Flashback Friday: 50-year-old Clifton Square building has housed every kind of restaurant

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

This week’s installment looks at the many restaurants that have operated inside the Dempsey’s Burger Pub building in Clifton Square, including Burton Pell’s Soupcon, the first tenant 50 years ago.

The building at the back of Clifton Square that for the past 10 years has been home to the popular Dempsey’s Burger Pub also has housed a long string of interesting eateries, dating back to the mid-1970s and serving everything from catfish to Chinese food.

And until Dempsey’s managed to survive a whole decade, Wichita wondered if the two-story space — which was the only new building in Clifton Square, 3700 E. Douglas, when it went up in 1974 — was too hidden to house a successful restaurant.

Ground was broken for the building on July 18, 1974. Its first tenant was to be Soupcon — which is pronounced “Soops On” — a French restaurant owned by well-known Wichita art patron Burton Pell.

Pell, who died in 2005 at age 82, made a career as an interior designer and was known around town as an arts activist. He was a big opera fan and a longtime member of the Kansas Arts Council. He created the Holiday Tables fundraiser that still happens each year.

But in 1974, he was an aspiring restaurateur who wanted to introduce Wichita to adapted recipes from his home kitchen: French onion soup, turkey tetrazzini, goulash, sirloin tip sandwiches and lime surprise cake.

He chose Clifton Square, a collection of Victorian-era houses that had been converted into boutiques and shops in 1972. The restaurant was built to look like a cottage so that it would blend in with the other structures.

Pell opened Soupcon in November of 1974. He decorated the main floor “with accents of black-and-white gingham and living greenery,” according to a story in The Wichita Eagle. The basement area was turned into a beer garden and an overflow seating area.

When she stopped in to review the restaurant in December of 1976, Wichita Eagle and Beacon food writer Kathleen Kelly liked what she tried, including the perfectly cooked pan -fried chicken breast with tossed salad, mashed potatoes and pan gravy. She also liked the salad bar, which included sweet-tart cabbage and sauerkraut salads, “both of which are exceptionally tasty.” (The split-pea soup, however, needed salt.)

But Soupcon appears to have closed in 1977 and not long after, a restaurant called The Peppermill opened in the space. It was also short lived, and in 1980, Clifton Square founder and owner Jo Zakas teamed up with Mary Lou Jaerger to open their own eatery, which they called Le Restaurant and Club. It served brunch and lunch to the public and dinner to members of its private club.

When the duo closed their venture one year later, in May 1981, they invited friends to “come dance on our grave” and offered free food and cheap drinks as the marked the restaurant’s final day in business.

Interviewed about the location, which had housed three failed restaurants in less than seven years, Peppermill owner Jim Acord blamed the location, which was in the back of a “horseshoe-shaped” shopping center, he said.

Also, all the other shops in the center were closed before the dinner hour and open after breakfast was over. He’d have standing room crowds at lunch, he said, but it wasn’t enough.”

“...You are stuck with one meal and the overhead is just more than a place that size can handle,” he told the paper.

Zakas said the real problem was that none of the restaurants in the building had been run by experienced restaurateurs — including hers.

Next up for the space was a Cantonese and Szechuan restaurant called Rose Garden, which opened in July of 1981. One of the partners in the restaurant was Chau Do, the owner of Lotus Garden Restaurant at 7742 E. Central. By 1982, the restaurant was called Lotus Garden. The restaurant was open for six years.

In 1987, the building got one of its most memorable tenants: a French restaurant called Le Beaujolais. Owner Robert Goehring, who’d spent time in France in his youth and trained at a cooking school in New York City, was the cook, and he impressed Wichita foodies with his rotating menu that featured around five entrees a week — dishes like shrimp Provencal and lamb stew with root vegetables. He also made pastries and desserts like lemon mousse.

The restaurant had a good reputation, but Goehring decided to sell the restaurant to Mon Yee in 1989, and she was able to keep it open only until 1991.

For the next decade, the restaurant space was either empty or home to a restaurant that didn’t last long. In November 1992, for example, Phillip Olson opened Clifton’s Restaurant, which offered “fine continental dining,” but that lasted only six months.

Catfish Hole, 1993 26 Jul 1993, Mon The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kansas) Newspapers.com

After him, Harold Burkholder took over the space to open a second location of his Catfish Hole catfish restaurant. And it appears that around 1998 a Mexican restaurant called Marisol’s Mexican Cafe briefly operated in the building as well.

In 2009, Clifton Square owner Zakas decided to try the space again, opening a club called Clifton Wine & Jazz. It didn’t last, either, and in 2010, John Fitzthum opened a bar called John Browns in the space. It closed within the year.

By the end of 2012, Wichita restaurateurs Kevin Brown and Tracy Fahrbach — also the duo behind Cibola at Bradley Fair — announced they’d take over the space for a business they’d call Mortimer’s Neighborhood Grill and Piano Bar. But they changed their minds.

Then, in 2013 a couple from Belgium said they were moving to the United States to open a French restaurant in the space they’d call Au Paris-Bruxelles. Their plans were on, then off, then on again. But they also never actually started their business.

Finally, in 2014, the curse was broken. Steve Gaudreau — a Wichita native with successful restaurants in Lawrence and Topeka as well as in Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Arizona — opened Dempsey’s Burger Pub in the space. He made the upstairs a dining room and served gourmet burgers and fries. He also carried a big selection of craft beer, which diners could get at the bar on the lower level.

Though Gaudreau has tried several other restaurants in Wichita since then — Dempsey’s Biscuit Co., Crutch & Biscuit, Quinton’s, even an east-side Dempsey’s — nothing has stuck.

But the Clifton Square Dempsey’s has made it nearly a decade, no doubt spurred on by other successful food businesses that have also moved in nearby buildings at Clifton Square, including Ziggy’s Pizza and Papa’s General Store.

Clifton Square founder Zakas sold the shopping center in 2015 to Mike Corley, Adam Steiner, James Lyon, Jason Clark and Steiner’s father, Kent. She died the following year following heart surgery.