Quirky chicken dinner place opens in historic Kansas hotel

If you are looking for grandma’s homemade fried chicken and mashed potatoes, look no more.

The newest place to eat chicken dinners on Sundays just opened and it requires reservations.

For now, the Historic Wolf Hotel only accepts 40 diners at a time. That’s to keep the quality of taste high and the 19th century experience authentic.

Chris McCord, owner of the Hotel, is hoping Kansans will make it a destination travel spot.

The Wolf Hotel and Ellinwood are best known for their tunnels, which feature historic storefronts, speakeasy, library, blacksmith’s shop, barber shop, saloon and laundry, all underground. .

Some say the hotel, which has been featured on two ghost-hunting TV shows, is haunted. A bullet hole remains in the dining room’s tin ceiling from when Bernard I. Millet committed suicide on Feb. 24, 1927.

A candle and place sitting are reserved each Sunday in memory of Millet. And diners can request to sit at his table.

“We wanted this to be an experience from A to Z. Starting with the entrance, the staff in period garb, to when we present the ticket to our guests, it will be in an old book,” McCord said.

Some of the books are in German — because many of the town’s founders were German.

When McCord bought the hotel nearly five years ago, his goal was to turn the building’s Sunflower Dining Room back into a special restaurant serving chicken dinners.

Cost is roughly between $15 to $25 per person, depending on how many pieces of chicken you order and if you have pie and ice cream to top the meals off. The meals are served between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Sundays. The pieces of chicken are flavorful and large. The peppered cream gravy is like grandma used to make. And the homemade pies? Well, the coconut cream pie is one of the best around.

Diners feast on wheat-patterned china. They are waited on by women who dress like the legendary Harvey Girls, restaurant workers who waited on travelers riding the trains on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. The hotel is across from the railroad, which reached the community in 1872.

Ever since McCord bought the hotel in 2013, it has been a labor of love.

“I sold my house and moved into the hotel,” McCord said. “People wanted a chance to stay here… They brought sleeping bags to spend the night. That’s when we knew it was going to be a thing.”

The re-emergence of the hotel has brought new life into Ellinwood’s downtown.

“It used to be at night, this hotel was always dark, but now you see the lights on almost all the time, you see people coming in and going out,” said Ellinwood resident Theresa Younger. “It just looks like there is life here again.”

This story was originally published January 14, 2018 at 1:09 PM with the headline "Quirky chicken dinner place opens in historic Kansas hotel."