Ambrosia Chiffon Pie

Molly’s Restaurant

5756 Central Avenue North
St. Petersburg, Florida

1950 – 1960

Lincoln L. Loper already had more than 25 years in the restaurant business under his belt—first in Milwaukee, then in Seattle, and then in several different cities in Iowa—when, in 1950, he and his wife, Florence, moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, bought a brand-new building at the corner of Central Avenue and 58th Street, remodeled it for their purposes, and opened Molly’s Restaurant.

The Lopers billed their restaurant as the “House of Good Food”—the legend emblazoned above the awning and on the big sign out front—as well as “The Best Place in Town to Eat Full Course Dinners.” The restaurant offered table, counter, and booth service, and customers could get their fill of comfort food at Molly’s without spending a lot of money. Weekday plate lunches, for example, were just 60 cents. Complete Sunday dinners ranged in price from $1.15 for “Fried Snapper Fingers” to $2.50 for a “Grilled Large T-Bone Steak”—served with chicken noodle soup or tomato or papaya juice, a combination salad with French dressing, and homemade rolls and butter—with a half-dozen other entrees in between. And in 1956 diners at Molly’s could get a full Thanksgiving dinner—roast turkey, roast Long Island duckling, or prime rib with soup or salad, side dishes, dessert, and beverage—for just $1.94.

In 1959 Loper bought a 100-acre of virgin land in western Brazil on the advice of his brother-in-law, who’d seen the tract while living in Sao Paolo. “He said the soil was rich and the climate was perfect,” Loper told a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times., adding that his grandfather had traveled west in a covered wagon during the California Gold Rush. “My wife and I plan to visit our ranch next summer. If we like it we may buy more and perhaps settle there.”

But Brazil, at least for the Lopers was not to be. In 1960 they announced that they had sold the building at 5756 Central Avenue to the I.C. Helmly Furniture Company, and Molly’s Restaurant closed on September 30 of that year. Lincoln Loper died in St. Petersburg in 1973 at age 79.

December 9, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Milwaukee/ Wisconsin

Sour Cream Salad Dressing

Strucel’s Supper Club

8253 West Appleton Avenue
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

1963 – 1996

Stanley and Beatrice Strucel opened Strucel’s Supper Club in 1963, and within just a short time they would be advertising it, with only a bit of hyperbole, as “Milwaukee’s most exquisite restaurant and cocktail lounge.” Strucel’s was a grand place, and on most nights of the week the restaurant would be packed with patrons who kept coming back for its prime-rib and fish-fry dinners.

By the mid-1980s Stanley and Beatrice were ready to retire from the restaurant business, and in 1985 they sold Strucel’s to their son Jack and his wife, Barbara Jean (“BJ”). (Beatrice died four years later, and Stanley died at age 86 in 2005.) The younger Strucels ran the restaurant and bar for 11 years and watched the neighborhood around it gradually decline until, as Jack put it, “we made the very difficult decision to sell.”

Strucel’s closed on August 10, 1996. A little while after that it reopened with a new owner and a new name—Alondra’s Restaurant. Within a year, however, a fire put Alondra’s out of business, and the building at 8253 West Appleton Avenue has pretty much been a boarded-up shell ever since.

December 8, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Skowhegan/ Maine

Indian Pudding

Gene’s

69 Water Street
Skowhegan, Maine

1929 – 1973

Eugene C. Tarbox started out as a cabinetmaker but decided in his early 40s to put down one set of tools for another and become a restaurateur. In 1929 he opened Gene’s at 69 Water Street in Skowhegan, Maine, a picturesque little town on the banks of the Kennebec River. Tarbox had no way of knowing that the Great Depression would begin that year, too, but his restaurant thrived under his management through the next decade, becoming a well-known stopping place for travelers on U.S. Route 2, the principal east–west route through the central portion of Maine.

