Jeff’s recent article about Pueblo’s B & K Drive-in got me thinking about Pueblo and food–the two go hand in hand in my mind. I have lots of memories of really good eating throughout the world, but the majority involve growing up and eating in Pueblo. I want to share them here in hopes others will verify the soundness of my recall and to see if they evoke thoughts of great food from other readers who’ll remind us about Pueblo culinary experiences I’ve now forgotten.
It would be really hard to create a top-ten list if I had to rank the best eateries (or drinkeries, if that is a word) from the fifties and sixties in Pueblo. But not so hard at all to include them in one big list without a rank. So that’s my goal, starting with a couple of places closest to home.
I grew up on the corner of 4th Street and Corona, a mere stone’s throw from Ben’s Hickory Pit BBQ, the logical starting point of my walk down memory lane. There were a couple of owners while I lived there with different motifs, but similar food, if memory serves me. I can remember it being very much a cowboy place early on, complete with country and western bands to serenade you while you ate. I can’t picture the owner, but I’m sure many of you readers will remember him. I believe he sold out to the owner that was there for most of my childhood who replaced the cowboy band with a Hammond organ that I believe his wife played. This “Ben,” and I think that was indeed his name, served up the food I most recall.
He was blond or red headed, only mildly friendly, but his entrees were out of this world. He had the standard fare of all types of BBQ meats, all of which were wonderful and hickory smoked on the premises. There were large and tasty french fries or potato salad to go along with meals. But the two really unique items I recall–and I’d give anything for the recipe of–were the hickory burger and the BBQ sauce he had out in bowls or dispensers. The hickory burger was a concoction of the leftovers from all the meats I believe, probably the dark outer parts that Ben thought that people might not want on the dinner plate. He mixed these meat scraps with a delicious BBQ sauce, lopped it on a bun, and, if you had probably 15 or 20 cents, you could have one as you sat up at the counter. But the real treat was dishing out the BBQ sauce that was placed on the counter or table. It was laced with large chunks of mild, sweet onions and had a flavor unlike anything I’d had before or since. If I’d only realized that Ben’s was not a permanent fixture in Pueblo, as most restaurants aren’t, I would have begged, cajoled, or stolen his recipe when I was a kid. Like a one-of-a-kind family photo that burns up in a house fire, that recipe is gone, and I’m the sadder for the loss. As I continue you’ll realize this was only the first of many such recipes whose loss I bemoan.
Next on my walk to Carlile, and a frequent stopping point after school, or possibly at lunch for Jerry Miller and myself, was the Barrel. Shaped like a huge wooden keg, it had a counter like most of the restaurants of that era, and some tables too. The two most prominent memories are the unique and delicious hamburger and the great pinball machines. Looking back I realize it wasn’t some great, secret family recipe that made the burger so good, it was simply using consistently fresh products. The iceberg lettuce was cut quite thinly giving it a consistency and flavor that were unique, especially when combined with the tasty mustard. There might have been tomato and pickles, too, but they have faded from memory if so. It was the lettuce and mustard and the burger cut in half laying in that basket that I remember–it was great.
My first encounter with a true pinball wizard was watching Jerry Miller attack the Barrel’s machines. He had a talent that few could match. He could be gentle and methodical as he carefully guided the ball to the proper location. Or he could be a raving madman trying to keep the machine just one or two millimeters away from that fatal tilt sign showing up to prematurely end the game. On almost every day we visited he racked up free game after game, always making me envious. You’d think that watching the master at work like this I would have learned his techniques, but I never did. It would be so much fun to have a movie of us wolfing down a delicious burger and then tackling the pinball machine. But, alas, no such movie exists. I play the movie in my mind only, and surely have embellished it well beyond reality–but that’s our prerogative when we don’t make real movies.
Across the street was Logan’s Drugstore, not a place remembered for the food, but rather for the great fountain drinks. It was literally out of the old movies in its soda fountain décor: the counter, the stools you could sit on and spin around to see those behind you, and the various spigots from which the delectable drinks were made. The floats, shakes, and malts brought me there as often as I could afford it, and remain branded in my memories for their great flavor.
Moving east to the Mesa Junction there are a couple of great memories there also. First recollection: the Mesa Snack Bar, famous for its great hamburgers topped with grilled onions. This was my brother’s favorite food in the entire world. For his birthday he didn’t want cake or ice cream, he wanted a dozen Mesa Snack hamburgers, and he somehow managed to eat them all. The paper bag would come home soaked in grease, but that made them all the better for him. But I can’t blame him, I loved those burgers too, and still love to grill up onions and put them on anything to enhance the flavor. Now my burgers are veggie style, but the grilled onions make them tastier too.
