East Wichita hotel offered rooftop dining in the ’70s and wants to do it again

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

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

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

But that wasn’t the case in the 1970s and ’80s in 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 to the early 1990s, but a taller hotel built on East Kellogg in 1974 – then called Holiday Inn East – owned also a rooftop space which housed a series 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 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 treetop views. Weigand’s business partner, Patrick Hale, has been on the case for more than a year, and Kellogg motorists have likely noticed his heavily-tied sign hanging from the sixth-floor balcony that reads “Restaurant for Rent.”

Although he hasn’t yet found a tenant, he said, several local restaurateurs have expressed serious interest. In addition to the views, the 6,266-square-foot space has a full kitchen, a built-in bar and a large Kellogg-facing balcony.

But it hasn’t been occupied for some time and work is needed. The kitchen will need some attention and to make the space functional some walls will need to be knocked down. So far, Hale hasn’t found anyone willing to take on the project.

But whoever can revive the space will bring back to life an old hot spot where many Wichitans attended New Year’s and Halloween parties, enjoyed shrimp peels and fish fries, or danced the night away to the sounds from a live band.

Decades of Rooftop Restoration

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

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

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

In 1985, Lancer’s East took over The Lighthouse space. Intended as a replacement of sorts for downtown’s popular Lancers Club, which operated in the Century Plaza building east of Century II but closed in 1984. Lancer’s East only lasted until 1986, then was replaced the following year by Burgundy’s, a restaurant that often served unlimited crab legs and operated until 1991. It was then replaced by Amelia’s, which used a drawing of Amelia Earhart as its logo and served 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 does not appear to have been open to the public. Several other hoteliers have managed 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 a free continental breakfast, but today it’s a ghost restaurant, with discarded dishes and furniture strewn everywhere and layers of dust covering the surfaces.

Ghost restaurant

The current owners of the hotel have renovated 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 didn’t reached the sixth or seventh floor.

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

Hale said he envisioned a mid-priced American-style bar and grill, open to both hotel guests and the public. People who looked at this space had many interesting ideas on how to transform it into a dining destination with one of the best views in the city.

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

“The things that are there are downtown,” Hale said. “Having a roof deck on the east side open to the public… is unique.”

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