At a time when many restaurants were cutting corners as they struggled to stay in business, Tarbox obsessed over the quality of everything served in the establishment that bore his name. All the milk and cream at Gene’s, for example, came from the herd of registered Jersey cows that Tarbox maintained at his own farm. Little wonder that the restaurant’s home-made ice cream was one of the things that made Gene’s, as its newspaper ads said, “A Delightful Place to Dine.”

In 1945 Tarbox brought on Stanley (Stan) T. Tyks, a former manager of the Hotel Oxford in Skowhegan, as a partner in his restaurant. In just a few years Tyks would be voted president of the Maine Restaurant Association, and Tarbox would go on, with his son, to establish another restaurant, the Three G’s, in Skowhegan. (Tarbox retired for good in 1960 and died at age 82 in 1966.)

In 1963 Edmund P. Branch, a veteran restaurant and hotel manager, joined Tyks as a partner in Gene’s, and he oversaw an extensive remodeling the following year. Expo ’67, as the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal was popularly known, offered the prospect of increased business, but it apparently was not to be, with Branch telling a reporter that the much-hyped world’s fair had proved “less than stimulating.”

In 1972 Branch moved to Northeast Harbor, Maine, where he converted the restaurant next to the Kimball Terrace Inn into the Mast and Rudder. That same year Tyks died in his home, at age 58, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and Gene’s restaurant closed soon after that.

The building that housed Gene’s for more than 40 years has since been home to a variety of businesses, including a pub, a pool hall, a clothing shop, and, most recently, Leakos’s Auction House & Gallery.

December 8, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Torrance/ California

Barbecued Pork

Ichabod Crane’s Tarry Town Tavern

2808 Sepulveda Boulevard
Torrance, California

1976 – 1987

In 1975 Harry Prodromides—Harry Prod, as most everyone knew him—decided that it was the right time to open a restaurant he could call his own. For a couple of years, as a vice president of Host International, Inc., he’d been managing the firm’s 18 Red Onion restaurants in and around Los Angeles. In that role he’d forged a friendship with Jose Ruiseco, a top-flight bartender who’d worked his way up to a management position at the Red Onion in Torrance. When Prod and Ruiseco learned that a sprawling restaurant property in Torrance would soon be available, they saw opportunity knocking. It didn’t seem to bother them that the building had been home to three different restaurants—first Gallareto’s, then Thirty Tons of Bricks, and then Neptune’s West—in just four years.

The 1970s was the heyday of American theme restaurants, and Prod and Ruiseco found just what they needed in the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the famous short story by Washington Irving first published in 1819. They enlisted Arthur Valdes, an up-and-coming architect and designer in Newport Beach, to give the building at 2808 West Sepulveda Boulevard an appropriate makeover (with such rooms as the Grand Salon, Katrina’s Cottage, Sleepy Hollow, the Study, and the Van Tassel Gallery), and their new restaurant, Ichabod Crane’s Tarry Town Tavern, opened its doors there on February 26, 1976.

From the beginning the specialty of the house was prime rib of beef, styled on the menu as “Roast’d Prime Ribs of Beefe,” served with a spoon bread pudding, a spinach popover, and a vegetable. Other entrees followed suit, style-wise, including “Hickory Smoked Barbecued Beefe Ribs” and “New England Boyled Brisquet of Corn’d Beefe,” as well as other beef and seafood dishes that changed with the seasons. When it came time for dessert, there was proverbial pièce de resistance: Baked Alaska, flambéed at the table.

In 1981, with Ruiseco by then out of the picture, Harry Prod and his wife, Linda, opened a second Ichabod Crane’s Tarry Town Tavern in La Habra, about 30 miles to the west of Torrance. Over time, though, the fortunes of both restaurants waned. Ichabod Crane’s Tarry Town Tavern closed in 1987, and all the restaurant’s antique furniture, artwork, leaded glass windows, and collectibles were sold.

King’s Hawaiian Bakery & Restaurant moved into the building in 1988 and has been there ever since.

