Flashback Friday: East Wichita hotel offered rooftop dining in the ’70s, wants to again

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature that will appear every Friday on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants they once loved but now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.

This week’s featured restaurant space was home to a long string of popular rooftop restaurants in the 1970s through the 1990s.

Wichita doesn’t really have regular access to rooftop views. Unless you live in the Garvey Center or Hillcrest apartments, work in a tall downtown building like the Epic Center , or spring for a night at the Hyatt Regency downtown, you don’t get to see Wichita from high above too often.

But that wasn’t true in 1970s and 1980s Wichita. Not only did a restaurant called The Top of the Plaza operate on the 26th floor of the Garvey Center from the early 1970s until the early 1990s, but a higher-rise hotel that went up on East Kellogg in 1974 — then called the Holiday Inn East — also had a rooftop space that was home to a string of popular clubs and restaurants during the same time frame. Among them: The Rafters Club, The Lighthouse, Lancer’s East and Amelia’s.

Now, the California-based owners of the hotel at 7335 E. Kellogg, which is now a Red Roof Plus , are trying to find a new restaurant tenant for the space, which offers views from above the treetops. Weigand commercial associate Patrick Hale has been on the case for more than a year, and motorists on Kellogg have likely noticed his heavily zip-tied sign hanging from the sixth-floor balcony that reads, “Restaurant For Lease.”

Though he hasn’t been able to find a tenant yet, he said, he’s had several local restaurateurs express serious interest. In addition to the views, the 6,266-square-foot space has a full kitchen, a built-in bar and a spacious Kellogg-facing balcony.

But it hasn’t been occupied in some time, and it needs work. The kitchen will require some attention, and to make the space functional some walls will need to come down. So far, Hale hasn’t found anyone willing to take the project on.

But whoever may eventually revive the space will be bringing back to life a onetime hot spot where many Wichitans attended New Year’s Eve and Halloween parties, enjoyed shrimp peels and fish fries, or danced the night away to a live band.

Decades of rooftop dining

The seven-story hotel Wichita knows today was built in the early 1970s as an expansion to the existing Holiday Inn at 7411 E. Kellogg. It included 105 guest rooms, meeting rooms and a lush swimming pool surrounded by plants imported from Florida and boulders brought in from eastern Kansas to serve as a diving platform.

The first tenant of the sixth-floor restaurant space was The Rafter’s Club, which operated from 1974 until 1984. It had a nautical theme, decorated with fishnets and crates, and it threw holiday parties, offered live music and acted as a supper club. In the early days, people in the seventh-floor ballroom space could look down on the restaurant through a circular cutout in the center of the room. It’s since been filled in, but the outline is still visible.

When The Rafter’s Club closed, hotel franchisee Bob Lightner opened in the space his own short-lived restaurant called The Lighthouse, which served breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week and offered not only chicken fried steak but also prime rib on the weekends and several options for diet-conscious diners of the mid-1980s.

In 1985, Lancer’s East took over The Lighthouse space. Intended as a replacement of sorts for the popular downtown Lancers Club , which had operated in the Century Plaza building east of Century II but closed in 1984. Lancer’s East lasted only until 1986 then was replaced the following year by Burgundy’s, a restaurant that often served all-you-can-eat crab legs and operated until 1991. It was later replaced by Amelia’s, which used a drawing of Amelia Earhart as its logo and served holiday buffets, weekend brunches and prime rib specials on Saturday nights.

In 1999, the Holiday Inn sold to a Ramada operator, and after that, the rooftop restaurant space doesn’t appear to have opened to the public. Several other hotel operators have run the hotel over the years. In the mid 2000s, it was called The Weekly Studios hotel before becoming La Quinta Inn in 2008 and then Red Roof Plus in 2019.

The current operators briefly used parts of the sixth floor for free continental breakfast, but today, it’s a ghost restaurant, with abandoned dishes and furnishings scattered all about and layers of dust covering the surfaces.

Ghost restaurant

The hotel’s current owners have been updating the first five floors and have even renovated the indoor pool that caught so much attention when the Holiday Inn first opened in the mid 1970s. They just haven’t gotten to the sixth or seventh floors.

In fact, Hale said, the hotel itself is now for sale, but its owners are still hoping that a successful rooftop restaurant could come in and sweeten the deal for potential buyers.

Hale said he pictures a mid-priced, American-style bar and grill that’s open both to hotel guests and to the public. People who have considered the space have had lots of interesting ideas for how to turn it back into a dinner destination with one of the best views in town.

And Hale said he thinks the east side of Wichita might enjoy visiting a place with so much history.

“The stuff that’s there is downtown,” Hale said. “Having an east-side rooftop place that’s open to the public...is unique.”

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