Moving west now I’d stop at Sambo’s, not a restaurant, but a candy store. This was on the way to or from the movies at the Junction, so it was a favorite stopping place. My two strongest memories involved the luscious taffy that you could watch being made from the front window and the parched corn. I don’t know how Sambo did it, but that parched corn was wonderful, deliciously browned, slightly crunchy and somewhat salty, for a unique flavor. Later I discovered Corn Nuts, the major commercial parched corn, which was good, but it didn’t hold a candle to Sambo’s parched corn.
As you headed back home, somewhat satiated from a delicious burger with grilled onion and a few handfuls of parched corn, what could be better than a malt to top it off? Voila, there was the Mesa Dairy Bar (or some similar name, I don’t recall it for sure now) just a couple blocks from Sambo’s as you headed west. Their malts, banana splits, sundaes and shakes were to die for using the current vernacular. Many a trip home from the movies or walking home from Keating or Central brought us in there for a tasty treat.
Getting a driver’s license opened a whole new world of food for us. Perhaps no better than what I’ve described, but new and different tastes to complement the ones we had grown up with. The memories include many great flavors, but perhaps none better than the SOB (sausage on a bun) at the Joker Drive-in. Imagine today driving up, rolling down your window, telling the car hop to bring you an SOB and a Coors. Ah, those were the days. Was a D.U.I even around then? If so, we didn’t know it and didn’t care. The Coors was good, but the SOB was GRRRRRate. Once again here’s a recipe I would pay dearly for. Surely a franchise selling SOBs couldn’t miss, and I’d like to be the owner. The slightly tangy tomato sauce, the tasty sausage on a soft bun made for a flavor I’ve never tasted again, and apparently never will. But I can dream.
The Joker was not too far south of the B & K where Jeff and I worked, and it had some memorable food too. Mainly this was my first taste of an onion ring, and they really were good. It was hard to eat fries after digging into my first B & K rings accompanied by a delicious root beer float. My rather meager wages, to a great extent, went right back the B & K as I satisfied my constant need for onion rings and floats.
You can’t talk about food in Pueblo without mentioning the zesty Mexican fare. Our number one favorite location by far was Ramirez’s Restaurant near the CF&I. More nights than I can count would start with a few brews at some club and end up at Ramirez’s for a spicy and delicious combination plate. Or, vice versa, starting the evening at Ramirez’s and then on to some club–either way was just great. Every single item on that combination plate was as good as it gets–at least in my memory–and we couldn’t get enough. If I ate Mexican food that late at night now there aren’t enough Rolaids in Wal-Mart to get me through the night, but not a problem for someone under age 20 back then. We could eat the spiciest salsa and green chili they could provide. I also remember buying the huge commercial-sized jalapenos cans in the 70s, getting some friends together, and eating a dozen or more at a time washed down with beer in frosty mugs. It hurts to even think of that now, but it was fun then.
And I’ll end my reverie at the location where I spent many an evening, Ianne’s. Icy cold pitchers of beer, great bands and dancing, and grinders with a flavor unmatched anywhere else I’ve eaten. Not a bad place to stop for an evening’s entertainment or to stop my story.
I’m sure I’ve missed some places that will stand out in others’ minds, and maybe a few that I’ll realize I should have highlighted. But now I’m hungry and need to get out in the kitchen to try to concoct something that will be even close to the delightful tastes that Pueblo’s finest offered us who were fortunate enough to grow up there in the 50s and 60s. Who says you can’t go back home? That’s what memories are for.
Jerry Donnelly
February 9, 2009 at 4:52 pm |
Jerry worked at the second BK. I’m not certain if it was BK or B&K. Bill Vickers had the state franchise and was hoping to compete with A&W. The place where Jerry worked was bigger and nicer, but it was on Elizabeth near 29th Street. North Side, Centennial and all those connotations.
This second place was being built at the same time as the Freeway. The first day the Freeway opened a regular customer at the Lake Avenue BK drove his classic T-Bird from one to the other in five minutes, without speeding, he claimed. That was a real shock since pre-Free you’d probably have to go through 20 stoplights to make that trip.
My introduction to eating out, along with most of Mrs. Varra’s class, probably fourth grade, at Minnequa was to Mike’s hamburger stand on Main near the old Y on Eighth Street. Mike was Mr’s Varra’s husband and we took a field trip. I didn’t eat hamburgers at home then, but I liked Mike’s,
Ron DeLeon’s mother and aunt opened Velasco’s next door to the Avalon and across from the Klamm’s Shell when we were at Corwin. Velasco was Judy and Estelle’s maiden name. Their mother cooked. It was my introduction to Mexican Food, still my favorite cuisine.
Everything seemed fresh and light. I don’t remember refried beans or green chile, now a requirement in Pueblo Mexican restaurants. I’d give quite a lot to be able to compare one of their entrees with anything served by any of the the popular restaurants now doing business.