December 6, 2022 By Bill Hogan

New York/ New York

Chicken Pagan

Camillo Restaurant

160 East 48th Street
New York, New York

1956 – 1964

In the late 1940s, while he was working as a pastry chef in New York City, Camillo Sidoli began dreaming of owning his own restaurant. Soon, however, a wee problem entered the picture: In 1951 Lawton Carver, a syndicated sports columnist, and Mike Manuche, a college football standout and Pacific War hero, had opened a Camillo’s Restaurant, so named for unknown reasons, that was attracting such big-name sports celebrities as boxer Rocky Graziano and New York Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto.

Sidoli got around the problem by naming his new restaurant Villa Camillo. It opened in 1952 at 142 East 55th Street, just east of Lexington Avenue, with the name emblazoned on a green canopy out front. Soon such famous Italians as opera star Ezio Pinza and motion-picture actress Silvana Mangano were finding their way to Villa Camillo, which one reviewer described in this way: “Past a photo gallery of Italy’s wonders—including some of her shapeliest movie queens—you are guided to a spacious and attractive dining room, where a small army of red-jacketed waiters is drawn up in battle array.”

In the mid-1950s, however, plans were drawn to raze the building on 48th Street that housed Villa Camillo, and Sidoli was forced to move. He found new space nearby at 160 East 48th Street and opened Camillo Restaurant there on February 27, 1956. (The other Camillo’s was to be rechristened Mike Manuche’s at around the same time, clearing the way for Sidoli to use the name.) White Rock Beverages featured Sidoli himself in newspaper ads for its sparkling water and ginger ale. “The same fine staff serves you at famous Camillo’s now located at 160 East 48th Street,” the ad said. “In their beautiful new dining rooms you can enjoy food that is better than ever. Visit Camillo’s and try Broiled Veal Chop en Papillote, or delicious Scampi.”

Camillo Restaurant would enjoy a fleeting moment of fame when it was used for a scene in The World of Henry Orient, a 1964 American comedy film directed by George Roy Hill and starring Peter Sellers. Later that year Wanda Hale, the longtime film critic of the New York Daily News, took actor Robert Taylor there to interview him over lunch. “The food was delicious, the service excellence, and our host, Camillo, charming,” she later wrote. Bob thanked me for taking him there….And he extracted some culinary secrets from Camillo painlessly. As a rule, getting a culinary secret from Camillo is like extracting blood from the old turnip.”

Sidoli closed Camillo Restaurant in 1965 but apparently couldn’t stay out of the business for long, as a little more than a year later he opened a new Camillo’s in Beekman Tower at 5 Mitchell Place. He died in 1990 at age 80.

Print Recipe

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Camillo Sidoli opened Camillo Restaurant at 160 East 48th Street in New York City on February 27, 1956. "As a rule," Wanda Hale, the longtime film critic of the New York Daily News, would later write, "getting a culinary secret from Camillo is like extracting blood from the old turnip.” Fortunately, though, Sidoli wasn't as stingy with his "secrets" as Hale suggested. Here's his recipe for Chicken Pagan, one of the restaurant's most popular specialties.

Ingredients

6 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
6 thin slices prosciutto
6 bay leaves
6 teaspoons chopped chicken liver
6 to 8 tablespoons (3 to 4 ounces) freshly grated Parmesan cheese
8 tablespoons (1/4 pound) unsalted butter, divided
½ cup all-purpose flour for dredging
Juice of 1 lemon (about three tablespoons)
1 1/2 cups white Chablis wine
8 ounces thinly sliced mushrooms

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Place the chicken breasts between two sheets of parchment or plastic wrap. Using a mallet or rolling pin, pound each one to an even thickness of about 1/4 inch.

Place 1 slice of prosciutto over each flattened chicken breast. Place a bay leaf on top, leaving the stem extended so that it may be removed before serving. Spread 1 teaspoon of the chopped chicken liver over the top of the prosciutto, sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese, roll tight, and dredge in flour. Set aside.

In a large skillet over medium-high heat, melt 4 tablespoons of the butter. Place the rolled-up chicken breasts in the skillet seam-side down and sauté until golden brown, about 1 to 1 1/2 minutes. Turn and cook for another 1 to 1 1/2 minutes.

