Our Rich History: Colonial Cottage was an icon of the Erlanger community, now history

By Raymond G. Hebert, PhD
Special to NKyTribune

Part 10 of an occasional series about Casual & Fine Dining

The Colonial Cottage, a traditional diner, was established in 1933 and became a landmark restaurant on Dixie Highway in Erlanger. It was demolished in October 2023 after a May 7, 2021 fire, from which it never recovered. The Colonial Cottage was best known for its breakfast menu (particularly its goetta offerings), fried chicken, open-faced roast beef and turkey sandwiches, and cream pies.

Colonial Cottage’s beginnings reached back to the Great Depression when Clara Rich opened a diner, just 10 miles southwest of Cincinnati, “in a small white cottage in Erlanger to feed the local tobacco warehouse workers. Known as the Colonial Cottage, the restaurant served basic home-cooked meals, including fried chicken, meatloaf, and the cream pies that soon became popular” (Noelle Higdon Grimes and Matthew J. Grimes, “Colonial Cottage,” in Paul A. Tenkotte and James C. Claypool, The Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).

After operating the restaurant for 37 years, Rich sold it to Verne and Bonnie Epperson of Dry Ridge in 1970. They had dined there, enjoyed it, and vowed to continue the tradition of great comfort food. In 1987, they built a new building about a block away from the original, with double the seating capacity. In 1999 they sold the restaurant to Matt and Noelle Grimes, described by a website admirer as “a young couple whose love of Kentucky history and Kentucky cooking ran deep” ( Road Tips: A Sales Guy’s Guide to Travel, Food and Music in the Midwest and Beyond .

The Grimes added banquet catering and had an upstairs room frequently used by groups such as the Kenton County Rotary Club. Gatherings were frequent and popular, and they supplied food for such groups as the Behringer-Crawford Museum in Devou Park for its Thursday evening Music Nights in the summer.

In August 2005, the Travel Channel’s Taste of America “devoted an episode to the phenomenon of goetta and featured the Colonial Cottage in the show. As a part of the episode, the restaurant put together a minifestival to show just how much Northern Kentuckians love their goetta.” The Grimes family continued the cozy atmosphere and great food of the Colonial Cottage, serving “as an integral part of the Erlanger business community,” and providing “a constant reminder of home, family, and friends” ( Encyclopedia of NKy ).

Uniquely, in 2006, the Grimes made the Colonial Cottage one of the first smoke-free restaurants in Kentucky . . . and found that their business actually got better after the ban.” The Sales Guy (obviously not a Northern Kentucky local) talks about being shown “goetta,” with its mixture of ground pork and ground beef, but concluded: “No, I didn’t try it, but it sounded interesting” (Sales Guy). How many of us have used the word “interesting” to describe a dish we did not like or did not want to try?

A 2021 fire could not have come at a worse time, during the massive international COVID pandemic. The restaurant was demolished two years later. A 2023 news story stated that an Erlanger resident named Eric Rolf, after witnessing the demolition, said: “I knew some people who went every week.” Another described it as “that was the place to meet.” Erlanger Mayor Jessica Fette went one step further in adding: “Everybody loved the cottage . . . there is no denying it was an icon of Erlanger” (Nathan Granger, “‘ That Was the Place to Meet’: Iconic Colonial Cottage Restaurant Demolished Years after 2021 Fire,” LinkNKy , October 30, 2023)

“The precise cause of the fire” was not certain, although Matt Grimes suspected it might have been “used cooking oil related.” Above all, “no one was hurt in the blaze” and, similar to the problems that other restaurants had during the pandemic, he stated that “the inflationary pressures on building materials and other economic travails during the pandemic made it mathematically impossible to gather enough resources to repair the building.”

Grimes helped Mayor Fette open her own restaurant called “The Hive” where many of his staff went to work. In the end, in Grimes’ words, “it was time to move on (with) the realization that I was not going to be able to get the cottage open.”

When asked to reflect on the loss of this icon to the community, Grimes said that having had the pleasure of watching three generations of families grow up, “it hurt. This was my passion.” The Mayor added how “Matt Grimes is absolutely beloved by this community. He did so much for his employees. He does so much for his community, even today” (That Was the Place to Meet”).

Dr. Raymond G. Hebert is Professor of History and Executive Director of the William T. Robinson III Institute for Religious Liberty at Thomas More University. He is the leading author of Thomas More University at 100: Purpose, People, and Pathways to Student Success (2023). The book can be purchased by contacting the Thomas More University Bookstore at 859-344-3335. Dr. Hebert can be contacted at hebertr@thomasmore.edu

Paul A. Tenkotte, PhD is Editor of the “Our Rich History” weekly series and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Northern Kentucky University (NKU). He can be contacted at tenkottep@nku.edu . Tenkotte also serves as Director of the ORVILLE Project (Ohio River Valley Innovation Library and Learning Enrichment). For more information see https://orvillelearning.org/

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