The world-famous Walnut Room was the first restaurant ever opened in a department store. With Circassian wood paneling imported from Russia and Austrian chandeliers, the 17,000 square foot dining room is both elegant and comfortable.
It's still open....
-------------------------------- We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb
Bazootiehead-in-training
Posts: 37921 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
Famous Barr in St. Louis had a nice restaurant with famous French Onion Soup. Thought about stopping on my way south, but had heard it was closed. sigh
-------------------------------- Several people have eaten my cooking and survived.
Posts: 25705 | Location: Still living at 9000 feet in the High Rockies of Colorado | Registered: 20 April 2005
-------------------------------- We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb
Bazootiehead-in-training
Posts: 37921 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
Pittsburgh had its share of fondly remembered department store restaurants and food specialties. Perhaps the best-remembered was the Tic Toc at Kaufmann's (later Macy's). Here is recollection of it along with the Arcade bakery in the same store. Joseph Horne's had its Tea Room. My first wife always had to go to Gimbels for Annaclairs from their candy counter when we were going to visit her mother. All memories from a vanished era.
Big Al
-------------------------------- Money seems to buy the most happiness when you give it away.
Why does everything have to be so complicated, all in the name of convenience. -ShiroKuro
A lifetime of experience will change a person. If it doesn't, then you're already dead inside. -MarkJ
Posts: 7409 | Location: Western PA | Registered: 20 April 2005
-------------------------------- “It's hard to win an argument with a smart person. It's damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person." -- Bill Murray
Posts: 13813 | Location: The outer burrows | Registered: 27 April 2005
My hometown was too small for the department stores to have restaurants. My parents talked about lunch counters at Kress and Woolworth and drugstore soda fountains, which I guess was the smalltown equivalent.
When I moved to Gainesville, Florida in the late 1980s, which actually wasn't that much bigger than my hometown, so there may have been a prosperity factor, too, one of the department stores still had a restaurant. I went there once, and it was past its glory days.
The store's name was Ivey's, and for many years after it sold out around 1990 (to Macy's, I think), there was a restaurant by that name that I really enjoyed. The restaurant itself wasn't much to look at, with a strip mall location, but the food was really good. In the 1990s, they had creative nightly specials and house-made pastas and breads-of-the-day. In later years, they cut back to a standard menu, but it was still good. I've wondered whether the department store restaurant was able to keep its name and perhaps took its chef's to the new location. It's been gone for about ten years now.
The Bird Cage in NYC's Lord and Taylor flagship store was a favorite treat when I was a child. The restaurant was an enormous, top floor atrium with birds in cages twittering. Behind the maitre'd's podium was an enormous white cockatoo that fascinated me. He was not in a cage, but had his claws clasped about a perch of steel tubing and cocked his head to and fro. Every once and a while the manager or a waitress would feed him a grape, or a slice of apple. He had the most intense black eyes that seemed to bore right through me.
The menu was pretentious--sandwiches cut into triangles with the crusts removed. But the dessert cart was to die for. The chocolate eclairs were my favorite.
It was a wonderful, bright, ebullient atmosphere and for a child, on par with a visit to F.A.O. Schwartz.
-------------------------------- fear is the thief of dreams
