his name in the news when a sandwich recipe he entered in a competition sponsored by the National Restaurant Association and the Wheat Flour Institute was judged one of the top 20 out of more than 700 submitted. Soon his recipe for “Mel’s Salami Treat” appeared in newspapers all over the country.

In 1959, with Mel’s health in decline, the Carls announced that they had sold their restaurant to Thurlow and May Belle Puckett, who for many years had owned a cafe in Sedalia. Aside from dropping the “Drive-In” from the name of the restaurant, the Pucketts kept things pretty much as they had been from the beginning, with steak and fried chicken at the top of the menu, and an assortment of pies (made by pastry cook Isa Cayton) heading the dessert list.

There were daily specials galore, like this one described in a 1964 newspaper ad: “Stewed Chicken with Dumplings, Potatoes, and Salad. Choice of Two Vegetables, Hot Roll and Butter, Coffee or Tea. Complete Dinner, 95 cents.” Plus: “We serve the only Rum Cream Pie and the tastiest Fresh Strawberry Pie in the Sedalia area.”

Mel Carl died in 1966 at age 64. The Pucketts operated Beverly’s Restaurant until 1978, when they sold it to Tony and Pat Rimel, who restyled it as Beverly’s House of Fine Foods. The restaurant closed in 1986.

A footnote: The state of Kansas has never ratified the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

December 13, 2022 By
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