Flashback Friday: If you ate out in 1970s Wichita, you surely dined at this sandwich shop
Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature that will appear every Friday on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants they once loved but now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.
This week’s featured restaurant, Dr. Redbird’s Medicinal Inn, might be one of the most famous in the history of Wichita.
If you lived in Wichita in the 1970s, you almost certainly ordered at least one edible “elixir” at the city’s most popular sandwich shop.
Dr. Redbird’s Medicinal Inn — which had an apothecary theme and a menu of addictive sandwiches — was founded in 1971 and grew into a small local chain. By the time the last Dr. Redbird’s closed in 1985, five different shops had operated in different parts of town.
The restaurant was started by entrepreneur Rich Vliet, who would go on to become one of the founders of Old Town. Though he worked with juvenile offenders as a career, he’d always dreamed of opening a bar that served top-rate sandwiches. He married his wife, Marni, in the 1970s, and the two became partners in the endeavor.
The first restaurant was at 124 S. Main. The Vliets named it after Jesse Redbird, a cowboy outlaw, and the menu was filled with names worthy of an Old West medicine show. The popular Dr. Redbird’s Daily Regulator was piled high with hot ham and Swiss cheese on an onion roll. The Supreme Preservative, served on wheatberry bread, was stuffed with sliced turkey breast and broccoli spears then drenched in cheese sauce. And Dr. Redbird’s Impaired Digestion Panacea was made with barbecue beef on fresh rye with “the doctor’s hot sauce.”
Dr Redbird's opening 1971 23 May 1971, Sun The Wichita Beacon (Wichita, Kansas) Newspapers.com
Sandwiches came with chips, a kosher dill pickle and a choice of wild rice with mushrooms, baked beans or potato salad. The bar offered beer and cider, served hot or cold.
Rich Vliet told the local newspaper in 1971 that he was trying to bring something unique to the city.
“We felt when people come to Wichita, they want to take their friends someplace that’s a little different,” he was quoted as saying.
The Dr. Redbird’s dining room also had an Old West theme. It was dimly lit with stained glass windows, a sousaphone and old magazine advertisements hung up for decoration. Customers sat in booths made from old church pews. Menus were printed to look like newspapers.
The second Dr. Redbird’s opened in 1972 at 4802 E. Central, and the Vliets also opened restaurants in the Harry Street Mall, 3825 E. Harry; at Twin Lakes Shopping Center, 2106 Amidon; and in Broadway Plaza, 2734 E. Lincoln.
But as the 1980s dawned, drive-through chain sandwich shops became the thing, and the Vliets slowly started turning their Dr. Redbird’s restaurants into other concepts. (The Vliets were also responsible for the popular downtown bar The Looking Glass, which was open from 1975 to 1985 at 412 E. Douglas.)
Rich Vliet died in 2011, nearly 20 years after he and partner Dave Burk opened Larkspur Restaurant at 904 E. Douglas, which was one of the earliest businesses in what would become Old Town. He and Burk also formed Marketplace Properties, which was instrumental in turning Old Town from a collection of aging buildings into a vibrant entertainment district.
Marni Vliet still lives in Wichita.
Last year, young Wichita entrepreneur Sebastian Gordon opened a new sandwich shop at 6640 E. Central called Red Bird. Despite the name and the menu’s focus on sandwiches, the two restaurants are not related.
Gordon said he chose the name Red Bird as an ode to his mother, Jeanne, who died in 2016 but would always tell her son that seeing a red male cardinal guaranteed a lucky day. Gordon reached out to Marni Vilet, who was his College Hill neighbor when he was a child, and told her of his plans before announcing the name.
