Wichita BBQ restaurant owner revives great garlic salad debate with new offering
Few debates have raged for as long or as passionately in the Wichita culinary community:
Who created the recipe for garlic salad — a staple of Wichita diners, steakhouses and grocery stores since the 1950s?
And what is in the real recipe?
Carey Maurer, the owner of B&C BBQ at 355 N. Washington, says he thinks he knows. He found a handwritten recipe in his late mother’s recipe box titled “Doc’s Garlic Salad,. And he knows that his grandparents knew the former owners of Doc’s Steak House, which operated at 1515 N. Broadway from 1952 to 2014. (In the great garlic salad debate, one faction insists that Doc’s founder Dwight “Doc” Hustead introduced garlic salad to Wichita.)
After speaking recently with a visiting freelance journalist who is researching an article on garlic salad, Maurer was inspired to dig the recipe out. B&C has served garlic slaw for years, and Maurer wanted to compare it to the recipe his mother had.
He made the recipe then added it to the menu at B&C a couple of weeks ago. It’s gone over so well that he plans to keep serving it (along with the original garlic slaw recipe) and is even investing in expensive chopping equipment that will aid him in the preparation.
“I’ve had a few people literally give me hugs,” Mauer said of the reaction to his new recipe “They’ll say, ’We used to live up by them. We went there all the time. This is exact.’”
Garlic salad — which is a lot like coleslaw only without the sweetness and with the addition of a garlic punch — has been a fixture in Wichita since at least the 1950s, when diners and even grocery stores served it. A surprisingly long list of restaurants in town still serve it today.
A few recipes have been floating around out there over the years, and most use either cabbage or wrung-out iceberg lettuce as a base. The Eagle published years ago a recipe provided by a descendant of the family that owned Ken’s Klub, another garlic salad purveyor in the vein of Doc’s and Abe’s Club, which operated at 318 W. 29th St. from 1946 until 1971. That version is seasoned with garlic salt, not garlic cloves, and is made with shredded lettuce.
Though Maurer won’t discuss what’s in his new recipe — or even in his old one — it’s clear that one of its main components is celery, chopped extra fine, creating a more substantial mouth feel than the more liquid-y original, made with cabbage. The new salad also has a distinct garlic flavor, and when it’s scooped with an ice-cream scooper, it holds its shape.
The recipe, which Maurer found about two years ago, is handwritten, but it’s not her handwriting. It’s also not his dad’s handwriting or either of his grandparents’, he said. The date scrawled on the top of the recipe card is 4-24-81, which is when Lucy and Louis Scott owned the restaurant. (They bought Doc’s from their next-door neighbor, Hustead, in 1963, then sold it to their son, Stuart Scott. He sold it to his nephew Brian Scott in 2011, who owned it until it closed.)
Though there’s no way to prove which recipe was the Wichita standard, Mauer says he believes this one is it. He does not believe, however, that garlic salad was invented in Wichita. During his research, he’s found that many regions of the country serve their own versions of garlic salad.
But the new recipe has been popular enough since its debut that Maurer plans to keep serving it, even though it takes him two hours to produce 20 gallons. The new garlic salad’s popularity also has helped him tune out the customers from other garlic salad factions who insist that his new recipe is in fact not the right recipe and will happily recite for him all the reasons they know that it’s not.
But Maurer says he’s been thinking about garlic salad for years and absorbing the various descriptions people who remember it have given him. He could never quite reconcile in his mind the descriptions of the texture and flavor, but when he found his mom’s recipe, it finally made sense.
“As far as I can tell, this is it,” he said. “It’s different from anything else out there.”
B&C customers can choose the new garlic salad as a side item when they order a meat combo, but they must pay a small up charge. They also can order garlic salad by the scoop.
The new salad is served atop a bed of shredded lettuce then topped with paprika. It comes with a package of Club crackers.
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