Place the rolled-up chicken breasts in a baking dish. Put the baking dish in the preheated oven and bake 35 to 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, in the same skillet, add the remaining 4 tablespoons of butter, lemon juice, Chablis, and mushrooms. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer for 15 minutes.

When chicken is done, pour the mushroom sauce over the rolled-up chicken breasts, and serve hot, making sure that the bay leaves are removed.

Notes

Don't forget to remove the bay leaves from the rolled-up chicken portions before serving.

November 29, 2022 By Bill Hogan

/ Idaho

Fried Chicken

Jack’s Chicken Inn

1950 South Yellowstone Highway
Idaho Falls, Idaho

1949 – 1966

Long before Colonel Harland Sanders and his Kentucky Fried Chicken made their way to Idaho (in 1956), Jack Scheets was already known throughout the state for his fried chicken—first from his days as the operator of the Dixieland night club near Ucon, and then as the operator of Jack’s Inn in Beachs Corner, just outside Idaho Falls.

In 1948, when Scheets—and his chicken—came to the Topper Club in Idaho Falls, the restaurant wasted no time trumpeting his arrival in a series of newspaper ads. “Chicken has come to town!” they blared. “Jack Scheets is serving his famous chicken dinners.”

Scheets, however wouldn’t be at the Topper Club for long. In 1949 he bought another supper club in Idaho Falls, the Tower Inn, at 1950 South Yellowstone Highway, remodeled it, and renamed it Jack’s Chicken Inn. A $1.50 chicken dinner was the star attraction, of course, but the menu also featured three steak dinners ($2.25 for a tenderloin or New York cut or $2.50 for a T-bone) and a shrimp and oyster dinner ($1.50).

From the beginning, Scheets made it his habit each year to throw a special Thanksgiving Day party at Jack’s Chicken Inn for underprivileged children in and around Idaho Falls. The kids could feast on turkey and all the trimmings at the restaurant and then take home but bags filled with fruit, nuts, candy, and other goodies. Even when Scheets fell seriously ill in 1952 and went to be treated at a hospital in Salt Lake City, he insisted that the special Thanksgiving Day party go on without him. He returned home soon after that but before the year was out died at age 63 in an Idaho Falls hospital.

Jack’s wife, Anna, and their three sons—Gayle, Vernon, and James had worked in the restaurant since day one, and they would keep it running smoothly in the years ahead. By 1957, thanks mostly to favorable write-ups in several national magazine, they were billing Jack’s Chicken Inn as “one of America’s finest eating places.” The restaurant became known, too, as a top entertainment venue. (Walter Kleypas, the original leader of the Texas Top Hands, a hugely popular Western swing band, later played for several years at Jack’s Chicken Inn.)

In the early 1960s management of the 400-seat restaurant fell in succession to the three sons: first to Jim, who oversaw its remodeling in 1963; then to Gayle, who took over in 1964; and finally, in 1965, to Vern, who’d left to manage two other Idaho Falls restaurants (the Flamingo and the Stardust) but returned to put Jack’s Chicken in up for sale. That year the restaurant was in the news briefly when the Hi-Notes, a musical trio from Idaho Falls, claimed to have broken “the world’s musical marathon record” there by playing and singing 43 hours without a break.

In 1966 Jack’s Chicken Inn disappeared when the Forde Johnson Oil Company, which operated 20 service stations in southeastern Idaho, bought the restaurant and its land, including its 450 feet of business frontage on South Yellowstone, to expand its operations in Idaho Falls.

Anna died at age 84 in 1981. James died at age 66 in 1988, Vernon at age 74 in 1992, and Gayle at age 77 in 1993.

Over the years Jack’s Chicken Inn has been credited as the birthplace of fry sauce, the mayonnaise-and-ketchup-based all-purpose condiment that’s popular as a dipping sauce for French fries, though Don Carlos Edwards, a Salt Lake City restaurateur, claimed to have invented it in 1949.

