One of Kansas’ oldest family restaurants has closed, and owners say COVID is to blame
One of the state’s most storied and longest-running restaurants has closed, its owners announced late on Thursday.
The Brookville Hotel in Abilene, whose history stretches back to 1870, has closed because of “Covid and lack of traffic,” according to a Facebook post.
“We hung on as long as we could,” read the post, signed by owners Mark and Connie Martin. The restaurant had been in Mark Martin’s family for four generations.
The Brookville Hotel was known for its family-style fried chicken dinners, and it was part of a dining tradition for many Kansas families.
On Friday, an emotional Mark Martin said that even if COVID-19 conditions improve, he’s done running the restaurant. But if someone else wanted to eventually take it over, he said, he’d be happy to serve as a consultant.
“There may be someone a little younger than I am who has the financial fortitude to run this place,” said Martin, 70.
He said the restaurant had a strong 2019 and he was preparing for an even better 2020 when COVID-19 hit. He applied for and got PPP money, which kept him going with carryout business during the month his dining room was closed. On Mother’s Day, he said, he served a record 700 to-go meals.
But once the dining room was able to open back up, the business just wasn’t there. The restaurant’s income was driven largely by tour bus groups and catering for big events like weddings, and with no tourism and no weddings, that all dried up.
In September, he brought in half of what he had the previous September and was looking at the same situation for the rest of the year, he said. He made the painful decision to cut his losses.
Sunday was the restaurant’s last day in business.
“This is not the way I wanted to go out,” he said. “This year had really, really good potential after last year, but COVID killed us,” he said.
The restaurant first opened as the Cowtown Cafe in the 1870s, when Brookville — which today has a population of 250 — was expected to become a railroad hub. But Union Pacific Railroad relocated its hub to Junction City.
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Gus and Mae Magnuson bought the hotel in 1894, and Mae earned a reputation as a cook whose food was worth seeking out. Their daughter, Helen Martin, originated the famous family-style fried chicken dinners in 1915 and eventually took over running the business.
The menu that the restaurant was serving to present day harked back to prairie days and included fried chicken plus sweet-and-sour coleslaw, baking powder biscuits with butter and preserves, cream corn and mashed potatoes with cream gravy.
The hotel eventually passed down to Martin’s father, Cal, who stopped renting rooms in 1972.
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Mark Martin, who washed dishes for his grandma Helen at the restaurant starting in the 1960s, took over in 1982, and in 2000, he and his wife, Connie, made the decision to move the restaurant 45 miles to Abilene because of a lack of a municipal sewage system in Brookville. They also wanted to be closer to traffic from the Interstate.
As part of a $1.5 million project, they recreated the hotel’s facade and tried to make the dining rooms feel like the dining rooms at the original.
In 2009, the Kansas Sampler Foundation named the Brookville Hotel one of the Eight Wonders of Kansas Cuisine.
Martin said he struggled with the decision to close a business that has meant so much to his family and the state for so many years, but he was left with no choice, he said.
The restaurant had a good run.
“You think about what we’ve accomplished over the years,” he said. “We’ve served presidents, almost every governor and every senator that was ever in office.”
This story was originally published October 2, 2020 at 9:53 AM.
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