Flashback Friday: Wichita’s Allis Hotel housed many luxury restaurants during its time
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 restaurants operated inside the legendary Allis Hotel, which operated in downtown Wichita from 1930 to 1970.
As you read this in 2025, the land on the southeast corner of Broadway and William is a construction zone that will eventually become home to the new Wichita Biomedical Campus.
But starting in 1930, that lot held a grand, 17-story Art Deco hotel that was a distinct member of Wichita’s skyline until it was demolished in 1996. And that hotel — The Allis — was home to several restaurants that for 40 years fed upscale businessmen, downtown Christmas shoppers and people in search of a quick workday lunch.
Last year, I was scanning eBay for old postcards, matchbooks, menus and dishes — something I do regularly as Wichita’s self-appointed archivist of local restaurant memorabilia — when I ran across something I hadn’t seen before: a color postcard featuring the dining room of the Allis Hotel’s Pancake Palace. The picture on the front showed a mid-century dining room with pale green half-circle booths positioned atop an ocean of bright blue carpet. White trellises lined the room, and greenery-filled planters were positioned behind the tufted seatbacks.
I was intrigued, and my research into the Pancake Palace led me to discover that the Allis Hotel — which sat vacant for 26 years before it was dramatically imploded — actually had three restaurants when it opened in 1930. And although the names and approaches of the hotel’s eateries changed over the years, it kept three restaurants until the 350-room hotel began to decline in the 1960s.
On opening day, the Allis — which was built to resemble New York City’s Wadlorf-Asotia hotel — was the tallest building in Kansas (and it stayed that way until the 1960s.). The Wichita Eagle exhaustively covered the hotel’s Dec. 3, 1930, opening and included lots of details about its three restaurants.
The grandest of them was the Empire Cafe — sometimes referred to as the Empire Room — which was directly off the hotel lobby on the second floor. According to an advertisement placed by hotel owner Barney Allis, the restaurant offered “French cooking by men chefs” and would be “the last word in appointments and cuisine.”
The elegant Empire Cafe also had a big dance floor, and patrons would often dance the night away to a live orchestra.
The other two restaurants were on the hotel’s main floor. One was Pup Lunch, which served “food quickly cooked before your eyes.” It had a lunch counter and a soda fountain and was more affordable. According to an advertisement at the time, it was open “23 hours and 59 minutes each day.”
The third restaurant was called The Kit Kat Coffee Shop. Unlike the “men chefs” at The Empire Cafe, The Kit Kat featured “home cooked foods with women cooks,” read an early advertisement. The Kit Kat served breakfast, lunch and dinner and was a favorite not only of the after-theater crowd but also of bridge players and business people.
In 1950, Pup Lunch was remodeled and renamed Prompto Lunch. The Kit-Kat lasted until 1955. when Barney Allis sold his hotel to the Boss Hotel Co., which had about 37 hotels across the country. That group had new ideas for restaurants for the Allis, and in late 1959, it opened The Country Kitchen, which featured early-American furnishings and seated 156.
The Country Kitchen served “king-size steaks” cooked on a Swedish charcoal broiler, and it was known for its prime rib. Its color scheme was “burnished antique crimson” and the dining room featured a sloping beamed ceiling, brass chandeliers and lots of teak wood, copper and brick touches. The tables were set with maple pepper mills and matching salt shakers, wooden sugar scoops and hobnail milk glass. In addition to charbroiled items, it served a special revolving relish cart plus raspberry ice, chocolate silk pie and cheesecake for dessert.
“We hope it will bring people back downtown, particularly in the evenings,” the hotel’s general manager Mingo Lamberti, was quoted as saying about Country Kitchen. An ad placed in The Eagle in March 1960 said that the Country Kitchen led all Boss Hotel Co. locations nationwide for individual dining room sales.
Then, in December 1960, The Allis added the aforementioned mid-century marvel known as Pancake Palace. Dubbed by its owners “Paris in Wichita,” its meals started at 65 cents, and it was open from 7:30 a.m. until 2 a.m. for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The menu included 14 different types of pancakes plus sandwiches, salads and pastries.
Despite the effort that Boss Hotel Co. put into the restaurants, though, the hotel’s fortunes were slipping. By 1967, The Allis was losing so much money — largely due to competition from motels — that the owners decided to sell it to Equitable Life Assurance Co. of New York, who then turned it over to Sheraton Corp. to run.
The last mention of Pancake Palace in Wichita newspapers was in 1966, when it appears to have closed. (It was briefly followed by a cafe called The Minute Chef.). Country Kitchen held on until The Allis — which Sheraton sold after only a year — was closed down in 1970. Once it was shuttered, five tons of the hotel’s furniture, china and chandeliers were sold at auction to collect on more than $300,000 in back taxes.
The Allis then sat vacant, except for resident pigeons, for more than 25 years. The city of Wichita bought it in 1994, and despite preservationists’ efforts to save the historic hotel — which included getting it added to the state register of historic places — the City Council was unable to find a developer that would revive The Allis and voted to demolish it.
The hotel came down at 8 a.m. on Dec. 22, 1996. It took only 6.5 seconds for 300 pounds of explosives to reduce it to a pile of debris.
This story was originally published April 11, 2025 at 5:03 AM.
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