November 20, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Lawrence/ Kansas

Scalloped Cabbage

The Hearth

17 East 11th Street
Lawrence, Kansas

1942 – 1953

Sadie L. King was already a seasoned veteran of the tea-room business when, in 1942, she and her husband, W.M. (William Melvin) McGrew, moved to Lawrence, Kansas, to open a place of their own in the quarters of the Lawrence Women’s Club at 1941 Massachusetts Street. They called it “The Hearth.”

Most recently the McGrews had spent five years stint operating the elaborately decorated tea and banquet rooms of the Hotel Grund in Kansas City, Kansas. W.M., a pharmacist by trade, had begun his career in Chanute, Kansas, where he owned and operated the Owl Drug Company; Sadie managed a tearoom in Chanute after the two were married in 1912 and would go on to manage others in Parsons and Pittsburg. In 1931 she became the manager of the tearoom at Radio Springs Park in Nevada, Missouri, and later opened a restaurant, “The Hob Nob,” in downtown Nevada. In 1936 the McGrews moved to Wichita, where she would manage the Tremont Hotel’s newly reopened dining rooms.

But things in Lawrence didn’t go as smoothly for the McGrews as they might have hoped. When the Lawrence Women’s Club decided not to renew their lease, they were forced to either find a new location or go out of business. And so in 1945 they bought a house at 17 East 11th Street, moved into it, and began preparing part of it as the new location of The Hearth. Somewhere around this time W.M. McGrew died, and Sadie McGrew took on C. Ruth Quinlan as a partner in the tearoom.

In 1948 McGrew found herself thrust into the national spotlight when it was discovered that Eden Ahbez (or eden ahbez, as he chose to style his name), a singer-songwriter who would later be credited with helping to inspire the hippie movement, was her long-lost adopted son. When Nat “King” Cole’s version of his autobiographical song “Nature Boy” shot to No. 1 on the Billboard charts for eight consecutive weeks, Ahbez suddenly found himself featured in Life, Time, and Newsweek magazines, which recounted how he had camped out under the first L in the Hollywood sign above Los Angeles, studied Oriental mysticism, and lived on a diet of vegetables, fruits, and nuts. At that point several residents of Chanute recognized Ahbez as George McGrew, though at first he denied that he and McGrew were one and the same. As it turned out, he and his twin sister, Edith, had spent their early years in the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York until the McGrews adopted them, at age eight, through the Children’s Aid Society of New York. Mrs. McGrew told reporters that she hadn’t seen or heard from “George” in 10 years. The spotlight quickly turned elsewhere, though, and in 1953 Sadie McGrew quietly closed The Hearth, saying that she planned to convert the house into apartments.

November 19, 2022 By Bill Hogan

St. Albans/ West Virginia

Corn Pudding

El Rancho Restaurant

2843 MacCorkle Avenue
St. Albans, West Virginia

1952 – 1970

In 1949 Irene Evans opened the El Rancho Inn in St. Albans, Virginia, a small town 10 miles west of Charleston on U.S. Route 60, billing it a “Little of the West back East.” The El Rancho was so popular from the beginning that in 1950 Evans decided to expand it, and then, in 1952, she built a 125-seat restaurant right next to the inn, maintaining the western motif inside and out. In 1957 she expanded El Rancho once again, building a modern motel on the property.

All the while, Evans saw to it that the menu at the El Rancho Restaurant was several cuts above anything else in the area. The 1959 Thanksgiving menu, for example, featured Roast West Virginia Tom Turkey with Chestnut Dressing and Giblet Gravy ($2.25); Sliced Virginia Sugar-Cured Ham with Orange and Raisin Sauce ($2.45); Roast Prime Steer of Beef, Au Jus ($3.75); and a Combination Seafood Platter ($2.75). There was a choice of Lynnhaven Oyster Bisque or French Onion Soup, a relish tray, and ample offerings of sides, salads, and desserts.

