Hotel Food: Home Cooking, Steak Pits and Wing Nights

Fine dining at the Maple Leaf Hotel, Maple Creek, 1914. Glenbow Archives, NA-3811-75

The hotel dining room was always a busy place in the early 1900s. Meals were served to boarders, traveling guests, local farmers and railway workers. For many years, trains stopped in small towns every day and meals were served to the crews. Annual Christmas dinners served in hotels were real banquets. Dining rooms were decorated with bunting, miniature flags and evergreens, and lighted with gas lamps and Chinese lanterns. The guests sat down to a lavish menu, the likes of which few had ever seen.  

Cecil Hotel dining room, Colgate, c. 1910. From Prairie Gold (1980)

Hotel cooks came from a variety of backgrounds. Chinese cooks were the mainstay of many hotel restaurants in the early days. The Silver Plate Hotel at Govan boasted of “an English chef who has few peers” in a 1908 edition of the Prairie News. The Hitt brothers, owners of the Griffin Hotel, brought their staff with them from the United States. “The Negro cook [Chloe] prepared the best food I have eaten anywhere,” one customer recalls in the Griffin local history book.  “[The owners] provided her with the ingredients for southern items such as beaten biscuits, yams and fried chicken.” Chloe married a “coloured” porter from Regina. When the Hitts sold the Griffin Hotel and returned to the States, she and her new husband went with them. 

Other hotel cooks were more “home grown.”  In 1923, Mrs. Mari Lewis was hired by the Vanstone family to operate the hotel dining room at Central Butte. Mrs. Lewis had spent three summers on cook cars preparing meals for threshing crews. She brought produce from the Lewis farm to help out with meals. “The turkeys came in very handy for the banquet we served to about 50 war veterans,” Mrs. Lewis’ daughter, Gertrude Lokier, recalled for the town history book. During the 1940s, on a typically busy morning at the Mont Nebo Hotel, Annette Taylor was up at 4 a.m.  She baked 25 pies – eight lemon, eight raisin and nine apple. After serving breakfast she headed for the town butcher shop, where for a dollar she bought a good sized beef roast. “By nine a.m. the roast was in the oven,” Donna Kolchuck writes in the Mont Nebo history. “At noon the aroma of roast beef, gravy and mashed potatoes was prevalent.” Mrs. Buhler, cook at the Fairlight Hotel, was a favorite with the commercial travelers who stayed at the hotel. They called her “Ma” for they knew “that regardless of what time they arrived, Ma would get them something to eat.” 

Steak pit, Whitewood Hotel, 2006.  Joan Champ photo

Today, small-town Saskatchewan hotels offer everything from bar food (chicken wings, nachos, dried ribs) to fully licensed family dining with great food. The steak pits that were added to many hotel dining rooms in the 1970s can still be found around the province today. At the Jansen Hotel & Steak Pit, for example, customers can cook their own steaks on the natural gas grill in the 22-seat steak pit area off the beverage room. 

One of the best kept secrets in Saskatchewan has to be the White Bear Hotel. People travel from miles around to the town of 13 for the extensive menu and unique décor. In the summer, visitors check out the flower gardens and fruit orchard where the White Bear Hotel grows its own pears and crabapples. In 2007, a visitor to the hotel wrote the following on his blog: “A big part of the reason we make the trip to the White Bear Hotel is the warm hospitality and good food at a reasonable cost. The couple [Wayne and Patricia Spence] who own and have run the hotel and restaurant for 29 years take pride in what they do and genuinely enjoy visiting with their patrons. What gets me is you would never expect to find good food like that in such an out of the way place. It seems to me this is why people travel to White Bear and patiently wait for 2 hours plus for their food. It is so charming and unexpected – one of those little surprises that make life interesting.”  At the time of writing this post, the White Bear Hotel was for sale.

White Bear Hotel, 2009. Photo courtesy of Ruth Bitner

© Joan Champ, 2011

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Prohibition: Hotel Bars Close Their Doors

From July 1, 1915 to 1924, Saskatchewan was dry. With the closure of 406 bars, 38 liquor dealers, and 12 clubs, it was estimated that liquor consumption in the province dropped by ninety percent. The number of convictions for drunkenness dropped from 2,970 cases in 1913 to 434 in 1918. When the bars closed down, however, so did many small-town hotels. “The hotelmen knew that without beverage revenue they could hardly hope to make ends meet,” writes H. G. Bowley in his 1957 history of the Hotels Association of Saskatchewan. “One of the cornerstones of the art of hospitality was to be removed, and they knew the whole structure of their industry would inevitably totter, and perhaps crash.” Indeed, hotels values in the province plummeted. Many hotel businesses never fully recovered from the blow of 1915. It may not be a coincidence that so many hotels burned down during the Prohibition years. 

The Lafrenieres. Footsteps in Time: Meota  (1980)

The last days of June 1915 before Prohibition came into effect were hectic ones for small-town Saskatchewan hotels. Prior to the closing of the bars on the July 1^st deadline, hotel owners were faced with the necessity of disposing of their stocks. There was a great rush to purchase liquor. At the Clarendon Hotel in Gull Lake, “more than one kerosene can, brought to town to be filled with coal oil, found its way home filled with liquid other than coal oil,” the town history (1989) reports. “Rye whiskey sold that afternoon of June 30^th at $1.00 per gallon and some sizeable stocks were laid in against the drought.”  That same day at the King Edward Hotel in Meota, Edward and Ferris Ann Lafreniere recalled that, prior to closing, “Anxious buyers filled the bar pushing and shoving. Money was thrown and bottles snatched in return. The doors finally closed and Ed and Ferris Ann literally swept the money from the floor with broom and dust pan. The following day the law moved in and destroyed the remaining stocks.” 

