Victoria Station – The Railroad-Themed Dining Adventure
Picture this: you’re pulling into what looks like a genuine train station, complete with vintage boxcars and cabooses converted into dining rooms. Victoria Station was a chain of railroad-themed steakhouse restaurants. At the peak of its popularity in the 1970s, the chain had 100 locations in the United States. The firm filed for bankruptcy in 1986. The last remaining restaurant in the former chain was located in Salem, Massachusetts until it abruptly closed in December 2017.
The idea for Victoria Station came from a project at Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. The original owners, Bob Freeman, Peter Lee, and Dick Bradley, all studied there. The first restaurant opened in San Francisco in December 1969. It was built using five old boxcars and two cabooses around a main lobby. This first location made a lot of money, about $90,000 each month in its first year! Prime rib was the featured item on a limited menu that included steaks, barbecued beef ribs, and shrimp done in a variation of scampi style known as “Shrimp Victoria”.
Hilltop Steakhouse – America’s Highest-Grossing Restaurant
If you drove Route 1 in Massachusetts, you couldn’t miss the massive 70-foot neon cactus towering over Hilltop Steakhouse. The New York Times described the Hilltop as “America’s largest restaurant, both in number of customers served and sales volume” in 1987. At that time, the Hilltop served nearly 2.4 million customers annually, three times the volume of the nation’s second-largest restaurant, Tavern on the Green in Manhattan. In 1988, it produced an estimated $31.5 million in sales and was again cited by Restaurants & Institutions as the largest-grossing restaurant in the United States.
In 1961, Giuffrida, a 43 year old butcher from Lawrence, Massachusetts, purchased a small bar on busy Route 1 in Saugus for $7,000 and converted it into a 125-seat steakhouse. The restaurant soon drew large crowds, which required an expansion to 400 seats. In 2013, the Hilltop Steak House closed. The property was sold and items, including the plastic cows, were auctioned off. The fan favorite sadly closed their doors in 2013 after 52 years of business and on their last day, hundreds of customers waited in line to get their last steak and to say a sorrowful farewell to the Old West atmosphere.
Steak and Ale – The Suburban Pioneer
Opening in Dallas in the 1960s at a time when steak dinners were widely seen as a rare and expensive indulgence, Steak and Ale brought the steakhouse to the suburbs at affordable prices. The chain’s old English-style dining rooms were also a launch point for now common restaurant ideas, like a lunch menu that costs less than the dinner menu, free refills on soda, and an all-you-can-eat salad bar, in addition to steaks, pasta, wine, and beer…