New York City/ New York

Piccate di Vitello alla Gabriella

Mercurio Restaurant

106 West 52nd Street
New York, New York

1950 – 1983

After a successful fifteen-year run as the proprietor of Romeo’s Chianti Restaurant in Beverly Hills, California, Romeo Salta decided to move to New York City, where, in 1950, he opened Mercurio Restaurant at 106 West 52nd Street. In the beginning, lest there be no mistake that the two Saltas were one and the same, he appended “of Hollywood” to his name, but within a very short time, having managed to put Mercurio on the map as a top Manhattan restaurant, he saw fit to quietly drop the suffix.

Mercurio, with its trattoria-like ambience, wasn’t pretentious in any way. Each table was covered with a red-checkered tablecloth and set with a small vase of flowers and a green-glass bottle of mineral water. You might hear “Torna a Surriento” or another popular Italian song playing in the background.

For his part, Salta was a virtuoso host. Patrons who ordered a Caesar salad would soon find Salta at their table, commanding the attention of the entire dining room as he prepared it right in front of their eyes, the New York Times noted, “with flourishes worthy of a vaudeville magician.”

Indeed, Mercurio had a certain magic about it, and throughout the early 1950s the restaurant was a popular hangout for many of New York City’s top models, including a young Grace Kelly, who’d just embarked on her acting career.

Buoyed by his success with Mercurio, Salta began thinking about opening a bigger and grander restaurant, more of a white-tablecloth establishment. This he did in 1953, with the debut of his namesake restaurant on West 56th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. In short order Romeo Salta, one of the first restaurants in New York City to offer elegant Northern Italian cuisine, would become a favorite of celebrities and cosmetics-industry bigwigs.

Juggling the two restaurants apparently didn’t suit Salta, however, and in 1956 he sold Mercurio to restaurateur Frank Giambelli, who later would move it to 53 West 53rd Street. In 1982, with the building slated for demolition, Giambelli decided to close Mercurio and open a new restaurant, Giambelli 50th, at 46 East 50th Street. Mercurio served its last dinner, just ahead of the wrecker’s ball, in 1983.

Both Salta and Giambelli were in business for some years afterward. Salta died in 1998 at age 93; Giambelli died in 2006 at age 90.

Here is the recipe for Piccate di Vitello alla Gabriella as it was served at Mercurio Restaurant.

May 12, 2020 By
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Greenfield/ Massachusetts

Olga’s Famous Chocolate Cake

Alwin and Olga

16 Federal Street
Greenfield, Massachusetts

1936 – 1965

In 1936 Alwin and Olga Gebhardt, who’d been aiming to open a restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts, found a second-floor spot at 16 Federal Street that fit the bill just about perfectly. Before the year was out they had opened the eponymous Alwin and Olga, which quickly found a loyal clientele in town and among travelers heading north on U.S. Route 5 to New Hampshire and Vermont or south to Connecticut. Within just a few years the Gebhardts got lucky when the Duncan Hines, the peripatetic restaurant reviewer, stumbled on their place and gave it his unqualified endorsement.

“You’ll have to climb the stairs to find Alwin and Olga’s,” Hines wrote in the 1940 edition of Adventures in Good Eating, his widely trusted guidebook. “But they and their dinners are worth it. Olga makes a fine lobster Newburgh and a chocolate cake I know my grandmother never equaled.”

Unfortunately, at about the same time, a blaze that started in Greenfield’s old fire station swept through the block of Federal Street that contained No. 16, pretty much destroying the Gebhardts’ restaurant. Although Alwin somehow managed to save many of its most valuable items in the restaurant, he and Olga could only bide their time as a larger and more modern building went up in the same place.) When they finally reopened Alwin and Olga nearly a year later, business seemed better than ever.

Through the 1940s and early 1950s, the restaurant’s reputation spread throughout New England, and even across the nation, but by 1955 the Gephardts were ready to move on. That summer they put the restaurant up for auction with a minimum bid of $30,000, which, they estimated, was about a third of its actual value. “This restaurant is a going, prosperous, money-making concern,” large display ads that the auctioneer placed in the newspapers said. “In 1954 the business showed a net profit of $15,000. . . . The one and only reason for this sale is that the owners desire to retire.”