In 1962 Evans married Dick Reid (born Richard H. Riedthaler), a radio and television star in Charleston. Soon after arriving at WKNA-TV (Channel 49) in 1951, Reid had developed a late-afternoon children’s show, The 49ers Club, that proved so popular that WCHS (Channel 8), a rival television station, lured him away before it went on the air in 1954. There Reid developed two immensely popular television shows—Lucky 8 Ranch for children and Dance Party for teenagers—and, in 1957, he created and began hosting Record Hop, a kind of West Virginia version of American Bandstand, the hugely popular television program hosted by Dick Clark. (In 1960 Reid even filled in for Clark at WFIL-TV in Philadelphia for ABC’s national broadcast of American Bandstand.)

In 1963 the Reids expanded the El Rancho Restaurant, adding three new dining areas—the Frontier, Thunderbird, and Patio Rooms—and bringing the total seating capacity to 325. They inaugurated Saturday night dinner dances featuring local bands in the Thunderbird Room, with Dick using the dances as the backdrop for a live radio show, and they hosted such special events as “Luau Nights” and “Chuck Wagon Buffets,” the latter with free pony rides for the “small cowboys and cowgirls.”

“When I was a kid, the El Rancho Motel and restaurant was one of the places to go for good food and fun,” recalls Jerry Waters, who maintains a website on the history of the Charleston area. “Everyone from celebrities to the state’s top brass visited the El Rancho. Part of the reason was Dick Reid’s live weekend broadcasts on WCHS radio. The show became so popular that there was always a waiting list to get in.”

In 1965 Dick left WCHS to help Irene run the El Rancho Restaurant and Motel, but the following year he fell ill and died after a three-week hospitalization. He was just 44 years old. Irene pushed forward, dubbing El Rancho “The Party Place” and introducing even more special events, such as a holiday-season “Joyland” with “our Popular Roast Beef Rodeo,” a “Bottomless Salad Bowl,” and, of course, an on-the-premises Santa Claus. But in 1970 Irene decided to sell the restaurant while continuing to run the motel, and soon the Rose City Cafeteria opened on the site of the El Rancho Restaurant at 2843 McCorkle Avenue. The cafeteria’s owner made sure that Irene would be part of the open-house ceremony, noting in a big newspaper ad that “she would love to greet her many friends and El Rancho guests that she has known over the years.” Just weeks later, however, a big fire swept through the kitchen of the Rose City Cafeteria, and it never reopened.

In future years the building would become home to the Kim Tiki Lounge and Restaurant, which served Polynesian and American food, and, much later, Flirts Nite Club.

Irene Evans Reid died in 2003 at age 85. She was the first woman ever elected to serve as the president of the Southern Innkeepers Association. Four years later Dick Reid was inducted into the West Virginia Broadcasting Hall of Fame.

November 17, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Chicken Rivel Soup

Green Gable Restaurant

4062 Massillon Road
Uniontown, Ohio

1946 – 1998

Sometime around 1916, soon after he arrived in the United States from Yugoslavia, Joseph Hahe made his way to northeastern Ohio, where he found work in Barberton, next door to Akron, as a stationary engineer with Columbia Chemical Company, a subsidiary of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. The firm had been formed in 1899 to produce synthetic soda ash to support its parent company’s glassmaking operations, and business at both operations would boom as the nation’s burgeoning automobile industry began using more and more glass.

But by the mid-1940s, with some 30 years at the company under his belt, Hahe began looking toward other pursuits. Specifically, he began looking up and down Massillon Road, the north-south state highway connecting Massillon, Canton, and a slew of smaller communities with Akron. In 1946 he and his wife, Mary, bought the Massillon Road Inn, five miles or south of the Akron Municipal Airport, and set about making it their own. “Here you can enjoy the finest food you ever had the pleasure of eating under the capable direction of Joseph Hahe, proprietor, who welcomes you to dine here,” an early ad said. “If you really want to know what a delicious meal tastes like, Massillon Road Inn is the place to go.” Before the year was out the Hahes renamed their place the Green Gable Restaurant.

