Flashback Friday: Beloved family restaurant chain started as a tiny burger spot in 1946

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature that runs 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 featured restaurant, Brown’s Grill, which started as a hamburger stand and grew into a big family restaurant business that included three locations.

In 1946, a young Richard Brown and his wife, Emma, opened a 26-seat burger restaurant across the street from Wesley Hospital.

Over the next four decades, Brown — also known by the nickname “Brownie” — and Emma grew that little hamburger stand into a big family restaurant business that included three locations and gave their sons careers in the restaurant industry.

The first Brown’s was at 545 N. Hillside, roughly where the Wesley-adjacent McDonald’s sits today. It quickly became a popular place to grab not only a burger but also a T-bone steak with a side of fries. The restaurant, which dubbed itself “The House of Cleanliness,” celebrated its third anniversary in 1949 with a special menu that included golden fried chicken for 85 cents and roast pork for 70 cents.

Twenty years after opening their first restaurant, the Browns started to grow their business. In 1966, they added a second restaurant at 7150 W. Harry, near the airport. It was a 6,000-square-foot chalet-style building that had a wishing well in the back.

Three years after the west-side restaurant opened, the Browns upgraded their east-side spot, moving it into a big new building they built just to the north and tearing down the original for parking. Inside was room for 425 diners. It became known as “Brown’s Grill East.”

The Browns weren’t finished: Just three years later, in 1972, they opened their largest restaurant yet — a 504-seat cafeteria that occupied the ground level of an insurance building at 212 N. Market in downtown Wichita. Its grand opening was on June 19 of that year, and instead of hosting a ribbon cutting, the owners invited a city commissioner to slice a prime rib to commemorate the event.

Brown decided to open the cafeteria, he told the Wichita Beacon, “because I felt we needed another good eating place downtown.” His son, Charles — better known to Wichita as Charlie Brown — was to manage the cafeteria, and his other two sons, R.J. and Larry, would oversee it along with the two other Brown’s restaurants.

By the late 1970s, Richard was ready to slow down. He sold his restaurants to his sons, and he officially retired in 1984. When he died in 1995, he had earned decades worth of Wichita fans. In a story that ran in the Wichita Eagle at the time of Richard Brown’s death, former WSU basketball player Cleo Littleton remembered that, in the early 1950s, Brown’s was one of the few restaurants that invited Black athletes inside to eat with their teammates after games.

“Every place else we’d go, we had to stay on the bus and eat, or go into the kitchen and eat,” he said. But at Browns, “We’d go through the front door.”

The Brown family restaurants didn’t make it through the 1980s, though. The downtown cafeteria went first, closing in 1981. Then, in 1987, R.J. Brown closed both the east and west restaurants during the same week of December. The east-side closed on a Wednesday, and the west followed on Thursday.

Talking to The Wichita Eagle at the time, R.J. Brown said that the closing was “tough” and “emotional” but that there was too much restaurant competition. When his father opened the first Brown’s, he said, Hillside was the east edge of town. But by 1987, the east edge was Rock Road, and that’s where people were living and eating.

“If you drive Hillside, there is very little traffic after 5:30 p.m.,” he said.

In 1985, Charles Brown opened a popular restaurant and lounge at 1443 Rock Road known as Charley Brown’s — which will be profiled in a future Flashback Friday feature.

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