Don’t get me wrong. I like several Mexican restaurants in Pueblo, but Velasco’s was first love.
Jeff Arnold
February 11, 2009 at 9:40 pm |
Since Jerry and I grew up together, his food memories and mine coincide to a great extent. As far as my ability at pinball, I think I was at least matched by Mike McNair. Mike was probably a little more of a violent player than I, resulting in more tilts, but man, could he handle the flippers. Sometimes we would play the same machine, each of us on one flipper, and he was at least as good as I was and he always took the left one.
The sad thing about Jerry’s post is that of the 10 places he mentioned, only 3 remain. On the other hand, maybe it’s amazing that 3 still do after 50 or 60 years.
When Jackie and I first married, in 1965, one night a week, I think Thursday, the combination plates at Ramirez’s were priced two for one, and we went there almost weekly. As I recall they were less than two dollars to start with, and who could pass up that wonderful food when you were in effect paying half price? When we moved to Denver, and later Colorado Springs, we learned that you could not get the quality of Mexican food in either place as we had in Pueblo.
When I was a kid my family didn’t eat out a lot, but sometimes on Sunday we would have dinner downtown, then head to either the Chief or Main to see a movie. We usually ate at the Canton Cafe, which I think was on 6th St. I always had a hot roast beef sandwich with lots of brown gravy.
Another downtown place was Christmas Cafe, which may have been on 7th between Main and Santa Fe. If you went in there at 2AM, after the bars closed, it was just as busy then as it was at 6PM. The clientele was a lot noisier and sometimes rowdy at that time of night, as you might imagine. But after we had been drinking, we were ravenous.
I know there are more great places that neither of us has mentioned. A lot of people made a decent living by operating a small restaurant, but the competition from chains has put many of them down. Because of that I rarely eat at chain restaurants. To paraphrase Hemingway, I obscenity in the milk of all corporations.
February 16, 2009 at 10:41 am |
There is a new restaurant in Pueblo that is apparently getting a lot of “buzz.” That’s “Restaurant Fifteen Twentyone” on 123 North Main Street. My “web sources” tell me that it just recently opened —- maybe around October 2008. Here is what one blogger said:
“Not only does the menu feature Colorado’s finest products from our varied region, Chef Duy expertly layers the ingredients in such a way that each one can be experienced as it exists alone and as it enhances the dish. State gourmet treasures such as Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy cheese, Pueblo County vegetables, and Colorado lamb are featured on the menu, which changes daily.”
Prices seem moderate. French/European/and New American. They serve hamburgers, etc., also.
Probably worth checking out.
Ray
February 27, 2009 at 2:34 am |
Yesterday I had lunch at the Mill Stop on Bay State, just off Routt, with my prom date senior year, Joann Mahaney O’Neill, her brother and his wife. Since this is a comment about food in Pueblo, I will say that today’s stuffed sopapilla was the best entree I’ve had at the Mill Stop. Still it didn’t move that popular place into my top five of Mexican restaurants in Pueblo, probably not the top ten if I include the legendary restaurants of yore.
The location of the Mill Stop had a previous incarnation. Back when mill workers “doubled over,” i.e. worked a second shift, CF&I paid for a lunch provided by Chuck’s Lunch. The lunch was likely to be a bologna sandwich on white bread with a container of chips, but at three o’clock in the morning, it was good.
Next door to the Mill Stop, right on the corner, the doors are closed, but I was in there a few times when it was Liz’s. That’s where I first ate menudo, a soup made with cow’s stomach. Cattycorner from there is the parking lot of the Power Credit union. Once it was a recreation center with a low ceiling in the basketball court, where the legendary, in Bessemer at least, Teto Trujillo perfected the flat shot that enabled him to play for the Phillips 66 Oilers at the age of 18. Later that rec center became the Ramirez café mentioned by both Jerry Donnelly and Jerry Miller.
Speaking of ghost buildings, right across from the Mill Stop to the south is a parking lot that takes up nearly an entire block. The Colorado Supply, Pueblo’s version of the “Company Store” burned in about 1953. I watched the fire with my family, as did Joann and hers. The south half of the block was the Steel Y, a subject too grand, and heartbreaking to go into now.
After lunch I turned north on Routt and drove by a good take-out place, Pasta Cottage, then past El Nopal, which was our favorite when I brought my wife to Pueblo in 1967. There was a fairly recent article in the Chieftain which claims that the same family owns it. Whether the change is in me or in the food, it’s not the same old El Nopal.
Further north on Routt I passed Sadie’s, a Mexican restaurant that is quite good, but which once was Simmons Down Beat, a drinking spot for African Americans that fascinated, and frightened many whites. Just down the street is Jorge’s El Sombrero where then candidate Barack Obama famously ate on a campaign trip to Pueblo. Jorge’s certainly would make my top five.