Richard and Winifred Whitney of Athol, Massachusetts, it was soon announced, were the new owners of Alvin and Olga. Richard Whitney had quite a bit of experience in the restaurant business, having operated a couple of diners with his brother before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, and then reopening one of them as well as starting Whitney’s Restaurant in Athol after the war. In 1960, though, after operating Alvin and Olga for just under five years, the Whitneys sold the restaurant to Dennis E. Slattery.

In 1963, when the editors of the Mobil Travel Guides selected the 45 restaurants in the United States that offered the best value for the money, Alwin and Olga was on the list. (Patrons who were used to its 99-cent specials every evening certainly wouldn’t have been surprised.

Alwin Gebhardt died the following year at age 64. In his retirement he had become an accomplished painter, exhibiting his works in stores, banks, the local library, and other venues. Olga would die in 1991 at age 89.

By 1965 Dennis Slattery decided to call it quits as a restaurateur, too. That November he placed a “Closed ‘Til Further Notice” ad in the local newspaper and soon shuttered Alwin and Olga permanently, citing a decline in business and his desire to have more free time. Early the next year the restaurant’s equipment, fixtures, and furnishings were sold at auction.

Less than a week before the auction the Greenfield Recorder-Gazette ran an editorial that was both an obituary for the restaurant and an homage to the couple who created it. “Whereas the successors to these two hard-working and skillful restaurateurs went at their tasks with determination to succeed, things were never quite the same without Alwin and Olga,” the newspaper said. “Greenfield will never have another [restaurant] like it. In almost no place will there ever be food or surrounds to beat Alwin and Olga’s in its golden days.

Now, from Alwin and Olga’s “golden days,” here’s the recipe for the chocolate cake that Duncan Hines made famous.

May 11, 2020 By
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Providence/ Rhode Island

Baked Oysters on the Half Shell

Johnson’s Hummocks Sea Food Grill

245 Allens Avenue
Providence, Rhode Island

1905 – 1970

Johnson’s Hummocks Sea Food Restaurant started out in 1905 as a clambake club on the shores of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. By the 1920s the club, founded by Frank Johnson and situated on a pork-chop-shaped peninsula of North Kingstown known as “The Hummocks,” had grown into a summertime attraction that could seat 1,400 people.

In 1925, however, Johnson’s restaurant was destroyed by fire. Johnson managed to rebuild it by August 1938 only to see it destroyed a month later by the New England Hurricane of 1938, the most powerful, costliest, and deadliest hurricane in the region’s history. Once again it was rebuilt. Then, in 1944, another hurricane ripped off the restaurant’s roof.

Henry Johnson, the son of the founder, who by then was operating the restaurant with his wife, Etta, wisely decided to abandon the site and move the restaurant to Providence. In time Johnson’s Hummocks became one of the most popular restaurants in Rhode Island. It was a favorite venue for political fund-raising events because it could seat 1,000 for dinner. Children loved the place because, on finishing their meals, they were always invited to select a toy from the large treasure chest at the front entrance. (One favorite was a plastic souvenir whistle, in the shape of an ocean liner, marked “U.S.S. Johnson’s Hummocks.”)

Some years after Henry Johnson died in 1955, Johnson’s Hummocks passed into the hands of Louis Capobianco, a longtime employee of the restaurant, who owned and operated it from 1963 to 1968,  and then to TX Industries, a Philadelphia-based conglomerate. But the new owner, apparently unable to make a go of it, closed Johnson’s Hummocks without warning on May 20, 1970, citing the old building, old equipment, and a generally undesirable location.

In recent years the building at 245 Allens Avenue has been the home of Cheaters, a strip club, and the Wild Zebra Gentleman’s Club.

The restaurant’s signature dish was a “Miniature Clambake” tray, shown here on the lower half of the postcard. And here is its recipe for Baked Oysters on Half Shell, as they were prepared right up until the restaurant’s closing.

