A Steak in the Past

Across the land, many of the old, abandoned monuments to America's past are welcoming visitors as they never did before. There are the august red brick firehouses, the rococo waterworks, the splendiferous banks with marble floors and tellers' grilles that could have come from a Jimmy Cagney heist flick, abandoned churches raised with prayer and artistry, majestic railroad stations, many designed by the finest architects in the U.S. They have been re-antiquated and reinserted into American life with love and ambience--and with food and wine. The fact is that hundreds of classic buildings throughout the U.S. have become thriving restaurants, saved from the wrecker's ball by the diner's thrall. If few of them are likely to match Maxim's in cuisine, they are for the most part good, solid, pleasant places to eat.

$1,000 Place Mats. One of the most substantial of the new-old thematic restaurants is The Last National Bank Restaurant in Hartford, Conn., occupying a building that once housed the Hartford National Bank & Trust Co. Diners eat behind 30-ton vault doors--one room is lined with safe-deposit boxes. Ancient glass-covered safe doors serve as tables, wine lists arrive in zippered moneybags, and place mats are blown-up replicas of $1,000 bills. Checks are paid to a cashier appropriately ensconced behind a teller's window. A six-ton armored car drives through town as an advertisement, and to make a reservation one has only to dial the telephone letters A HOLDUP.

An equally imaginative restaurant has been installed inside the old grain exchange in Bloomington, Minn. One entrepreneur has re-created an antique cinema in Cleveland. Its name: The Last Moving Picture Company.

In downtown Atlanta, an abandoned Unitarian church has been converted into a dining place called the Abbey. The 70-year-old building--where Author Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind) was married--is graced with an elegant stained-glass front window, vaulted, beamed ceilings and a crafted Gothic interior. Though it might seem odd to some that Christians should go to a church for sole rather than soul, the Abbey has been serving capacity crowds. Most favored of its five dining areas: the choir loft, where monk-robed waiters Handel their guests with priestly concern.

Unused railroad stations have provided a bonanza for thematic restaurateurs. In Chattanooga, Tenn., for example, when Motel Operator Allen Casey heard that the Southern Railway terminal was about to be razed, he put together $2.4 million to buy the gracious old building, which boasts one of the highest freestanding domes (85 ft.) in the world. The Chattanooga Choo Choo, as it is now called, has 2,000 seats and food that is as elegant as the ambience. Little has been changed inside. Diners enter through a ticket booth, scanning a big schedule board, and buy tickets printed with a destination that determines their choice of entree: New Orleans books their shrimp; Virginia, cloved, sugar-coated ham; New York, filet mignon, and so on.

Old railroad stations are the basis of a chain of classic-building dining places. A San Francisco-based corporation owns 29 Victoria Station restaurants across the U.S. (nine more are being completed); guests dine inside 50-ft.-long boxcars, salad is served from old baggage carts, brakemen's lanterns light the tables, and a treasury of railroad relics line the walls. To ensure an ample supply of artifacts, the company has just bought the entire East Grinstead Station in England, well known to Sherlock Holmes fans.

Classic restaurants are blooming around such nostalgic themes as old automobiles--for instance, Doug's Body Shop in Detroit, where diners can consume their filet mignon in a 1951 Packard--a building in Buffalo reconstructed from Mark Twain's old home, and an exquisite old Claremont, Calif., high school. There is also a streetcar manufacturing plant in San Francisco that serves only spaghetti dishes; and a reconstructed Colorado-style mining camp called The Chicago Claim Company, where luncheon menus are printed on land-claim certificates, and the decor features outsize mining pans. The place is, literally, a gold mine.

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