NuWay turns 90: The story of the creation, endurance of Wichita’s oldest restaurant chain
This is what we know about July 4, 1930 — a monumental day in Wichita restaurant history.
The country was in the midst of the Great Depression, and Tom McEvoy — a young entrepreneur who invented and patented a steam cooker that produced super tasty “loose meat” — was opening a new business.
It was in a tiny brick building with just a stand-up counter, built on the site of a former potato patch in Wichita.
A transplant from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where McEvoy had sold loose meat sandwiches known as Made Rites, he’d set out in search of a city that had longer summers, better for sandwich sales. He chose Wichita, having decided it was a better market for his product than Tulsa or even Dallas.
It was where he decided he would sell his ground beef sandwiches, topped only with chopped onions, mustard and pickles. And he wasn’t going to call them Maid Rites anymore.
From then on, they’d be known as NuWays.
That was 90 years ago, and somehow, the NuWay Cafe at 1416 W. Douglas is still open — in the same building, on the same site.
This weekend, Wichita will celebrate the unlikely nine-decade lifespan of an unusual eatery that has become a cherished, crumbly part of the city’s fabric.
“I think it’s going to last another 90 years,” said Neal Stong, who has owned the restaurant and its younger sister restaurants for the last 40 years. “It’s a good product. Don’t you think?”
Humble beginnings
Betty Gettings started working as a waitress for NuWay in 1977. Today, she’s 76 years old and still working at the original store on Douglas. A former longtime manager, she’s now the right-hand woman to current manager Angel Ouellette.
Inside a cabinet behind the counter, Gettings keeps a scrapbook that she started back in 1980. By now, it’s at least eight inches thick, and it’s stuffed with photos, menus and mementos she’s collected over the last 40 years.
It also includes some items she’s dug up about the restaurant’s storied history as well as photos of the founders.
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When it first opened, the original NuWay restaurant was so tiny that there was barely room for McEvoy to prepare his Nu-Way sandwiches, which cost a dime apiece. He also sold root beer but from a small stand outside the restaurant.
In the early days, he opened the restaurant from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., but when “sandwich season” ended, he closed for a few months. Until 1976, Nu-Way would shut down every year on Christmas Day, not to reopen again until March 1.
Back then, the menu was slim. Gettings found a copy from 1936 that lists a 10-cent NuWay sandwich, made with “hot chopped beef, mustard sauce, dill pickle and diced onion.” A “DeLux” sandwich, topped with “two slices brick cheese” was 15 cents.
The only other option was the Tip-Top — “breaded pork tenders with our own barbecue sauce” for 15 cents. Ketchup was not an option in the restaurant, and old schoolers are still somewhat appalled that it’s allowed on the premises today.
McEvoy’s restaurant was popular right away, and according to old articles, he was able to gross about $400 a day. NuWay was the second restaurant in town to offer curb service, and McEvoy hired 13 boys and girls ages 8 to 10 to work as carhops. He stopped curb service when World War II started.
He married Helen in 1938, and the two ran the restaurant together until McEvoy died in late 1965. They never had children.
Gettings’ scrapbook contains several black-and-white photos of Helen cooking in the tiny NuWay kitchen or posing behind the horse-shoe shaped counter.
Helen managed the restaurant on her own until she retired in 1975, and she ran the place with exacting standards, said Gettings, one of the only remaining Nu-Way employees who actually met Helen, who died in 1989 at age 75. Gettings is the only one who can still do “the Nu-Way flip,” a method Helen used to construct Nu-Way sandwiches and that she insisted her employees learn.
Using the spatula, she would quickly fling meat upwards and catch it on the bottom bun, then she’d shape it into a perfect mound with the spatula so that, when the top bun was placed, no meat fell out of the sides.
When Helen retired at age 60, she sold the restaurant to Gene Friedman — the founder of David’s Department Store — and his partner Jack Freeman. Freeman died a year later, and a couple of new partners joined Friedman: E.L Yost and Mike Foley, the founder of the Taco Grande chain.
Once they took over, the expansion of NuWay that today still includes five Wichita restaurants began — and french fries and ketchup came into play.