May 9, 2020 By
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Tiverton/ Rhode Island

Indian Pudding

Sunderland’s

2753 Main Road
Tiverton, Rhode Island

1948 – 1987

In 1946 George and Nina Sunderland paid $10,000 for a magnificent Victorian home on eight acres of waterfront property in Tiverton, Rhode Island. The 1870s-era house, sited high up on a knoll above Nannaquaket Pond, offered pleasant views of lush woods and a quaint little cove—just perfect for the new restaurant they had in mind.

Two years later, in 1948, they opened Sunderland’s, which for nearly 40 years would reign as Tiverton’s top special-occasion restaurant. In the beginning, Mrs. Sunderland ran the kitchen; Mr. Sunderland tended bar. For $1.50 you could get a fried-clam dinner, complete with New England clam chowder, salad, homemade ice-cream cake, and coffee, and for $3.50 you could get broiled live lobster with the same accompaniments. Cocktails were 55 cents.

“We had regular customers who would all talk to each other,” Nancy Manchester, who for many years was the restaurant’s hostess, recalled in 1996.  “You could look around the dining rooms and the same people would be sitting at the same tables every Sunday.”

In 1987 the Sunderlands sold the restaurant that bore their name, and over the next decade it would be sold, resold, and fall into foreclosure proceedings. At one point there were plans to renovate the restaurant and reopen it as the Nannaquaket Inn, but they fell through, and the property went on the auction block in 1994. In May 1996 it became the Here & Now Tea Room, but later that year Judith Galloway bought the property for $175,000 and made it the new home for her gift and antiques shop, Past & Presents Place, which had been located a few miles to the south.

By then George and Nina Sunderland had passed away, but a reporter for the local newspaper tracked down Martha MacNaught, their only child. “About everybody in town worked there, or ate there, or both,” she recalled in an interview. “So I’m glad to see the building being taken care of. That was my home.”

In just a few years, however, the property that once was home to Sunderland’s was again back on the market. It sat vacant until 2017, when Stephen and Sandra Porridge bought it for $300,000 and converted the historic building into the Gathering Place Church.

Tiverton’s two other fine-dining venues—the Stone Bridge Inn and the Coachmen Restaurant—have also disappeared.

Here’s the recipe for the Indian Pudding that was served at Sunderland’s.

May 8, 2020 By
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Thibodaux/ Louisiana

Lobster à la Newburg

Bilello’s Restaurant and Lounge

535 Saint Mary Street
Thibodaux, Louisiana

1950 – 1987

Salvatore “Sam” Bilello, the founder and patriarch of Billello’s Restaurant, in Thibodaux, Louisiana, was the second of seven children born to Antonio and Vita Bilello—all of them boys. With his older brother assigned to work on the family’s farm, it fell to young Sam to help his mother cook and take care of the other children. Working alongside his mother in the Bilello kitchen, he developed a love for food and for cooking that would shape his life—and the lives of nearly everyone around him—for many decades to come.

For a while Antonio Bilello operated a bar and club that specialized in po’ boys, Louisiana’s trademark submarine-style sandwich, but it was Sam who went full-bore into business with the Venetian Bar and Donut Shop in downtown Thibodaux, a few miles off U.S. Highway 90. His donuts were so good that at times the line to get inside the place stretched down the block.

Sam had the touch.

In 1950, with his six brothers as co-owners, he opened Bilello’s Restaurant and Lounge on St. Mary Street. It quickly became a landmark on Bayou Lafourche. “We had people from all over the world to come to that place,” Bilello would recall many years later in an interview with the Daily Comet, the local newspaper. “When they came to Thibodaux, that is where they wanted to go. They couldn’t even pronounce the name, but they knew where they wanted to go.”

The restaurant’s menu was filled with Italian and French dishes at reasonable prices as well as such Cajun standbys as fried crawfish tails, crawfish étoufée, broiled oysters with bacon, and stuffed mirliton (a squash-like vegetable, also known as chayote, filled with shrimp and crabmeat).

Even when he turned the reins of the restaurant over to his son Donald, Sam was still there every day, working in the kitchen. In the early 1980s the Bilellos finally let go and sold the restaurant, but it didn’t last long under new ownership. It closed in 1987.

