Wichita Somehow Survived a Decade Without This Legendary Restaurant

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature appearing Fridays on Kansas.com and Dinner with Denise. It was designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants they once loved but now live only in your memories – and in The Eagle archives.

This week’s featured restaurant, Doc’s Steak House, would have turned 72 this year if it had survived.

In just a few months, Wichita will reach a milestone it might have previously thought impossible to achieve:

You will have lived without Doc Steakhouse for an entire decade.

The once-famous restaurant, beloved for its garlic salad, closed forever at the end of October 2014, after 62 years in the market. Since then, the building at 1515 N. Broadway has sat vacant. Pieces of the signage are still visible, although only a few letters remain on a marquee that once read “Home of the World Famous Garlic Salad.”

Doc’s was founded in 1952 by Dwight “Doc” Hustead, and when it opened, it was in an up-and-coming area of ​​the city. The North Broadway area at the time was also home to iconic nightclubs like Abe’s, Ken’s Club and Savute’s — the latter still open at 3303 N. Broadway and turns 80 this year.

While there is still some debate over which of these restaurants started serving garlic salad, it was undoubtedly the star of the Doc’s Steak House menu which, in the restaurant’s heyday, included items such as fried chicken livers and gizzards, giant frog legs, potatoes French fried clam strips, catfish, pork chops, spaghetti and meatballs and lasagna. In 1977, when famous Wichita food writer Kathleen Kelly reviewed Doc’s, she described the steak special, which cost $4.90, as a thick cut of prime rib, cooked just rare.

The garlic salad she described as a “mixture of chopped vegetables in a creamy garlic-scented dressing, served on a little bit of chopped lettuce.” Customers could get the spicy mix as a side dish for their steak or order it on its own.

Doc’s started small: Kelley described the original building as a “dwelling with a small cooking and dining area.” In 1963, Hustead sold the restaurant to his neighbor, Louis Scott, and Scott’s business partner, Mike Belluomo.

In 1970, new owners spent $25,000 renovating a Doc’s, adding the stone facade and arched parking lot entrance still visible today. The new look was so successful that, in 1971, the restaurant received a mention from Projeto Beleza for its property beautification.

The new owners also updated the interior of the 200-seat restaurant, adding the kind of dark oak paneling that was elegant in the early 1970s and updating the booths, tables, chairs and carpeting.

The Doc facelift in 1970 February 8, 1970, Sunday The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kansas) Newspapers.com

Doc’s Steakhouse made headlines in the 1970s for another incident as juicy as its steaks. In 1974, the owners sued KAKE-TV for $250,000 for running a story in which a news crew followed a health inspector into Doc’s kitchen. The inspector found 37 violations, and the embarrassed owners insisted they were duped by the police department, which claimed to be producing a documentary about a health inspector at work. The case went to trial in 1977, but Doc lost.

Over the years, ownership of the restaurant has passed through the Scott family. Louis Scott sold it to his son, Stuart, who sold it to his nephew, Brian, in 2011. Although Brian Scott, who grew up working at the restaurant, dreamed of modernizing and revitalizing Doc’s, he faced a lot of competition and fell short. It wouldn’t break even when costs rose, he told the Eagle in 2014 when he announced he was closing the location.

By that time, most of the other once-famous nightclubs in the area had also disappeared. Ken’s Klub had closed decades earlier in 1971, and Abe’s closed its doors in the early 2000s.

New owners bought the Doc’s building in 2016, saying they planned to open a Mexican restaurant there — but never did.

A few years before Doc closed, then-Wichita Eagle food writer Joe Stumpe I tried to talk Brian Scott out of the restaurant’s garlic salad recipe. But Scott didn’t move.

Stumpe tracked down the original Ken’s Klub garlic salad recipe, provided by founder Ken Hill’s daughter. You can find it below:

Ken Garlic Salad

The key to this is using real mayonnaise and extracting as much moisture as possible from the lettuce. Sauce should not be added to vegetables before serving.

1 cup Hellman’s mayonnaise

1-2 teaspoons McCormick garlic salt

2 tablespoons of tomato juice

1 head of lettuce

1 cup grated carrot and radish

Garnish: Parsley sprig, radish roses, paprika

Biscuits (Club or Ritz are recommended)

Mix mayonnaise, garlic salt and tomato juice. Refrigerate.

Remove the outer leaves and core of the lettuce (the outer leaves can be washed, drained and used to line the salad plate or bowl).

Chop remaining lettuce into dime-sized pieces to fill 6 cups. Line a sieve with paper towel, place the lettuce in the sieve and cover with more paper towel. Press the lettuce to extract the moisture. Remove the lettuce from the sieve and place in a plastic bag lined with more paper towels. Refrigerate for several hours. Grate carrots and radishes and dry. Refrigerate.

Just before serving, mix the chopped vegetables with the sauce. Assemble the salad in a bowl or plate and garnish with parsley, pink radish and paprika. Serve with crackers.

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