The Fifties

By Ronald Holden

1950 Once the Legislature changed state law to permit the service of liquor by the drink in restaurants, Peter Canlis, a restaurateur from Hawaii, almost immediately commissions architect Roland Terry to build a cantilevered structure at the south end of the Aurora bridge which will be both his home and his restaurant. The servers are all Japanese women in kimonos (yikes!); a regular salad is 75 cents but the famous Canlis salad, prepared table-side, costs $2. The restaurant today-run by grandsons Mark and Brian Canlis (photo)-remains at the top of Seattle's restaurant scene; the current chef, Brady Williams, was named in 2018 by Food & Wine magazine as one of America's best young chefs.

1950 Victor Rosellini and his brother-in-law, John Pogetti, open Victor's 610 at 610 Pine Street downtown. An instinctive maître d'hôtel, he becomes downtown Seattle's most popular host. (His cousin Albert, no less gifted a politician, is elected Washington state's governor in 1988.) In 1956, Victor opens Rosellini's Four-10 in the White-Henry-Stewart building across from the Olympic Hotel, and, when that building is torn down, moves the restaurant to 4th & Wall in the wilds of Belltown (then referred to as the Denny Regrade).

1951 David Cohn opens the Barb, a restaurant serving barbecue sandwiches. A decade later, he opens the Polynesia on Pier 51 (which is taken over by the ferry terminal), then Elliott's Oyster House on Pier 56. In 1983 he opens Metropolitan Grill in the heart of downtown financial district, which quickly becomes Seattle's foremost steak house.

1951 UW Professor Lloyd Woodbourne, housebound after a camping trip by a bout of poison ivy, stumbles across Philip Wagner's American Wines and How to Make Them. He and three friends soon start making their own wine using grapes shipped by rail from vineyards in California and eastern Washington. Within a few vintages, their hobby becomes a commercial operation, originally dubbed Academic Winery, later Associated Vintners (and, still later, Columbia Winery).

1951 From their ancestral village in the remote Dolomites of northern Italy, the Nella family joins a legion of itinerant knife- and scissors-grinders who spread out across Europe, the British Isles, and North America. In Toronto, the family makes bayonets for the Canadian army. In Seattle, Nella services local restaurants with a full range of knives, blades, and slicing machinery, but by 2017 the store closes.

1952 Floyd Paxton, a manufacturing engineer whose family makes the nails used to hammer together wooden crates of fruit, develops a plastic clip for bread wrappers. His Kwik-Lok Corporation, headquartered in Yakima, Washington, to this day produces almost all the bread clips in the country, and is still family-owned.

1952 Phil Jensen, a restaurateur who'd lost the lease on his downtown Seattle restaurant, is offered a property in the University District, where he opens the first Burgermaster drive-in. Unlike other chains, its meat is locally sourced and never frozen. The company grows to six locations and remains family-owned.

1953 Jim Ward, an old-school restaurateur, opens both 13 Coins and the original El Gaucho. His general manager is Paul Mackay, who revives the El Gaucho name in Belltown in 1996. A basketball star named Al Moscatel takes over 13 Coins, which remains open (24 hours a day) at its South Lake Union location until 2018, when it moves to Pioneer Square. Mackay and his son, Chad, expand El Gaucho to Bellevue and Portland, add several new properties (Aqua, Miller's Guild, Eritage in Walla Walla) and create a new company, Fire & Vine, to manage the portfolio.

1954 Dick Spady opens Dick's, Seattle's iconic burger stand, about half a mile west of the UW campus. Half a century later there are still only six stores. Actually, an earlier 19-cent burger shop, Gil's (named for Gill Centioli), had opened in the Rainier Valley in 1951 but didn't survive. Centioli goes on to own a string of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises; one of his daughters, Dorene, is a co-founder of the Pagliacci pizza chain. Other burger casualties: Dag's (1955-1993), Herfy's (not actually dead, but no longer in Seattle proper), Daly's (1962-2007).

1955 Jack Croco, a longtime employee of the Albertson's chain of grocery stores, opens his own store, Lake Hills Thriftway. In 1963 he opens a second store on NE Roosevelt Way and calls it Quality Food Center, QFC for short. Over the years, Croco and his partners take over 30 more locations from a dozen owners. By the time it goes public in 1997, QFC is the second-largest supermarket chain in Seattle (after Safeway); then it is acquired by Portland-based Fred Meyer, the region's pioneer in one-stop shopping, which itself is absorbed by the Ohio-based supermarket giant Kroger (almost 3,000 stores) just 18 months later.

1956 The Port of Seattle closes its "Frozen Fish Museum" at what was then Terminal 30 on Spokane Street. For 30 years it had displayed a bizarre collection of piscatorial oddities, competing with Ivar Haglund's aquarium on Pier 54. In 2008, the Port also closes its money-losing Odyssey Maritime Discovery Center at Pier 66.

1956 Sol Amon, Seattle-born son of an immigrant fishmonger from Turkey, acquires Pure Food Fish in the heart of the Pike Place Market and over the years becomes the unofficial Mayor of the Market; his grandchildren Isaac and Carlee now run the stand.

1957 The city's original Manning's (a brand of canned coffee that also operated a chain of 40-some cafeteria-style buffet restaurants) in the Pike Place Market, is sold and becomes Lowell's. Its Main Arcade neighbor is the Athenian Inn, founded by three Greek brothers in 1909 and owned since 1964 by the Cromwell family; on the current Happy Hour menu: elk sliders. Tourists from around the world line up every day for what is, at heart, diner food with a magnificent view.

1958 Restaurateur Frank Tonkin opens a burger joint called Bif's in Renton. Four years later he buys a one-third interest in a fledgling chain of fast-food franchises based in Eugene, Oregon, called Taco Time, which has ambitions to expand nationally, and Bif's soon becomes a Taco Time. In 1979, Tonkin buys back the rights to the brand in Western Washington. While there are over 300 individually franchised Taco Time stores worldwide today, 80 units remain under the Taco Time Northwest umbrella (56 family-owned, 24 franchises); the privately-held company (over $100 million in revenue) is run by two cousins, Frank's great-grandsons Chris (left) and Robby (right) Tonkin.

Photos courtesy of Ronald Holden unless otherwise noted.

December 2018

Ronald Holden is a Northwest native who's been writing about local food for over 40 years. His latest book, the second edition of Forking Seattle, is available on Amazon.com ( paperback here , kindle version here ). He blogs at ForkingSeattle.com .