Sam Bilello died on December 27, 2005, at the age of 93. “He was always a cool gentleman, and if you had something to tell him, he’d listen to you,” Odel Zerinque, a longtime friend, recalled at the time. “He was a very, very nice guy.”

Today, Politz’s Restaurant occupies the building in Thibodaux that once was home to Bilello’s.

May 7, 2020 By
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Scottsdale/ Arizona

Campari Melon Salad

Aldo Baldo Ristorante

7014 East Camelback Road
Scottsdale, Arizona

1990 – 1998

Aldo Baldo Ristorante began as a figment of Lee Cohn’s imagination.

As “concept restaurants” hit it really big in the 1980s and 1990s, Cohn, the founder of Scottsdale-based Big 4 Restaurant Group, Inc., was cooking up new ones like there was no tomorrow: The American Grill. Arizona Terrace. Bigoli. Bssghetti. Cafe 66. Gill’s Grill. Kowabunga! Leo Restaurant & Bar. Lunt Avenue Marble Club. Oscar Taylor Butcher, Bakery, and Bar. The Oyster Grill. Stanley’s Grille. Steamers Genuine Seafood. Tom’s Tavern.

And, Aldo Baldo Ristorante.

This 135-seat, full-service restaurant, sited just outside the Palm Court of Scottsdale Fashion Square (an upscale shopping center), opened in 1990 and was described by the company as an “Italian food concept centered on a fictitious futurist inventor.” The imaginary Signore Baldo, said to be from the 1920s, was further described as having created practically everything useful as well as a certain number of not-so-useful things. Think of it as Leonardo da Vinci meets Back to the Future.

Cohn’s design team installed lots of black wood, polished metal, multilevel customer seating. A length-of-the-restaurant exhibition kitchen was intended to represent order, and sculptures of “Baldo’s” failed inventions were intended to represent chaos. “We wanted our own identity,” Cohn explained. “We didn’t want to be stuck in Northern Italy or Southern Italy. So we took the theme from the early 1900s and the futurist movement in Italy and expanded it to include everything.”

The concept worked quite well for a while, but by 1996 Cohn had decided to restyle Aldo Baldo as an Italian seafood restaurant. Though it played to positive reviews, the restaurant’s days were numbered.

Aldo Baldo closed in 1998. Its space at Scottsdale Fashion Square was taken over by Kona Grill, which still occupies it today.

Here is the recipe for the utterly simple—and utterly delightful—Campari Melon Salad that was served at Aldo Baldo.

May 5, 2020 By
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Salina/ Kansas

Swedish Baked Beans

The Swedish Diner

2401 South 9th Street
Salina, Kansas

1955 – 1960

It was big news in Salina when a new restaurant, the Swedish Diner, opened one mile south of town on May 8, 1955. It wasn’t really a diner (what with the white tablecloths and all), but it was Swedish, from the mural of a Swedish scene on one wall by Signe Larson, a well-known painter from nearby Lindsborg, and the smörgåsbord laid out every Sunday. (Lindsborg, which bills itself “Little Sweden USA,” has long been famous for its resident artists and art galleries and studios.)

The Swedish Diner was designed by the local architectural firm of Anderson–Srack–Johnson and built of brick and Haydite, a lightweight aggregate invented in Kansas City in the early 1900s by Stephen Hayde. The restaurant adjoined the Howard Johnson Motel, which had opened in 1953 on U.S. Highway 81. (The motel, which took the name of its local owners, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Johnson, wasn’t affiliated with the famous national chain.)

After a little more than four years in business, however, the Swedish Diner’s days were apparently numbered. In June 1959 came a new manager and a rechristening of the restaurant as “The New Swedish Diner.” In August came a remodeling of the restaurant and the arrival of yet another manager, this one a veteran of the vaunted Fred Harvey organization.

The Swedish Diner made it to January 31, 1960, when it served its last meal, a day-long, all-you-could-eat extravaganza that it billed as “A King’s Treat.” For just $2.25 you could get the smörgåsbord and all its Swedish standbys, from risgrynsgröt (rice porridge) and rag brod (rye bread) to köttbullar (meatballs) and lingonberry-topped ostkaka (cheesecake), as well as “many other choice foods.”

