Flashback Friday: Wichita’s Cowtown Museum once had an on-site fried-chicken restaurant

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, Delmonico’s, was a full-service restaurant that once operated on the grounds of Old Cowtown Museum.

Today, the building next door to Empire House at Old Cowtown Museum has a fading, nondescript sign on the entrance that reads “M Zimmerly: Wholesale and retail dealer in Hardware, Stoves.” Zimmerly Hardware, as the staff calls it, is now used as a place for volunteers to gather.

But for 20 years, that building served a different purpose. Many modern-day Wichitans don’t know that Cowtown, the Old West-themed museum at 1865 Museum Blvd. that brings Wichita’s earliest days back to life, once had a full service, on-site restaurant.

It was called Delmonico’s — named after a restaurant that operated in Wichita during its earliest days. This Delmonico’s lasted from 1961 to 1981 in a building on the far west-side of the museum.

The building had originally gone up at 816 E. Murdock in the 1890s and operated as a grocery. According to local legend, the building was once the scene of a holdup where the store operator was shot and killed

John Jabara Jr. and Jim Jabara, who had purchased the building from their father, John Jabara Sr., in the mid-1940s, donated the building to Old Cowtown, which had been established in 1952.

Anyone who wanted to dine at Delmonico’s did not have to pay Cowtown admission. Inside the dining room, which would seat 100 people, customers could order pan-fried chicken dinners, channel catfish, country-fried steaks, homemade bread and pies.

An inscription on the front of the building read, “The best food in the west. Pardner, come on in and eat some.”

During its early days, Delmonico’s was a seasonal restaurant. It would close during the winter along with the museum then reopen in the spring, usually around March. When it was open, it typically served dinner from 4:30 to 9 p.m. on weekdays and from noon to 8 p.m. on Sundays, when it captured big after-church crowds.

It also advertised itself as a place that catered to private parties, and some Wichitans remember attending wedding rehearsal dinners, retirement parties and club functions there. Some longtime locals who comment on social media pages aimed at Wichita nostalgia remember working at Delmonico’s as waiters or waitresses — or hanging out at Cowtown while their parents worked there.

The interior of the restaurant had a simple, Old West theme, and starting in 1969, the walls were decorated with photos of all 60 of Wichita’s past mayors, a project taken on by Dick Long, the author of the red, hardback Wichita history book called “Wichita Century.”

In the mid-1970s, the owners of Historical Wichita Inc. — who ran Cowtown at the time — took over management of Delmonico’s and decided to start opening it for both lunch and dinner six days a week, keeping it going even after tourist season ended on Labor Day.

A plan was hatched in 1977 to upgrade Delmonico’s and join it with the variety theater next door using money from a $750,000 federal Economic Development Administration grant. Just four years later — in 1981 — Delmonico’s closed, and Cowtown leased the restaurant and theater space to Crown Uptown Dinner Theatre owner Ted Morris. He opened it as Empire House Restaurant and Variety Theatre, and the business operated off and on at Cowtown under various owners until 2007.

Not everyone’s gotten the memo, though, that Delmonico’s is gone and that Cowtown no longer has a full-service restaurant, said James Vannurden, the current curator at Old Cowtown Museum. Some assume it’s still there.

“Every once in a while, I’ll answer the general phone and people will ask about it,” he said.