Lost Tables: Nantucket Cove

Nantucket Cove

Charles Heiss was born into a hotel family in Germany in 1883. After working in hotels in Belgium, France, England and Canada, he came to the United States in 1912.

The Statler Hotel chain hired Heiss to manage its hotel in Detroit and later transferred him to St. Louis to manage the Statler on Washington Avenue. A story is told that Heiss had an argument with Mr. Statler and declared, "Someday I'm going to build two hotels close to yours and they'll be better than yours."

Heiss kept his word. The Hotel Mayfair opened at St. Charles and Eighth Street, a block behind the Statler, in 1925, and the Hotel Lennox opened across Washington from the Statler in 1929.


Hotel Mayfair, 1939	Hotel Lennox, 1939

Heiss married his secretary, Marie Wagner, in 1921. They had two children, Jean in 1923 and C. Gordon in 1925.

The Heiss family lived at the Mayfair. "We lived at the Mayfair until I was 12 years old," remembered Jean Heiss Donegan. "My mother tired to keep us busy, but we still managed to throw food out the window."

C. Gordon Heiss was educated at Cornell, Yale and Boston universities. He served as a second lieutenant in the Army in World War II. When his father died in 1956, C. Gordon Heiss assumed ownership of both the Mayfair and Lennox hotels.


Charles Heiss	Jean and C. Gordon Heiss

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In October of 1955, Joseph Campagna was issued a building permit for a 173-unit apartment building at the southeast corner of Kingshighway and West Pine. Campagna had previously built The Montclair apartments at 18 South Kingshighway.

Frontenac Apartment Building, 40 North Kingshighway, Nov 1956

Campagna's 16-story structure, known as The Frontenac, was completed in the fall of 1957. On opening, approximately one-third of the luxury apartment's first floor area was occupied by a restaurant called the Golden Lion, which featured a specially-built oyster bar patterned after New York's famous Grand Central Station oyster bar.

In April of 1958, Al and Vivian Tucker, who operated the Frontier Room in The Montclair, took over the Golden Lion. They reopened it in July of that year as the Villa Capri, featuring upscale Italian cuisine.

Al Tucker died in June of 1959 at the age of 46. The Villa Capri restaurant in The Frontenac closed shortly thereafter.

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In the 1950s, two of the best places to eat in St. Louis were the Mayfair Room, in the Hotel Mayfair, and the Rathskeller, in the Hotel Lennox. Both restaurants were operated by the Mayfair-Lennox Corporation and its president, C. Gordon Heiss.

On August 1, 1959, Heiss announced plans for a new seafood restaurant in The Frontenac apartment building, to be located in the space formerly occupied by the Villa Capri. The new restaurant would be operated by Mayfair-Lennox and called Nantucket Cove.

Nantucket Cove officially opened on November 27, 1959. Its "cove" was its parking lot, which one entered off Kingshighway through wooden gates adorned with nautical buoys and fish netting.

Nantucket Cove Parking Lot Entrance, 1959

Diners entered Nantucket Cove's suite of five dimly-lit rooms via a wooden walkway. A Cape Cod atmosphere was fostered with authentic artifacts acquired from Massachusetts seaport towns.

Nantucket Cove Floor Plan

A "Jenny Lind" masthead kept watch over Nantucket Cove's bar. The bar was separated from the restaurant by a wall of oars, harpoons and buoys, covered with fish casting nets. There were red running lanterns which had been used on sailing ships of the 1800s, along with compasses and other navigational equipment.

Nantucket Cove Bar, 1959

Two large dining rooms – The Mayflower and the Upper Deck – were replete with checkered table clothes, captain's chairs, beamed ceilings and 12-inch planked flooring.

Nantucket Cove Mayflower Room, 1959

Nantucket Cove Upper Deck, 1959

The smaller Revere Room, modeled on the Paul Revere home in Boston, featured a large fireplace. The room contained an innkeeper's chandelier dating from 1750, a baby cradle and highchair from 1690, and a circa 1730 corner cabinet holding Bennington china from 1800 and pottery made by the Pilgrims.

Nantucket Cove Revere Room, 1959

Nantucket Cove featured a trout run and a live lobster pond, as well as an oyster bar.

Our trout run duplicates conditions under which these delicious fish live in babbling brooks from Missouri to Colorado. No dish could be fresher . . . have your waiter net one from the stream or if you are so inclined, we will give you a pole and you can cocktail while you fish.
Our lobsters are flown from cold northern waters and thrive in our pond which simulates their native habitat.

Nantucket Cove, 1959
Trout run (left foreground), lobster pond (left background), oyster bar (right)

Nantucket Cove Oyster Bar, 1968

When Nantucket Cove opened, its seafood orientation was revolutionary for the Midwest.

At the Nantucket Cove, no frozen sea food will ever be served . . . for we are dedicated to a "hook-to-pan-to-plate" freshness that converts even the most avid landlubber to our delicacies from the briny deep.

