Infiltrates, say

Website keeps St. Louis’ restaurant history alive

ence. We’d talk about school and friends, while they ate chips with salsa.

“We also went regularly to Redel’s on DeBaliviere with our children. Our usuals were their veggie salad, veggie pizza and fried chicken.”

Golden Fried Chicken Loaf is the impetus for Lost Tables. Hammerman started researching the restaurant. He even purchased the domain name “goldenfriedchickenloaf.com” and began putting his research online. Soon, he expanded that project into what is now Lost Tables.

“I do most of my research online – in the newspaper archives, on ancestry, etc. I also interview primary sources when I can, including Adalaide Balaban (Balaban’s), Ray and Ann Gallardo (Casa Gallardo), Barbara Suberi (Bobby’s Creole), Larry Shriber and Alan Londe (Hamburger Heaven), Zoe Robinson (Café Zoe) and Donna Hafer (Mother-in-Law House),” says Hammerman.

Hammerman spends countless hours in his study doing the research, before putting it together for the online articles, with photographs and scanned menus. He has a large collection of original menus from St. Louis restaurants, which he finds mostly on eBay.

“I love that I’m preserving the history of these lost restaurants and that people really care about it. I find particularly gratifying the emails I get from family members who thank me for providing history and photographs about their parent’s or grandparent’s restaurant they knew little or nothing about,” says Hammerman.

One story stands out for Hammerman, involving much beloved recipes that were almost lost to the trash heap of history, literally.

In 2012, he read an article in the PostDispatch about Chris Leuther, a St. Louis baker who had found the original recipe cards from the Lake Forest Pastry Shop in a dumpster behind the bakery when it closed. He messaged him on Facebook on Feb. 16, 2019, and asked if he could speak with him. No reply.

“On April 21, 2021, he messaged me his phone number and told me to call him,” says Hammerman. “I visited him at the bakery he was then working at, and he gave me the recipe cards – decaying in tattered binders -- to scan and post on the Lost Tables website. These would have been lost forever, and now they’ve been preserved.”

Not long after launching his website, Hammerman created the Lost Tables Facebook group to share his stories. The group has become a public service in its own right, where over 10,000 members discuss not only Hammerman’s stories, but share random memories and ask questions of others. Basically, it’s a place to kibbitz about all the great St. Louis eateries that have come and gone.

“The public response has been amazing and unexpected. I get FB messages and emails from strangers all the time, thanking me for the website,” says Hammerman. “Strangers stop me in restaurants to thank me. My friends are constantly talking about the website articles or the Facebook groups. It’s nice to know people are reading and enjoying the articles I spend so many hours researching and writing.”

ABOVE: Harley Hammerman, pictured at his home in 2018, created www.losttables.com, which chronicles St. Louis’ restaurant history.

PHOTO: JOE ANGELES/WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

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