4 Department Store Restaurants Ohioans Still Miss

A downtown shopping trip used to come with a proper sit-down lunch, right inside the store.

Ohioans who made those trips still remember the food, the rooms, and that dressed-up feeling.

Here are the department store restaurants that are long gone but not forgotten.

1. Higbee’s Silver Grille

Higbee’s Silver Grille was the Art Deco restaurant on the 10th floor of the Higbee Company’s downtown Cleveland department store.

Art Deco was the height of fashion when the store opened in 1931.

Guests entered past a red marble fountain stocked with goldfish.

Your menu choices included creamed chicken, chicken pie, and a Puerto Rican salad with mangoes, avocados, and dates.

The Welsh rarebit was melted cheese over toast, garnished with almonds.

You could also stop in for breakfast, since the Silver Grille served it as well as lunch.

In the 1930s, the Silver Grille offered daily luncheon specials for 45 cents.

The restaurant remained a favorite of Clevelanders for years.

By 1962, the restaurant’s color scheme was pink, green and red.

Some Art Deco elements came back in 1982.

The Silver Grille stayed open until late 1989, when the Higbee’s Public Square store downsized.

After the restaurant closed, the nearby Ritz-Carlton hotel ran the 10th-floor space as a special-event center.

2. Lazarus’s Chintz Room

Lazarus’s Chintz Room began in 1953, when the Columbus department store remodeled its Fifth Floor Tea Room and reopened it under a new name.

The Fifth Floor Tea Room itself dated to 1914.

You’d find the Chintz Room on the fifth floor of the downtown Columbus store.

Chintz-patterned curtains gave the upscale restaurant its name.

Both lunch and dinner were on the menu at the Chintz Room.

The Ohio History Connection says the Chintz Room’s chicken salad was the most requested recipe.

If you wanted the Chintz Room’s food without dining in, Lazarus introduced a take-home section.

The Chintz Room closed on Jan. 30, 1998, after 45 years of service.

3. O’Neil’s Georgian Room

You took the escalator up from the mezzanine to reach O’Neil’s Georgian Room, an elegant restaurant on the second floor of the downtown Akron store.

It debuted six months before the Oak Grille.

You could order upscale fare such as lobster salad, beef tenderloin, or red salmon steak.

A 1958 photo shows the 225-seat room with chandeliers, linen tablecloths, and a salad bar surrounding a pillar.

In December 1988, O’Neil’s parent company announced it would shutter the downtown Akron store, which was losing $1 million a year.

The Georgian Room served its final meals a week before the store closed on Jan. 27, 1989.

4. O’Neil’s Oak Grille

Behind the men’s department on the State Street level, O’Neil’s Oak Grille offered a cheaper, more relaxed meal than the Georgian Room.

The Oak Grille opened on Sept. 13, 1947.

Opening day brought chicken a la king on Holland rusk, buttered fresh peas and carrots, a molded fruit salad, a chocolate sundae, and coffee.

You paid 75 cents for the whole meal.

Customers sat at U-shaped counters, where waitresses in brown-and-white uniforms took orders and delivered meals.

Ad copy for the Oak Grille said its brightly lighted counters served more than 150 people.

In 1959, a Southern fried chicken dinner special cost 97 cents.

In 1973, a pigs-in-blankets dinner special cost $1.29.

The Oak Grille’s last day was May 29, 1984.

O’Neil’s announced it would convert the Oak Grille into a merchandise area for women’s apparel.

In the weeks that followed, the U-shaped counters came out.

Lazarus’s Restaurant Lineup

If you shopped at Lazarus, you could pick from restaurants well beyond the Chintz Room.

By 1987, Lazarus ran eleven restaurants.

The Balcony Tea Room followed close behind the 1914 Fifth Floor Tea Room.

Both tea rooms were quite popular, particularly among working women and college students.

They hosted women’s fashion shows, rush parties, and other social functions.

In 1926, Lazarus reimagined the Balcony Tea Room as the Colonial Room.

The Colonial Room took its look from the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The Colonial Room was best remembered for its Chicken Salad Lemonaise, ham loaf, and Baked Cheese Sandwich.

The Buckeye Room, also on the fifth floor, shared a kitchen with the Chintz Room.

It was a more casual affair, with fast homestyle entrees such as chicken tetrazzini and Maryland-style chicken livers.

The Copper Kettle Lunch Counter opened in 1957 in the lower level annex.

Its long, winding counter featured cheap, fast food such as vegetable soup, stuffed mushrooms, and shortcake.

Cleveland Rivals of the Silver Grille

Higbee’s wasn’t the only Cleveland department store with a restaurant.

The Lindner Company moved to a bigger store at 1331 Euclid Avenue in 1915.

By 1918, the company had a tea room on its fourth floor.

Your 65-cent lunch could range from club steak dinners with au gratin potatoes to corned beef hash with a poached egg.

In 1922, the W.B. Davis Company opened a restaurant called Schuder’s, with daily luncheon specials for 30 cents.

In March 1929, the May Company announced the grand opening of its redesigned restaurant, the Spanish Room Restaurant and Tea Room.

In 1936, Lindner’s introduced a restaurant called the Continental, where you could order reasonably priced French cuisine.

Food Court Competition at Lazarus

By the 1980s, Federated Department Stores was dictating that restaurants in its stores be more standardized, the Ohio History Connection says in its account of dining at Lazarus.

Food courts were faster and cheaper than Lazarus's in-store restaurants.

Shoppers at Lazarus didn't care as much about where they ate.