The advent of jet air freight in early 1960 was the key, and over the years, Nantucket Cove steadily built its reputation for absolutely fresh, imaginatively prepared seafood. Flounder, red snapper, salmon, pompano, halibut, oysters, clams and live Maine lobster were featured daily on the menu.

Nantucket Cove served more live Maine lobsters than anyone else in the Midwest. It was their most popular item.

We serve them with drawn butter, but you might be interested in knowing that lobsters have fewer calories and higher protein content than almost any other popular food, and are delicious without butter using only lime, salt and freshly ground pepper. We recommend that you try a bite this way. For those who appreciate Lobster Roe, please specify a female lobster. Unless we are instructed otherwise, we steam all of our lobsters.

The Nantucket Cove menu included a small section for landlubbers.

We have searched the Seven Seas, the Lakes and Streams to tempt your appetite for sea food, but we must realize that some of our most valued clients might still be determined to eat meat.

Nantucket Cove entrees were served with a potato, a tossed green salad and Pilgrim Cornsticks – cornbread baked in cast iron molds shaped like ears of corn.



1960 Nantucket Cove Menu (click image to enlarge)

On October 1, 1967, C. Gordon Heiss opened a second Nantucket Cove at 1000 Lake Shore Plaza in Chicago. He announced plans to expand into 20 cities throughout the United States.

I have tried to turn the company away from the accommodations and more in the direction of Nantucket Cove. Perhaps eventually we may get out of the hotel business entirely and concentrate on the one thing that we have that is unique – the fresh seafood restaurant.
We use two tons of Maine lobster a week now in St. Louis and Chicago. This is one reason we're charging a dollar less for a lobster dinner in Chicago than most other restaurants there. We use so much we can buy direct from the source and avoid middleman costs.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 20, 1967

Heiss would open one more Nantucket Cove in Cleveland, and another was opened in Kansas City. In 1972, Heiss sold the St. Louis and Chicago restaurants to Frank A. Potts, treasurer of the Mayfair-Lennox Hotels, and moved to Phoenix, where he opened stripped down versions of the Nantucket Cove, called Nantucket Lobster Trap.


1971 Nantucket Cove Menu (click image to enlarge)

Frank Potts, and later his son Charles, continued operating Nantucket Cove pretty much unchanged. In an October 12, 1988 St. Louis Post-Dispatch interview, Charles Potts discussed the restaurant's longevity.

I guess we're easily known as the seafood restaurant in St. Louis. From the very beginning, we were serving exclusively seafood and a few steaks when no one else was. And we were serving seafood in unconventional methods at the time.
For example, we were charcoal broiling our fish nearly 30 years ago. We also don't believe in putting sauces and heavy spices on our seafood. We let the flavor of the fish speak for themselves. And we never dropped our lobsters into boiling pots of water. We've always steamed them.
[We] believed we were preparing seafood the right my, and our longevity seems to bear out what we thought.

One constant on the Nantucket Cove menu was its signature salad dressing. The creamy anchovy based dressing originated at the Hotel Mayfair, and was originally listed on Nantucket Cove menus as Mayfair Dressing. But after Heiss sold the Mayfair-Lennox Hotels in 1969, he changed the condiment's name to Cove Dressing.

In an April 23, 1995 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, Charles Potts gave his father credit for creating the original Mayfair Dressing when he worked for Heiss at the Hotel Mayfair. While Potts was willing to list the dressing's ingredients, the exact recipe was a carefully guarded secret.

However, C. Gordon Heiss told a different story in a June 25, 1995 Post-Dispatch interview.

I hired Frank Potts as accountant for Mayfair-Lennox Hotels in 1967, eight years after the Nantucket Cove was started. I developed Mayfair Dressing in the 1950s, when Waring Blenders became household appliances.

In the same article, Heiss divulged the recipe for his Mayfair Dressing.

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On September 3, 1994, Charles Potts closed the Nantucket Cove restaurant on Kingshigway and reopened it two weeks later in the Interco Corporate Tower on South Hanley Road in Clayton. The new space featured large booths with half-moon tables – gone were the fish nets, the buoys and the captain's chairs.

Potts sold Nantucket Cove to Amer Hawatmeh in October of 1995.

When I came to St. Louis last spring and stopped in for a beer at Nantucket Cove, I knew I had to own it.
I wanted a restaurant with a big-city attitude, one that offers New York-Chicago-Los Angeles-style dining, where you can go for really fresh fish, nothing frozen, and where you can eat a great meal and have a good time.
Here we don't focus on the bottom line; we concentrate on everything else, and the bottom line takes care of itself.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 5, 1996

C. Gordon Heiss died on January 19, 1997 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Two and a half years later, the restaurant he had created in 1959 stopped steaming lobsters in its new Clayton space and closed its doors.

Nantucket Cove, 40 North Kingshighway, 1959