For decades to come the Green Gable Restaurant was a popular destination for home-style comfort food, with chicken, ham, and steak dinners topping the list. A 1955 ad, for example, touted “Our Famous Chicken Dinner”—with mashed potatoes, French fries, vegetable, salad, hot roll, dessert, and coffee—for $1.65. (A smaller version of the same dinner was $1.15.) Also on the menu was a ham dinner at $1.40 and a T-bone steak dinner at $2.00.

In 1976 Joseph died at age 87 in Port Charlotte, Florida, where he and his wife typically spent the winters, and Mary continued as the owner of the restaurant until 1982. She died in 1992 at age 94. Their children—including son-in-law Ray Naehring and daughters Martha Yost and Karen Smith—carried on until 1998, when they closed the Green Gable, sold the property to a group of local investors (today’s it’s part of the Green Town Center), and auctioned off the restaurant’s contents. “It was just the time to sell,” Smith told a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal

November 14, 2022 By Bill Hogan

Washington/ D.C.

Crab Imperial

Café Burgundy

5031 Connecticut Avenue Northwest
Washington, D.C.

1954 – 1989

Ray S. Walters opened Café Burgundy in Washington, D.C., on August 24, 1954. Its location at 5031 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., just below Nebraska Avenue, perfectly positioned it to become a bustling neighborhood restaurant, which it very quickly did.

The name of the restaurant had more to do with its décor — the walls of the main dining room were dressed in burgundy — than its cuisine. For the most part, in fact, the food was straightforward American fare.

“I’m from Paris,” Ray Walters liked to say by way of introduction, adding, after just the briefest pause, his punch line: “— that is, Paris, Tennessee.”

Walters clearly aimed for the role of bon vivant, putting his name on the neon sign above the restaurant’s entrance and nearly always being on hand to greet guests for lunch and dinner. Walters was also an active member of the Epicurean Club of Washington, at one point serving as its president. And in 1966 the 1,000 or so members of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington voted him “Restaurateur of the Year.”

But Walters’s wife, Anna, was every bit as essential to the restaurant’s success. She’d gotten her start in the business during the Great Depression, flipping pancakes at the griddle in the window of Childs’ restaurant in downtown Chicago. Ray worked there, too, first as a porter, then as a cook’s assistant, and finally as a manager. In time they married and moved to Washington, where, during World War II, Ray worked for the Office of Price Administration and Anna worked at a Navy yard as a riveter.

After the war the Walterses opened Napoleon’s Restaurant, at 2019 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., and then and then Café de la Paix in the Hotel Windsor Park, at 2300 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. “While Dad worked in the kitchen, Mom was the hostess and greeted some of Washington’s most famous people, including the Kennedys,” their son would later recall. “She had a wonderful personality and everyone loved her. They knew she would always make sure everything was perfect.”

After running Café Burgundy for two decades or so, the Walterses decided to sell it. But the 225-seat restaurant foundered without Ray and Anna at the helm and, in the late 1970s, briefly closed its doors. Then, suddenly, and much to the relief of its longtime patrons, Café Burgundy reopened with its founder back in charge. In 1978 you could get a complete dinner at the restaurant for $4.25, up slightly from the $2.95 you would have paid in 1971.

John Rosson, the restaurant critic for the Washington Star, named the restaurant’s crabcakes his favorite.

Once Café Burgundy was running as smoothly as it had in the old days, Walters left once again. It didn’t take long, however, for the aging restaurant to begin slowly slipping from its once-premier position in the neighborhood. Within just a couple of years, by one account, the kitchen was serving Mrs. Smith’s pies.

Café Burgundy closed its doors for the second and final time in July 1989. A few weeks later there was a farewell party for Nick and Fame Nicholas, the restaurant’s owners, but the Burgundy, as many had come to call it, was gone. (The following year Ray Walters died in Sarasota, Florida, at age 80; Anna Walters died there in 2000 at age 88.)

The space at 5031 Connecticut Avenue was soon taken over by Peacock, a restaurant that featured Nepalese, Kashmiri, and Punjabi cuisine, and then a succession of other restaurants, including, most recently, Buck’s Fishing & Camping.

November 13, 2022 By Bill Hogan

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