Flashback Fridays: Swank supper club was where 1980s Wichita danced the weekends away
Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature that runs Fridays on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants that they once loved but that now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.
This week’s featured restaurant was one of the hottest tickets in town in the 1980s.
They’re probably remembered more for their restaurant endeavors that lasted into the early 2010s: One was a co-owner of Scotch & Sirloin, the other had a popular restaurant and nightclub called Tommy’s.
But in the 1970s and 1980s, buddies Sonny Glennon and Tom D’Annunzio hitched their restaurant careers to the same wagon and at one time co-owned one of Wichita’s hottest supper clubs.
It was called, appropriately, Tom & Sonny’s, and it operated from 1979 to 1989 at 3920 W. Douglas, near the corner of Douglas and West Street. The building, which today is part of a Super Car Guys dealership, also was once home to Mike and Ali Issa’s Italian Garden west.
Tom & Sonny’s was an upscale operation that served dishes like Chateaubriand, shrimp scampi, oysters on the half shell, frog legs and Alaskan King Crab legs. D’Annunzio ran the restaurant’s bar, and Glennon was the chef.
The duo had first worked together at Kamiel’s Restaurant and Club, which was owned by Kay Shibley (father of Doo-Dah Diner’s Patrick Shibley) and operated at Kellogg and Rock in the early 1970s. When Shibley decided to open a west-side version of his popular supper club in 1972, he sent his young bartender (D’Annunzio) and kitchen manager (Glennon) to run the place.
Three years later, the duo bought the west-side Kamiel’s, which was at 2047 N. West St, and that’s when they became known Wichita-wide as “Tom and Sonny.” In April 1978, a fire broke out in the shopping center where Kamiel’s West operated and destroyed the business. Four neighboring businesses suffered heavy smoke damage.
But D’Annunzio told the newspaper at the time of the fire that the restaurant would reopen, and in November of that year, it did. Now called Tom & Sonny’s, the new supper club took over the 8,000 square-foot space at Douglas and West Street that had recently been vacated by the Safeway grocery store chain.
The big new space included seating for 350 plus a big banquet room — where many birthday parties, anniversary celebrations and wedding receptions were held.
Tom & Sonny’s, which offered valet parking, also had live entertainment five nights a week from bands like the Steve Downey Trio, The Haze, Chicago Transfer, and The Benders. Many in Wichita remember dancing Friday and Saturday nights away in the smoky club — or waiting at home with a babysitter while their parents did.
Tom & Sonny’s served both dinner and lunch, and customers loved its salad bar. In addition to steak and seafood, it also offered some Lebanese fare, and people loved the restaurant’s fried chicken livers.
Tom & Sonny’s opened before Kansas passed “liquor by the drink” in 1986, which meant that for the first seven years it was in business, customers had to be members of the club to get an alcoholic beverage. And Tom & Sonny’s had plenty of those: A wine list from an old menu lists some of the popular wines of the day, including sauvignon blanc by Ernest and Julio Gallo, white zinfandel by Sutter Home, and Chablis by Gallo. People also loved the tumbleweeds the bar put out (and its lax approach to checking IDs.)
Wichitans still reminisce about the restaurant’s top-rate service: D’Annunzio never forgot a name and would even remember teens who brought their prom dates to the restaurant. Many business deals were inked at Tom & Sonny’s.
In 1986, D’Annunzio sold his part of the restaurant to Glennon. He hung on, and after liquor-by-the-drink was enacted in 1987, he said business was up by 10%. He remodeled the club in 1988, but in 1989, he declared bankruptcy, and Tom & Sonny’s closed. Later that year, Italian Garden took the space over.
In 1990, Glennon became the general manager at Scotch & Sirloin, and eventually, he became a part-owner along with Lindy Andeel and Doug Farha. Mike Issa bought Scotch & Sirloin in 2014 and still owns it.
In 1992, D’Annunzio and his wife, Judy, opened a new club — Tommy’s Restaurant and Lounge — at 2121 N. Tyler, where Pizza Ranch is now. Like Tom & Sonny’s, it saw many years of fine dining and Saturday-night dancing but closed in April 2012, one year after a new owner purchased it from the D’Annunzios.
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