The next day there was a Keck’s Steak House where the Swedish Diner had been. Lou Keck had opened his first steakhouse in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1940, and then a second, in Topeka, in 1958. His third, in Salina, lasted just a few years.

Today a Verizon Wireless retail store occupies the site where the Swedish Diner once stood.

Here is the recipe for Swedish Baked Beans as they were prepared at the Swedish Diner in the 1950s.

May 5, 2020 By
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Washington/ D.C.

Lemon Chiffon Meringue

The Parrot Tea Room

1701 20th Street Northwest
Washington, D.C.

1926 – 1943

In 1926 Jennie Murchison and Ashley Curtis, two sisters from Wilmington, North Carolina, arrived in the nation’s capital with the dream of opening a restaurant that would have all the charm and character of their old Southern home. Neither of them really knew much about cooking, though, aside from what they liked and didn’t like, so their plan was to bring up an African-American cook from back home to run their kitchen.

In short order the Murchison sisters (Ashley had married) leased the former home of Thomas Bell Sweeney at 1643 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., and opened The Parrot Tea Room, using the slogan “Speaks for Itself.” This was the height of the tea-room craze in America, and The Parrot thrived, especially with so many upwardly mobile Washington women being unable to entertain in their small apartments.

A fixture of The Parrot in its early years was “Madame Marie,” who was on hand up to six hours a day to read tea leaves and otherwise divine the future for patrons at “no extra charge.” (Palm readers, psychics, and other seers were so popular in those days that the Washington Post had a special section for clairvoyants “licensed by the District of Columbia” in its classified-ads department.)

In 1932 the sisters moved The Green Parrot to a grand pink-granite and brick mansion at 1701 20th Street, N.W., just a few steps from the intersection of 20th and R Streets above Dupont Circle. The mansion, designed by the noted architects Joseph C. Hornblower and James Rush Marshall and completed in 1891, had originally been the home of George S. Fraser, a New York merchant who had moved to Washington in 1888. Fraser died in 1896, and five years later his widow sold the mansion to Pennsylvania pig-iron magnate Joseph Earlston Thropp, who, after losing his bid to be re-elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1900, decided to stay on in Washington. Thropp died in 1927 and his wife in 1930. When the mansion came on the market, the Murchison sisters pounced on it.

The Fraser mansion was grand in every way, beginning with its 32 rooms and 16 fireplaces. With high ceilings, stained-glass windows, crystal chandeliers, rich paneling, and hand-carved details, it looked more like an embassy or privateclub than a restaurant. The sisters used the ground floor for their dining rooms and rented the three floors above to tenants.

In 1934 the Parrot Tea Room became home to the Federal Chess Club, and the following year it began hosting art exhibitions. An early show featured portraits, etchings, drawings, and watercolors by Gene Mercere, a nationally known sketch artist (and former professional boxer) from Indiana who traveled to various cities around the country to draw stage and screen stars, as well as ordinary folk, in pastels.

“Will you have some hot breads right out of the oven?” guests were asked. And there were lots to choose from, including beaten biscuits, freshly baked pocketbook rolls (the southern version of Parker House rolls), cinnamon rolls filled with raisins and currants, and golden-brown corn sticks baked in cast-iron molds.

As for the rest of the menu, the food editor of the Washington Post listed “fried chicken with cream gravy, broiled chicken in butter, imperial deviled crab, lobster à la Newburg, grilled lamb chops, leg of lamb, broiled fish and chicken, spaghetti with mushrooms, and a host of other delectable entrees” in a 1939 review of The Parrot Tea Room.

In 1943 Jefferson L. Ford, Jr., a Washington hotel man, acquired the tea room, renamed it The Parrot Restaurant, and affiliated it in advertising with the Hotel Lafayette, at 16th and Eye Streets, N.W., which he’d owned since 1932. But everyone kept calling it The Parrot Tea Room, Ford didn’t change much in the kitchen, and kept advertising the “famous Parrot fried chickens” and attaching his tag line–“A Jeff Ford Enterprise”—to ads for the restaurant.