As I continued on towards the library, I passed many other places with memories, either gone like Bolingers or boarded up. There is a Mexican store/restaurant on the southeast corner of Routt and Mesa that advertises bus trips to El Paso. I have not been in.
On Abriendo are the old and new locations of the Pass-Key. The smaller, older one was a place I played pinball. The new one is iconic Pueblo, partly because a couple of writers for the Chieftain mention it frequently.
I know the Junction itself if full of food ghosts: ice cream places, hamburger shacks, drug store soda fountains, Sambo’s, but that was too far from the Bessemer I remember.
February 27, 2009 at 5:26 pm |
Jeff’s mention of Sadie’s restaurant brought something to mind. Over the years, it has been our favorite Mexican restaurant, and we got to know the proprietor, Gary Martinez, and his wife. Sadie’s is closed now, having merged with Grand Prix, and the building was recently sold to someone who will open another restaurant.
One night when we were in Sadie’s, James Brown came on the jukebox singing, “I Feel Good.” I was facing the jukebox and noticed that no one had put any money in it. I mentioned this to Gary’s wife, and she said this occurred fairly frequently, that the jukebox would begin start without anyone putting any money in it, and it was always James Brown, but singing different songs. She went on to tell us about other freaky incidents that occurred on a regular basis, like the radio station changing by itself, lights that kept coming back on when they had been turned off, and mumbled voices that could be heard when the restaurant was closed and no one was there. She said she and her daughters refused to help clean the place at night if Gary wasn’t with them. I knew that before Sadie’s opened the building housed another restaurant, but then something clicked and I asked what had been there long before, and she said Simmons Downbeat. Gary came up to us then and he verified what his wife had told us, and I asked him if anyone had ever been killed in the Downbeat, and he said it had happened, although I don’t know if he was correct. Those few of you who have read my story on this blog, “David Glick, Private Dick,” posted in March, 2008, might recognize that I used this jukebox incident in that story.
A couple of years later, when they put the building up for sale, Gary’s wife told us that Gary had told her to keep quiet about the ghostly happenings or they would never sell it.
A few doors down from Sadie’s, on E. Evans in Bessemer, is a pool hall. It was there, in the early 1940s, that my father and his partner, Scotty Spinuzzi, ran a barboot game in plain sight just inside the front door.
March 4, 2009 at 4:40 am |
You have triggered some memories of mine that are, as is often the case, a bit sideways from yours. But, I will share them anyways. My favorite memory of the mean streets of Bessemer was going with my parents when I was four to buy my first horse for $25–about what they are worth today. It was in a backyard in a tiny pen right in town near the Steel City Y. That would probably have been in the summer of 1944 before I turned five.
She was a classic old gray mare we called Lady and she had a backbone that stuck up several inches from shoulders back to the tail and she was pot bellied but her ribs still showed. My Dad rode her bareback out to our place a mile West of City Park—quite a trip for a man who hated horses. (His step dad, Pete Smith, was a horse trainer at the State Fair Grounds and he made Dad clean stalls and hot walk horses when he was young. He hated Pete and the horses. Pete was also a railroad union president. My Dad always hated Unions, too, even though he was a Democrat.) My Dad had once been a pin setter at the Steel Y bowling alley and whenever we got near it he also liked to talk about the pool there where he learned to swim.
A few years later Dad put us to work with him tearing down an old shed on a street near the Y. It must have belonged to one of the bartenders or owners in the area. The lumber was old and weathered (it would be priceless today) and we used it to make a chicken house for my brother’s laying hens that paid for his music lessons and went into his college savings. So, we helped remove the horse manure production from Bessemer and turn it into a dehorsified community.
When horse and man finally arrived at our home, I got on and rode for seven straight hours. I could barely sit for a week and had a huge scab on my nether regions that tore whenever my bowels were emptied. But, I continued riding all over the West Park and Arkansas River area from the 4th street bridge out to the Rock Creek Barrier Damn and out the Rock Creek Springs road to Beulah—a far cry for the old mare from her little pen in the hood. A colt was born to her when I was nine and she was my steady companion for the next five years.
We were never treated to all the great places to eat that you guys seem to know. Once a month when Dad was paid we dressed in our one suit and went to the Top of the Town for a steak while our Mother read to us from Emily Post. I hated it and still do not have the relish for ‘eating out’ that many folks do. My colt was sacrificed to a Top of the Town outing one evening when I got her out of the neighbor’s garden where she had escaped to and tied her with a lariat to a post while they honked the horn and yelled at me to ‘hurry.’ Next morning she was dead from choking on the loose rope.
In his later days in Pueblo in the mid 1990s, my Dad almost always wound up steering us to the various Mexican restaurants in the old Bessemer area. So, I do not even know their names but I do remember some darn good Mexican Restaurants around there. Thanks for giving me some names to look for if I ever get back that way.