Flashback Friday: This restaurant was one of Wichita’s top-rated starting in the 1950s

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature that will appear every Friday on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants they once loved but now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.

This week’s featured restaurant, Hickory House, opened in Wichita in 1950.

From the 1950s through the 1970s in Wichita, fine dining was found at Hickory House at 1625 E. Central, just south of I-135.

The restaurant was opened in 1950 by businessman J. Robert Dry and his wife, Verda, who would famously go on to by western-wear chain Sheplers and turn it into a multi-million dollar business.

Hickory House quickly built a reputation as a place where people could get a fancy meal. Its menu featured Maine lobster for $2.95 (in 1954, anyway) and people could also choose sides like baked potatoes, hot biscuits and green salads from a rolling smorgasbord cart. It was the place that local organizations and clubs would put on holiday parties or where sororities would host dinners.

During the almost two decades the Drys owned Hickory House, it was one of Wichita’s highest-rated restaurants, and the Dry family grew it from a 55-seat eatery to a dining destination that, when a snack shop they opened next door was included, could serve 310 people at a time.

But in 1967, the Drys — wanting to focus on Sheplers — sold Hickory House to Kansas City-based Myron Green Cafeteria Co., which also had nine restaurants in Kansas City and Topeka. The Green family completely remodeled the restaurant, giving it a Colonial Williamsburg motif and dividing the space into five separate dining rooms, each one reflecting the period. The Williamsburg room boasted a giant wood-burning stone fireplace. The Raleigh and Pickwick Rooms were decorated with replicas of famous inn signs. Old maps and pewter greeted guests in the Tidewater room. Diners could enjoy Prime Rib of Beef Au Jus prepared over an old fashioned bed of rock salt. For dessert, they’d have champagne sherbet.

But a massive fire destroyed much of the restaurant just before Christmas in 1972. The roof collapsed, and according to reports, the heat was so intense that it melted pewter antiques. The restaurant suffered $50,000 in damage, but the Green’s rebuilt, and the restaurant was reopened by fall 1973.

hickory house big ad 23 Sep 1973, Sun The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kansas) Newspapers.com

Hickory House remained popular through most of the 1970s and even added a private club in 1978 so it could serve alcohol and continue to compete with other restaurants. But it slowly began to fall out of favor as the 1980s dawned. The restaurant closed in 1983, and the owner blamed the local economy, saying that business, especially from local diners, had dropped “rather precipitously” over the previous year.

The contents of Hickory House were auctioned off in 1983.

Hickory House recipe

In 1986, a reader asked The Wichita Eagle to find the recipe for a spinach salad that the Hickory House had once served on its salad bar. Here’s a recipe provided at the time by reader Lucille Jackson.

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