Flashback Friday: In the ’90s, Wichita stood in line for this cafe’s potato casserole

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 restaurants they once loved but now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.

This week’s featured restaurant, Garden Cafe, opened in Brittany Center in 1994.

When it opened in January 1994 in Brittany Center, 21st and Woodlawn, it was called Old Fashioned Garden Cafe. But as the years went on, Wichita just called it Garden Cafe.

Though it was fairly short-lived — it lasted only until the summer of 2000 — the restaurant was so popular at first that people would stand in line to get a table. Once inside, they’d order dishes from the huge menu, which featured more than 300 items and included all-day breakfast, sandwiches, salads and stir fries. Garden Cafe’s signature dish was potato casserole, which came in many different varieties, including Omaha-style with ground beef, American, colby jack and cheddar cheeses, mushrooms, onions, tomatoes and pickles. Garden Cafe also had a bakery that offered fresh-baked cinnamon rolls, deep-dish pies, cakes, fruit crisps, cheesecakes and more.

Garden Cafe review, Diane Lewis 11 Mar 1994, Fri The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kansas) Newspapers.com

When reviewing the restaurant in March 1994, then-Wichita Eagle restaurant critic Diane Lewis said of the giant menu, “It borders on the overwhelming,” and she described the portions as “generous, sometimes humongous.” But the menu also famously featured a long list of “heart healthy” options like salads that came with fat-free dressing on the side and omelets made with cholesterol-free eggs and served with oat-bran muffins.

Wichita’s Garden Cafe was part of a small regional chain based in Omaha, and it was brought to Wichita by Matt Kuzma and Mark Wurfel, both longtime Pizza Hut employees. Their restaurant was the first Kansas location for the chain, which also had five restaurants in Omaha as well as others in Nebraska and Iowa.

Garden Cafe’s massive dining room had seating for 280. Green carpet ran throughout, and it had white tables and chairs, some set up inside full-sized white gazebos. It also was filled with plants, giving the restaurant even more of a garden feel.

In 1997, Kuzma and Wurfel purchased 2 Feathers Bar & Grill, a Southwestern restaurant that once operated in the Occidental Building at 300 N. Main. Then in 1999, they opened the short-lived Roosevelt’s American Eatery at 6960 W. 21st St., where Mexico Viejo is now.

But in July 2000, the duo suddenly closed Garden Cafe. Business was fine there, they told the Eagle, but they lost too much money on Roosevelt’s, which closed in June 2000 after only 10 months in business. As a result, they missed a lease payment at Brittany Center, whose owners then decided not to renew the cafe’s lease.

All these years later, Garden Cafe still makes many Wichitans’ lists of restaurants from the past that they miss most.

A few years after Garden Cafe closed, a couple of home cooks from El Dorado asked in The Wichita Eagle’s “Reader Recipe Exchange” column if anyone had the recipe for the restaurant’s oat bread, which they used to drive to Wichita just to purchase. The following week, The Eagle published this recipe:

Garden Cafe-Style Molasses Oatmeal Bread

1 cup rolled oats

1/3 to 1/2 cup molasses

1/4 cup shortening

1 tablespoon salt

2 cups boiling water

2 pkgs. granular yeast

1 cup warm water

8 cups flour

Combine oats, molasses, shortening, salt and boiling water in large mixer bowl. Let cool to lukewarm. Sprinkle yeast over warm water. Stir well. Add to cooled oat mixture.

With mixer, stir in 4 cups flour. Let mixer beat for 4 minutes. Add remaining flour, mixing by hand, until well blended. Place in large greased bowl, cover and let rise in warm place until doubled (1 1/2 hours or more). Punch down and allow to rise two more times (about 30 minutes each time).

Divide into three portions. Knead each portion and form into loaves. Place in greased loaf pan. Allow to rise until doubled. Bake in preheated 425-degree oven for 10 minutes; reduce heat and bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes. Remove from pans immediately. Brush tops with butter and cool on racks.

Source: Jane Winslow, Newton, 2002