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

The restaurant area featured this week was home to a long line of popular rooftop restaurants from the 1970s to the 1990s.

There isn’t really regular access to rooftops in Wichita. Unless you live in the Garvey Center or Hillcrest apartments, work in a tall downtown building like the Epic Center, or treat yourself to a night at the downtown Hyatt Regency, you don’t often get the chance to see Wichita from high up.

But that wasn’t the case in Wichita in the 1970s and 1980s. Not only was there a restaurant called The Top of the Plaza on the 26th floor of the Garvey Center from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, but a taller hotel built on East Kellogg in 1974 – then called the Holiday Inn East – had a rooftop space that housed a number of popular clubs and restaurants during the same period. 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, now a Red Roof Plus, are trying to find a new restaurant tenant for the space, which offers treetop views. Weigand’s business partner Patrick Hale has been on the case for more than a year, and motorists on Kellogg have likely noticed his sign, zip-tied to the sixth-floor balcony, that reads “Restaurant for Lease.”

Although he hasn’t found a tenant yet, he said several local restaurateurs have expressed serious interest. In addition to the views, the 580-square-foot space features a full kitchen, a built-in bar and a spacious balcony overlooking Kellogg.

But it has been unoccupied for some time and needs renovation. The kitchen will need some attention and to make the space functional, some walls will need to be demolished. So far, Hale hasn’t found anyone willing to take on the project.

But whoever ultimately revives the place will breathe new life into a former hotspot where many Wichita residents attended New Year’s Eve and Halloween parties, enjoyed shrimp bowls and fried fish, or danced the night away to the sounds of a live band.

Decades of experience in rooftop dining

The seven-story hotel that Wichita knows today was built in the early 1970s as an extension of 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 imported from eastern Kansas that served as a diving board.

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

When the Rafter’s Club closed, hotel franchisee Bob Lightner opened his own short-lived restaurant on the premises called The Lighthouse, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week and offering chicken fried steaks on the weekends, prime rib and several options for diet-conscious guests of the mid-1980s.

In 1985, Lancer’s East took over the Lighthouse space. It was intended to be a replacement of sorts for the popular downtown Lancers Club, which 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 offered crab legs to fill you up and operated until 1991. It was later replaced by Amelia’s, which used a drawing of Amelia Earhart as its logo and offered holiday buffets, weekend brunches, and Saturday night prime rib specials.

In 1999, the Holiday Inn was sold to a Ramada operator, and after that, the rooftop restaurant appears to have been closed to the public. Over the years, several other hotel operators have run the hotel. In the mid-2000s, it was called The Weekly Studios Hotel before becoming a La Quinta Inn in 2008 and a Red Roof Plus in 2019.

The current operators briefly used parts of the sixth floor for a free continental breakfast, but today it is a ghost restaurant, with abandoned dishes and furniture scattered throughout and surfaces covered in a layer of dust.

Ghost Restaurant

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

In fact, the hotel itself is now for sale, Hale said, but the owners are still hoping that a successful rooftop restaurant could make the deal more attractive to potential buyers.

Hale said he envisions a mid-priced American-style bar and grill that would be open to both hotel guests and the public. People who have considered the space have had many interesting ideas about how to turn it back into a restaurant with one of the best views in the city.

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

“The things that are there are downtown,” Hale said. “To have a rooftop on the east side that is open to the public … is unique.”

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