A chance to revisit the rooftop restaurant that was ‘the cat’s meow’ in the ’70s, ’80s

Back in the day, if you wanted to have dinner and drinks while taking in a sweeping view of downtown Wichita, there was one place to dine: The Top of the Plaza restaurant.

The restaurant operated on the 24th floor of what is now known as The Garvey Center — the retro, 26-story building at 250 W. Douglas. Back then, it was known as the Century II Plaza Hotel. The restaurant also had an adjoining nightclub called The Penthouse Club, which always drew a who’s who of Wichita. The businesses operated from the early 1970s until the early 1990s, and they were among Wichita’s top hotspots for a time.

“It was the cat’s meow,” says Larry Weber, who managed the hotel in the 1980s and who serves as its property manager today. “It was the place to be.”

Today, the Top of the Plaza restaurant and Penthouse Club live only in the memories in the Wichitans lucky enough to have patronized them. The 24th floor of the Garvey Center now serves as a clubhouse for the tenants of apartments that occupy 17 floors of the building.

But Weber has come up with a fun promotion that will allow one lucky winner a chance to dine on the 24th floor again.

On Friday, Weber will put on the Garvey Center’s first foray into Final Friday, Wichita’s well-known monthly art crawl. The Garvey Center’s Final Friday activities will include the debut of some previously unused storerooms and empty spaces on the ground level of the building that are now being used as “open studios” where local artists can display their work. Several artists will participate, and the event will feature food from tenant Kyoto Garden, coffee from Reverie Roasters Cafe at the Kiva, a cash bar and live music from William Bloom.

But it also will feature a contest whose winner will be treated to a private dinner for two in the spot where the Top of the Plaza restaurant once operated. It will be a five-course dinner prepared by Georges French Bistro. Only people who attend the Garvey Center’s inaugural Final Friday event can enter the contest.

Weber said he has great memories of the restaurant and knows other people probably do, too. He said that, during Riverfest time, he could peer out the windows of the restaurant and look into the eyes of the pilot operating the plane for the annual flyover.

“It was fabulous,” he said. “You sat there and had dinner and you could look out forever. More proposals were made up there than anywhere else in town.”

The building opened as a Holiday Inn in 1970. Six years later, it became the infamous site of a shooting when Michael Soles shot with two rifles from a top-floor balcony, killing three and wounding six.

The hotel closed in 1994, and Willard Garvey took over ownership in 1997. Eventually, he turned the hotel rooms into apartments.

For more information on The Garvey Center’s Final Friday event — and the contest — visit The Garvey Center Facebook page.

This story was originally published October 23, 2018 at 12:46 PM.