East Wichita hotel that offered rooftop dining in the 70s, wants it again

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature that will appear every Friday on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit the restaurants they once loved but now live only in their memories – and the Eagle’s archives.

This week’s featured restaurant space was home to a long line of popular rooftop restaurants from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Wichita doesn’t really get regular access to rooftop views. Unless you live in the Garvey Center or the Hillcrest Apartments, work in a downtown high-rise like the Epic Center, or spring for a night at the Hyatt Regency downtown, you won’t see Wichita from above very often .

But this was not true in 1970s and 1980s Wichita. Not only did a restaurant called The Top of the Plaza operate on the 26th floor of the Garvey Center from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, but a taller hotel was erected on East Kellogg in 1974 — then called the Holiday Inn East. — also had a rooftop space that was home to a string of popular clubs and restaurants during the same time frame. Among them: The Rafters Club, The Lighthouse, Lancer’s East and Amelia’s.

Now, the California owners of the hotel at 7335 E. Kellogg, which is now a Red Roof Plus, are trying to find a new restaurant tenant for the space, which offers treetop views. Weigand’s business associate Patrick Hale has been on the case for more than a year, and Kellogg drivers likely noticed his heavily zip-tied sign hanging from the sixth-floor balcony that reads “Restaurant For Lease “.

Although he hasn’t been able to find a tenant yet, he said, several local restaurateurs have expressed serious interest. In addition to the views, the 6,266-square-foot space has a full kitchen, a built-in bar and a spacious balcony facing Kellogg.

But it hasn’t been busy for a while and it needs work. The kitchen will require some attention and to make the space functional some walls will need to come down. So far, Hale hasn’t found anyone willing to take on the project.

But whoever might eventually revive the space will bring back to life a onetime hot spot where many Wichitans attended New Year’s Eve and Halloween parties, enjoyed shrimp and grits and fish fries or danced the night away to a live band.

Decades of rooftop dining

The seven-story hotel that Wichita knows today was built in the early 1970s as an expansion of the existing Holiday Inn at 7411 E. Kellogg. It included 105 guest rooms, meeting rooms and a lush swimming pool surrounded by plants imported from Florida and boulders brought in from eastern Kansas to serve as a diving platform.

The first tenant of the restaurant space on the sixth floor was The Rafter’s Club, which operated from 1974 to 1984. It had a nautical theme, decorated with nets and crates, hosted holiday parties, offered live music and acted as a nightclub. dinner. In the early days, people in the seventh-floor ballroom could look down on the restaurant through a circular cut-out in the center of the room. It has since been filled in, but the outline is still visible.

When The Rafter’s Club closed, hotel franchisee Bob Lightner opened his own short-lived restaurant in the space, called The Lighthouse, which served breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week and offered not only chicken fried steak, but and prime rib on weekends and more options for diet-conscious diners since the mid-1980s.

In 1985, Lancer’s East took over The Lighthouse space. Intended as a replacement of sorts for the popular downtown Lancers club, which had operated in the Century Plaza building east of Century II, but closed in 1984. Lancer’s East lasted only until 1986, then was replaced the following year by Burgundy’s , a restaurant that often served. all-you-can-eat crab legs and operated until 1991. It was later replaced by Amelia’s, which used a drawing of Amelia Earhart as its logo and served holiday buffets, weekend brunches, and prime rib specials in the evenings from Saturday.

In 1999, the Holiday Inn sold to a Ramada operator, and after that, the rooftop restaurant space does not appear to have been open to the public. Several other hoteliers have run the hotel over the years. In the mid-2000s, it was called The Weekly Studios Hotel before becoming La Quinta Inn in 2008 and then Red Roof Plus in 2019.

The current operators briefly used parts of the sixth floor for the free continental breakfast, but today it is a ghost restaurant, with abandoned dishes and furniture scattered throughout and layers of dust covering the surfaces.

Ghost restaurant

The current owners of the hotel have renovated the first five floors and even renovated the indoor pool that attracted so much attention when the Holiday Inn first opened in the mid-1970s. They just didn’t make it to the sixth or seventh floor.

In fact, Hale said, the hotel itself is now for sale, but its owners still hope a successful rooftop restaurant could come along and sweeten the deal for potential buyers.

Hale said he envisions a mid-priced American-style bar and grill that’s open to both hotel guests and the public. The people who considered the space had a lot of interesting ideas on how to turn it back into a dining destination with one of the best views in the city.

And Hale said he thinks the east side of Wichita might enjoy visiting a place with so much history.

“The stuff that’s there is downtown,” Hale said. “Having a rooftop venue on the east side that’s open to the public … is unique.”

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