Watercolor by Marilynne Bradley

Miss Hulling's

Florence Louise Hulling was born in St. Louis on September 17, 1891 and orphaned at the age of three. She was adopted by her maternal grandparents who operated a farm near Mascoutah, Illinois, 30 miles east of St. Louis.

Florence attended a one-room public school for a while, and later transferred to Holy Childhood School in Mascoutah. But her formal education ended when she was 13 and she became a full-time farm worker — cooking, dusting, sweeping, churning, making jellies and preserves, washing, ironing and occasionally working in the fields

At the age of 17, Florence Hulling and her sister Catherine moved back to St. Louis.

My sister and I packed up and came to St. Louis. We thought we could make more money.

I dreamed of working at the telephone company. The first thing I did was to apply for a job there, but they turned me down.

Instead, she got a job cooking in a private home in Westminster Place. One day about a year later, she and her sister and another girl were passing a Childs restaurant on Seventh Street near Olive. In a spur of the moment decision, the trio decided to go in and ask for jobs.

All of us were hired immediately. I was scared. I lost my nerve and would have backed out but I didn't have a chance. They were short of help and put us to work immediately.

1914 Childs Supper Menu
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Childs was part of a famed national chain of restaurants, then at its peak. Childs served good food for the money and was immaculately clean. Florence made 10 cents an hour, worked seven days a week, bought and washed her own uniforms and did her best to survive on nickel tips.

I waited on tables. I did everything but scrub the floors. Come to think of it, I did scrub the chairs and table legs.

Shortly after Florence Hulling began working at Childs, she met the man she would marry. Stephen R. Apted worked out of St. Louis for a Chicago paint firm. He frequented Childs on weekends and occasionally sat at one of Florence's tables. The two became friends and, over twenty years, more than friends. They were married in 1931.

Florence Hulling worked for Childs from 1910 to 1930 . . . waitress, head waitress, food checker, cashier, head of the cafeteria department. She knew so much about the restaurant business, her friends encouraged her to open a place of her own.

In 1930, there was an opportunity. A basement restaurant in the Missouri Hotel at Eleventh and Locust was failing. Florence Hulling was able to take over the space by putting up the first month's rent – her whole $600 savings.

I started with $600 and a prayer. I was terribly frightened. I didn't know anything about bookkeeping or the finer points of business administration. Times were bad. The stock market had crashed and business everywhere was falling into the great depression.

But her restaurant was a success and it made money. In 1931, when she and Stephen Apted were married, Apted quit his job and joined his wife in the operation of the restaurant. He took care of the business and financial matters and she supervised the day-to-day operations, particularly the cooking.

The Apteds' son, Stephen J., was born in 1933. In March of 1934, they gave birth to a second cafeteria at 8th and Olive in the basement of the Chemical Building, formerly occupied by the Edward Benish eating place. They called it Miss Hulling's.
 

Florence Hulling Miss Hulling's at Olive & 8th

In 1935, General American Life gained control of the Missouri Hotel and the Apteds moved their Missouri Cafeteria across the street, leasing part of a building at the northwest corner of 11th and Locust. It eventually would also be called Miss Hulling's.
 

1950s Miss Hulling's Lunch Menu
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Both Miss Hulling's cafeterias were a spectacular success, gastronomically and financially. Florence Hulling Apted began her day with breakfast in one of her restaurants. She spent the rest of her six-day week in and out of the kitchens.

The noon hour rush was at its peak. The tables were filled with diners from the downtown offices and business houses, with shoppers, with visitors to the city. A long line of customers pushed trays ahead of them, appraised the tempting meats and vegetables and salads and pastries behind the glass barrier.

Girls in white uniforms moved among the tables and an older woman, brown-eyed and dark-haired, moved among the tables, too. She wore a white dress, but it was not a uniform. She took an extraneous empty tray from a customer at one table; she picked up the dirty dishes from another.

She was not a bus girl; she was not a waitress; she was not a cook, though she performed some of the functions of all. She was the founder and owner of two of the largest restaurants in downtown St. Louis. Together they fed a total of 7500 or 8000 people every day, enough hungry men, women and children to populate a small American town.

To the several hundred employees who literally rubbed shoulders with her every day, she was "Miss Florence." To many thousands of customers who put their feet under her tables each day she was the legendary "Miss Hulling."

St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Nov 11, 1961

Miss Hulling's Cafeteria, 725 Olive Street, 1957
 
1961 Miss Hulling's Menu, 11th & Locust
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The restaurant at Eleventh and Locust expanded sideways and upward. In the basement was a sandwich shop, on the first floor a large cafeteria, a banquet hall, a room where diners could be served at tables and a charming self-service bakery, candy shop and area with take-home frozen foods.

So many customers kept asking us to sell them a slice of the cake or pie they had just enjoyed that we had to install a carry-out service. We do our biggest bakery volume in our split-layer cakes, lemon and chocolate.

Miss Hulling's, 725 Olive Street, 1957
 
Florence Hulling Apted, 1967 Miss Hulling's, 725 Olive Street, 1957

The Miss Hulling’s enterprise, headed by son Stephen J. Apted, expanded well beyond Florence Hulling's two cafeterias.

Steve is the one who promotes the new things and gets the brainstorms.

In 1960, the family purchased Medart’s, remodeled it extensively, and renamed it the Cheshire Inn and Lodge.

In 1963, Catfish & Crystal and His Lordship's opened at 409 N 11th Street, in the same building as the Miss Hulling's cafeteria at 11th and Locust. A free carriage ride was offered with dinner. The upscale restaurant and bar served food and drink for thirty years.

