I don’t know exactly when New Haven’s status as the culinary capital of Connecticut was minted. But I do know, in a city approaching four centuries old, it was a long time coming.
Hints of New Haven restaurants I wish still existed are dropped like breadcrumbs across the internet’s busy dining room floor. A menu listed on eBay tells us that on Sunday, October 27, 1926, the Hotel Taft, offering New Haven’s ritziest lodging and probably some of its finest dining, held a luncheon for the Yale-Dartmouth game. Emblazoned with a football that could just as easily be a watermelon, the menu was printed in green, perhaps a clue to the expected allegiance of diners. This “table d’hote” meal cost $2 and started with fresh fruit cocktail and hearts of celery, followed, I think, by a duo of soups: cream of cauliflower and consommé renaissance. A choice of entrees included “chicken pattie a la reine”—later widely bastardized as chicken “a la king,” even though, in French, “reine” means “queen”—served with potatoes (Delmonico or rissolées) and green peas. Then came a “salad verte” (green salad), a choice of two desserts (honeydew sherbet or Boston cream pie) and a cup of coffee (with cream). French cuisine and words were in fashion, if you hadn’t noticed, and even the name Hotel Taft, placing the noun first as the French would, may have been meant to project an aura of Parisian hospitality.
Other breadcrumbs show us where that menu was served. Ordinary, the modern-day cocktail bar at 990 Chapel Street in the former bar room of the Taft, keeps a history section on its website, where you can see an undated but likely proximate photo of the hotel’s grand main dining room (today enjoyed by patrons of The Luke, having been restored to glory for the previous tenant, Roìa). Other images there show the hotel’s “rathskeller,” a pillared and arched “grill room” where I wish we could all still grab a bite or a drink, plus the bar room as it looked upon the hotel’s opening in 1912, where, thanks to Ordinary, we still can.
Another past place the internet’s got me salivating over: Hofbrau Haus, the second location of a budding international hospitality empire, opened in 1901 in the rather nice basement of what is now The Washington apartment building at 130 Crown Street. A 1908 menu from the original NYC location declares the founder’s decidedly un-French mission: to capture “the unique ensemble of… art and refinement” embodied by “the inns in the famous mediaeval towns” of “Old Germany.” But the menu also features French and American cuisines, and while I haven’t found an early menu for New Haven’s Hofbrau, I have found a late one doing the same. Likely dating to the 1960s or early ’70s, the period the restaurant closed, it shows a far more focused kitchen, albeit one that also feels less German, with just a handful of “spezialitäten.”
More photos posted to the internet help us imagine what it might’ve felt like to go there. The Washington’s leasing website has a carousel of exterior shots spinning on a sort of undated timeline. In the first one, three huge Hofbrau signs line the building’s x-, y- and z-axes over Church and Crown, while a fourth sign, the one above the actual door, peeks in from the east. In a pair of other images, we see churchy wooden moldings with sharp Gothic peaks flanking the entrance, a set of rounded pilasters also between them. The pilasters still survive, as does a decorative interior relief you can spot through the windows in one of the old photos.
Known to pleasure-seekers of a more recent era as a succession of night clubs—first Gotham Citi Cafe, then Empire—the subterranean space is now a private lobby, I think. But if you peer down into it through the street-level windows, you should spot the same tightly tiled flooring you see in this 1940s postcard, just without the medieval German-style decor. Another postcard of the same era shows the Hofbrau’s “ladies dining room and fireplace,” a softer space with more plants and less heraldry, while a third card shows a “carefully preserved” corner, presumably in the first room: a booth-style “shrine” where, “at the time of their matriculation,” hundreds of Yalies had “carved their names on walls and tables,” with the tops of two of those tables apparently retired and hung from those walls.
As the Hofbrau was winding down, a third local place whose patrons I envy was winding up. Built into the side of a hill, Les Shaw’s Restaurant was one story at the top and two at the bottom, with a balcony on the second level and a parking lot that, at least for a time, swooped down neatly and newly enough to make even the asphalt seem beautiful. Unmistakably midcentury even in its more nascent state, the restaurant, located at 70 Pond Lily Avenue, really came of age when it added a carport. Confidently topped with “Les” in red script and “Shaw’s” in red block letters, the long, low-angled, hard-top awning offered a clearer and more esteemed entryway for guests and, more importantly for anyone who had to stand there in rain, snow or beating sun, weather-proofed the valet station.
Les Shaw’s was indeed a place you drove to, a destination at the edge of town just off the Wilbur Cross. It specialized in “American & Continental cuisine” and boasted banquet facilities for 200, then 250, people. It had a main dining room (connected to the balcony), a “rib room” (with a central circular dance floor) and a now-retrofuturist cocktail lounge, which might have been where you went if you wanted to take away novelty swizzle sticks topped with lounge ladies and mermaids. A menu posted online feels appropriately boozy, with two fine-print pages for drinks and one for food.
Despite being younger than either the Taft or the Washington, the building that housed Les Shaw’s, now home to Shree Nathji Haveli, a Hindu worship and community center, is probably the least recognizable. The balcony has been filled in, which neuters the flair and drama of the peak you can still sort of see if you squint. The carport and the slope of the lot are the only clear tells of what it was, and only then if you know what to look for. Yet a thread posted last year to Growing Up In New Haven, a Facebook group, proves plenty of people still remember Les Shaw’s, and quite fondly at that. Those people also got to talking about the address’s successor restaurants: Steak House West, Septembers, Piccadilly Square.
More breadcrumbs to follow, perhaps, when we’re not already so full.
Written by Dan Mims. Image, featuring Les Shaw’s, sourced from eBay.