Closure and arson weren’t the only coping strategies used by Saskatchewan hotel owners when Prohibition hit. Charles Hitts sold the hotel at Griffin. “When the liquor licenses were rescinded it was hard to keep the commercial travelers over the weekends in the small places,” Griffin historian Mable Charlton writes (1967). “Although the menus were as good they went on to bigger places where there was more amusement.” The owner of the Imperial Hotel at Frobisher, John Klaholz, approached the town council in 1920 requesting that the sales of soft drinks, cigars and cigarettes be confined to the hotel to help make it pay – otherwise, he said, he would have to close it. Some hotel owners applied for government grants for the maintenance of public restrooms and reading rooms in their establishments. Unable to operate profitably, the Last Mountain Hotel at Strasbourg established a movie theatre on the second floor. Ice cream parlours often took the place of hotel bars. In 1916, F. A. Wright got a license to operate five pool tables in the Commercial Hotel in Herbert. Two years later, the Commercial Hotel was destroyed by fire.

Bootleg operations flourished in small-town Saskatchewan hotels during Prohibition. The thirsty traveler staying at the Arlington Hotel at Maryfield was usually able to satisfy his wants through the good graces of John Dodds, the proprietor. Dodds was caught on at least two occasions by a provincial liquor inspector, and paid the appropriate fines for his indiscretion. 

The Wilkie local history book provides the following account of a suspected bootlegging case at the Empire Hotel. On August 17, 1915, the Royal North West Mounted raided the hotel between 10 a.m. and noon. “In room No. 6, which was occupied by the hotel proprietor [W.H. Smith] and his wife, after a vigorous search was made, 28 bottles of liquor of various descriptions were found, the contents of two of which had been partially consumed. Upon being asked how this exceptionally large ‘private’ stock came to be on the premises, the defendant, during the hearing before Mr. T. A. Dinsley, J. P., stated that she had taken this liquor from the hotel cellars prior to the date upon which intoxicants had to be removed from the premises, July 1^st, and had secreted the bottles, unknown to her husband, in her trunk in which they were found. ... The room in which the liquor was found had been occupied exclusively as a private living room during the entire period that her husband had been proprietor of the house and that it had never been used as a guest chamber. … When the police commenced to search the trunk she told them that it only contained linen. When asked why she made this statement, she could give no reason. When asked why she had kept her husband in ignorance of the fact that she had a private stock she stated that had he known he would probably not have allowed her to retain it.” Verdict: Not guilty.

© Joan Champ, 2011

Day-to-Day Hotel Operations

Ben and Sarah Cook on right, with Bradwell hotel staff, c. 1910.

Western Development Museum Library, 6-E-4

Running a small-town Saskatchewan hotel back in the early 1900s was hard work. The hotel staff usually consisted of at least two chambermaids and a cook who worked from morning ‘til night, cleaning the guest rooms, doing the laundry, and washing dishes. The maid's work day at the Herbert Hotel started at 6:00 a.m. and ended at 9:00 p.m. for which she was paid $10 per month, plus room and board. Charles Pratt, the porter at the Griffin Hotel, not only assisted hotel guests with their luggage; he also washed dishes, milked the two cows that supplied the milk for the hotel and did all the odd jobs. The Griffin Hotel’s upstairs maid also polished the silver and glassware and kept everything shining. 

Staff in the kitchen of the Frances Hotel at Midale, c. 1910. 

From Plowshares to Pumpjacks: R.M. of Cymri: Macoun, Midale, Halbrite (1984)

All members of the hotel owner’s family had to share in the work of running the hotel. Leo Buhler, whose parents owned the hotel in Fairlight, recalls, “One of the duties of the kids was to help with the housekeeping and at noon you had to take your turn at washing the dishes before going back to school. My sister, Irma, served as a waitress in the dining room when she was barely taller than the table tops.”  Henry, son of the owner of the Herbert Hotel, had jobs, too, “such as carrying wood and water to the hotel when needed, and carrying out ashes.  On Mondays he always had to skip school to turn the handle on the washing machine. … Henry also earned an extra dollar by teaching the Chinese cook how to speak English. ” 

The Ferrie family ran the hotel at Invermay for 28 years.  The four Ferrie boys worked shifts hauling great loads of wood to keep the hotel’s furnace running 24 hours a day during the winter months. As Ben Ferrie recalls in the Invermay local history book:  “The years in the Hotel were busy ones for all of the family. It was the boys’ job to fire the wood-burning furnace. This meant rising about three a.m. and again at six to stoke the furnace. … We were responsible for bringing in blocks of ice and snow to melt for the daily wash. … We hauled our drinking water from the town well… A familiar sight around town was our Scotch collie, Don, pulling the sleigh loaded with cans of water.”

Cutting ice on a river.  From Wikimedia Commons

Packing ice in the winter was quite an experience.  It was necessary to put up about 30 tons of ice to provide year-round cold storage for the hotel kitchen.  Hotel owners would often hire a farmer to cut the ice and haul it in with teams and a sleigh, which would take several days.   

Mrs. Rehaume, owner of the Pleasantdale Hotel,

did all the washing for the hotel using a washtub and scrub board. 

From Memories of the Past: History of Pleasantdale (1981)

Wash days – usually Mondays – were an ordeal, especially in winter. Washing bedding and clothes was often a two-day proposition. Water had to be hauled and then heated in tubs the night before. Start-up time was set for five or six a.m. and the laundry process quite often ran into the afternoon. The next day, one of the maids would run the clothes and sheets through a mangle, a machine used to wring water out of wet laundry.  Most hotels did not get running water until the 1940s or 1950s, so water had to be hauled from a well in the summer.  In the winter, hotels used melted ice and snow, or water that had been collected in rain barrels during the previous summer.

© Joan Champ, 2011