The warm elegance of pre-victorian St. Louis, the flickering candles, the old silver, and the hearty good dishes of that bygone day. Steaks, prime rib, of course, and a wide selection of seafoods prepared with Miss Hulling's loving care. Stout drinks prepared in His Lordship's tavern. Catfish & Crystal, 11th and Locust.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 30, 1975

Catfish & Crystal and His Lordship's Menu
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Catfish & Crystal, 409 North 11th Street

In December of 1963, the 17-story Bel Air East Motel opened at Fourth and Washington in downtown St. Louis. The new motel would include two street level restaurants – Trader Vic's and Miss Hulling's Open Hearth.

Next of the Apted restaurant creations is the colonial styled Open Hearth in the new Bel Air East hotel near the Mississippi waterfront and the colossal awe-inspiring Gateway Arch.

Here Miss Hulling’s colonial cookery ideas are all over the menu. There are "dinners in skillets," like pot roast in ale, New England boiled dinner, roast pork with rhubarb; and "dinners in trenchers" like fried chicken, trout, prawns and Passamaquoddy pepper steak.

There are also Yankee terms for steaks and other offerings. Dinner entrees include a trip to the "relish hutch," heaped with spicy condiments; a miniature loaf and a vegetable.

Imaginative breakfasts are also served in skillets. Prices are remarkably reasonable.

Madison (New Jersey) Eagle, Oct 21, 1971

1964 Miss Hulling's Open Hearth Menu
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Early in 1967, the Apted Hulling corporation opened a restaurant at 8215 Clayton Road, across from the Westroads Shopping Center. Initially called The Country Cupboard, and then simply The Cupboard, it exhibited an ever changing menu and decor.

In 1975, The Cupboard was renamed Miss Hulling's, Clayton. The rebranded restaurant was a bevy of small rooms, which budded off a warm, comfortable, antique-strewn lobby. Waitresses wore early American attire and the menu offered downtown cafeteria favorites. Miss Hulling's, Clayton closed in the spring of 1978.
 

1975 Miss Hulling's, Clayton Menu
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To have dinner at a real cafeteria, a wondrous place of gleaming chrome and exotic aromas where a person had a choice of what seemed to be a thousand things to eat in the years that straddled World War II, THAT was an event.

The chicken pot pies, their steamy, creamy insides waiting for a fork; the Salisbury steak (what an elegant name for hamburger!) with a snowy mashed potato volcano complete with crater of brimming brown gravy; the quivering ranks of red and yellow Jell-O wearing identical dollops of whipped cream; peach and cherry pies teasingly revealing their rich and gooey fillings through lattice-work crusts – those were some of the delectables that gave reality to the parental injunction, "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."

Arnold Sawislak, UPI, 1981

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According to a 1978 Restaurant Hospitality survey, New York’s Tavern on the Green and Mama Leone were two of the nation’s top grossing independent restaurants. Guest checks averaged $14.50 and $13 respectively, with alcohol accounting for a significant portion of the tab 30% at Tavern on the Green.

At the same time, Miss Hulling’s — with its chicken livers, creamed spinach, carrot marshmallow salad and a negligible alcohol business — had an average check of $2. Yet it ranked 58th out of the 500 restaurants in the survey.

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Standing in a cafeteria line is a bothersome thing for me, to be avoided when possible.

Still, there are benefits that accrue from cafeteria dining. They generally offer speed economy, the opportunity to view the actual portion before it is served and eaten and a usually wide selection. Balancing that is the fact that the food, prepared for the lowest common denominator of palate, is rather bland, and there is a tendency for some dishes to dry out when left too long on a steam table or under a warming lamp.

Joe Pollack, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec 18, 1974

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Stephen R. Apted died in 1969. Florence Hulling Apted remained in close touch with her restaurants every day until she was well into her 80s. Her dinner sometimes consisted of "little tastes" from the restaurant kitchen so she could be certain there was no lapse in quality.

In late 1981, the Miss Hulling's Cafeteria at 8th and Olive closed its doors. It was sold to Forum Restaurants and reopened as Waid's Cafeteria.

On Tuesday, April 3, 1984, Florence Hulling Apted died at the age of 91. Until near the end she could be seen daily at her restaurant at 11th and Locust supervising the preparation of food, the cafeteria line and clearing dishes from tables.
 

Miss Hulling's, 11th & Locust Florence Hulling Apted, 1970s

In the fall of 1986, Stephen J. Apted opened a Miss Hulling's bakery on the upper level of Plaza Frontenac. Breads and pastries were made fresh daily at Miss Hulling's main bakery downtown and delivered to Plaza Frontenac every morning.

Specialties included the chocolate split-layer and lemon split-layer cakes that had been famous for 48 years, as well as gourmet plum cake, Danish, pies, cakes and cookies. The Plaza Frontenac location also offered unusual salads, wine and cheeses to compliment the bakery goods.
 

Miss Hulling's Plaza Frontenac Menu
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The Miss Hulling’s cafeteria at 11th & Locust shuttered its doors for good after the close of business on Friday, October 8, 1993. Stephen J. Apted explained, "The building is crumbling around us, it’s in a high-risk area for our employees and the insurance company wants to raise our rates due to the building’s condition and age." Apted added that all attempts to find an alternate location for the cafeteria were futile.

The Miss Hulling's building at 11th & Locust was demolished early in 1997. Apted closed the Miss Hulling's at Plaza Frontenac at the end of 1997. Stephen J. Apted died on March 23, 2000 at the age of 66.

Miss Hulling's split layer chocolate and lemon cakes live on.
 

Miss Hulling's split layer chocolate and lemon cakes


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