Ford operated The Parrot Restaurant until 1950, when he sold it to Johnny and Hilda Goldstein, who renamed it The Golden Parrot. The Parrot Tea Room continued in business until 1950, when it was taken over by Johnnie and Hilda Goldstein, who transformed it into what Paul Herron, the Washington Post’s nightlife reporter, called “a pretty plush establishment that has many features of a swank town house or private club with all the facilities of a modern dining room.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower ate there in 1953 with boxer Rocky Marciano. In 1974, after a long run in the business, the Goldsteins sold the Parrot Restaurant. It soon was transformed into the Golden Booeymonger restaurant, and then nightclubs known as Larry Brown’s and Sagittarius. In 1981 Walter Sommer bought the mansion for $2 million and after a $3 million renovation, opened the luxury The restaurant Fourways. The Church of Scientology acquired the landmark building in 1994, bringing an end its life as a restaurant.

May 5, 2020 By
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Los Angeles/ California

Marinated Mushroom Salad

Chantal Restaurant

11712 San Vicente Boulevard
Los Angeles, California

1968 – 1981

In 1968 Auguste Rossi and his son, Paul, opened Chantal Restaurant in the Brentwood neighborhood of West Los Angeles. Auguste, a veteran of such top-tier L.A. restaurants as the Escoffier Room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Le Petit Café, and The Tower, was a skilled and fastidious chef; Paul was the gracious and easygoing presence in the front of the house. Notwithstanding their Italian lineage, Chantal was a cozy little French restaurant (“endearingly shabby,” as a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times once described it) with pink walls, yellow tablecloths, and candles on the tables at dinner. The food was so good that Chantal quickly acquired a devoted following.

In 1977, with nearly a decade at Chantal under his belt, Paul decided to open a second restaurant, La Brasserie, in Orange, with chef Joseph Vieillemaringe as his partner. In 1981 the Rossis sold Chantal, and it soon was replaced by Donatello’s Ristorante. But Auguste, who was approaching 70, wasn’t about to retire. “I’m not going to die watching TV,” he vowed.

He was true to his word. Within a few years he’d opened his own restaurant, Papa Rossi, also in Orange, and this time—for the first time—the dishes he turned out were Italian through and through. He died in 1992 after putting in a busy day at the restaurant.

One of the most popular items on the menu at Chantal was its Marinated Mushroom Salad. Right after the restaurant opened in 1968 the Los Angeles Times’s restaurant columnist noted that the mushrooms in the salad, flown in from Virginia, were “white and crisp as apples, voluptuously drenched in a vinaigrette, fragrant with chervil.” Here is Auguste Rossi’s recipe, though it calls for tarragon, not chervil.

May 5, 2020 By
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Roanoke/ Virginia

Virginia Peanut Soup

Hotel Roanoke

110 Shenandoah Avenue Northeast
Roanoke, Virginia

The soup was invented in 1940 by Fred Brown, the executive chef of the Hotel Roanoke, which was originally built in 1882 by the Norfolk and Western Railway, now Northern Southern. (In 1989 Norfolk Southern deeded the hotel for $1 to Virginia Tech.) Brown’s peanut soup quickly became the hotel’s signature dish. “He had a very inquisitive mind, and he was always trying to develop something new,” Douglas Dowe, Brown’s brother-in-law, recalled in an interview with the Roanoke Times in 1999. “Eventually, he hit upon the soup.”

The soup.

Brown, an African-American, started working at the hotel in 1922, when he was still in high school. He began as a runner, fetching supplies from the storeroom, but gradually worked his way up the ladder in the hotel’s kitchen—boiler cook, fry cook, roast cook, assistant chef. Brown left for a job at the Greenbrier, the world-famous resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, but he returned to the Hotel Roanoke in 1937 as its executive chef.

Brown didn’t have much in the way of formal training, but, according to Dowe, “He was an especially creative cook and liked to try new recipes.”

Brown, who died in 1984, reportedly tried (unsuccessfully) to patent the soup he’d invented. For a while the recipe was a closely guarded secret, but eventually the hotel made it available—as it appears below—to anyone who asked for it.

May 1, 2020 By
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