Then, in 1981, Friedman brought on board one of his longtime David’s employee, Neal Stong. In the 1990s, Stong acquired the entire chain, finalizing the deal before Friedman died in 1999. He has run the restaurant chain solo, with the help of his son, Chris, ever since. Today, though he’s 83, Neal Stong still makes all the decisions for the restaurants and visits them almost daily.
Neal Stong also is the one who added NuWay’s first website, modernized its logo and hired out the creation of the NuWay television commercial that is mercilessly stuck in so many Wichitans’ brains. “You’ll love the NuWay. You’re gonna love the NuWay way.”
The menu has grown significantly over the decades and now includes the restaurant’s famous chili plus hot dogs, taco salads, onion rings, malts and shakes.
But the original NuWay sandwich is still far and away the best seller, Neal Stong said.
“I think it’s just the way we cook it with tender loving care,” he said. “It’s good quality, and people really love it. A lot of people are addicted to it.”
Decades of change
Though Helen McEvoy tried to franchise the NuWay brand in the late 1960s, it never took off. Until the new owners took over, the West Douglas store was the only NuWay.
A second restaurant opened in 1978 at 3441 E. Harry followed by a Twin Lakes location, on the southeast corner of 21st and Amidon, in January 1980. By 1989, there were eight NuWay restaurants in Wichita and two in the Kansas City area.
When they opened on East Harry and at Twin Lakes, the new owners made the daring move of adding fries to the menu and ketchup to the tables. But it was years before they’d allow the original restaurant on West Douglas to serve fries.
It was waitress Gettings who made it happen. She’d started to hear from many customers that the lack of fries was the only reason they didn’t come downtown and dine at her store.
“Neal would say, ‘No, we don’t want to change it. We don’t want to change it,’” she remembered. “But we were losing business.”
Neal Stong told her she’d have to spend a day at a different NuWay to watch the fries being made and see for herself how much work it was. If she still wanted to add fries after that, he told her, they would.
She did, so they did, she remembers with a triumphant smile.
Over the years, a few local NuWay restaurants have failed to thrive and have closed. There was once a restaurant inside Towne West Square, Gettings remembers. The chain’s third restaurant at Twin Lakes closed in the 1980s, and a new one built at 2143 W. 21st St. in 2013 closed just three years later, with the owners citing lagging business because of road construction. There’s a Subway in the space now.
But the original NuWay that McEvoy opened in 1930 always survives.
The original shop has been expanded four times. The first expansion moved the dining room four feet forward on the side walk, says Chris Stong, who started working in the restaurants for his father when he was 14. (Recently, Chris Stong has stepped out on his own, bringing the Jersey Mike’s sandwich chain to town. His first restaurant opened earlier this year at K-96 and Greenwich.)
The next expansion enlarged the restaurant to the north, and the third enlarged it to the west. In the mid 1990s, Neal Stong and his partner added on what the owners call the “new side,” which sits on the west side of the building and includes space for booths and ADA compliant restrooms.
Gettings, who says she’ll retire from her waitress job when she turns 80, said she loves being a part of a Wichita institution like NuWay.
The restaurant is special to so many Wichitans, even those who’ve moved away. Many make NuWay their first stop when they come back to town to visit for holidays. Some freeze the sandwiches and ship them to relatives. North High School has put on class reunions at the restaurant every year for the past seven years, she said.
She’s one of the people who cringes when people put ketchup on their NuWay sandwiches, she said, but she understands that things change.
What hasn’t changed, she said, is how good those crumbly sandwiches still are, 90 years later.
“The young kids will come to work here and say, ‘I don’t know what’s so special about a NuWay,’” she said. “And I tell them, ‘You can’t get them in California. You can’t get them in New York. It’s something you can’t get any place else. It’s unique.”
NuWay’s annual anniversary sale
NuWay is putting on its annual anniversary special through Saturday, July 4.
Large NuWay sandwiches will be 90 cents with the purchase of a medium drink. Hot dogs will also be 90 cents. A large sandwich is usually $4.07. Limit one per person.
NuWay has restaurants at 7301 W. Central, 6404 E. Central, 3441 E. Harry, 2415 S. Seneca and the flagship at 1416 W. Douglas.
The stores’ hours are 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, though they’ll close at 4 p.m. on Saturday.
This story was originally published July 2, 2020 at 2:18 PM.
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