Flashback Friday: ’90s Wichita ate (literal) buckets of spaghetti from this restaurant

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature that runs Fridays on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants that they once loved but that now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.

This week’s featured restaurant, Spaghetti Jack’s, was a locally owned, quick-service Italian restaurant.

Back in the 1990s, Wichitans who didn’t feel like cooking dinner could stop at a local restaurant chain and pick up a bucket of spaghetti.

That’s right. A bucket.

For a decade starting in 1992, Wichita was home to one or more Spaghetti Jack’s restaurants, known not only for pails of pasta but also for unlimited garlic bread, a push-cart salad bar and a famous baked rigatoni supreme.

It’s important to note that, before this incarnation of Spaghetti Jack’s opened, Wichita had a similarly named restaurant. In 1974, entrepreneur Jack Perry opened a restaurant called Spaghetti Jack & Co. at 4847 E. Harry serving spaghetti, lasagna and pizza. The restaurant moved it to 221 N. Main in 1979 and operated there until 1981. Jack Perry went on to become a Schlotzsky’s franchisee and sold his original restaurant’s naming rights to his brother, Carl, who in 1982 opened a revival of that Spaghetti Jack’s at 3016 E. Harry. It lasted until about 1984.

But the Spaghetti Jack’s being discussed here was a chain first opened by Louis Stoico, a transplant from Boston who also was the founder of the popular Sub & Stuff chain , which he started in Hutchinson in 1977. In 1991, he moved his restaurant headquarters to Wichita, and that same year, he came up with a new concept: a quick-service Italian restaurant that would serve pasta dishes and salads. He opened the first two Spaghetti Jack’s in Hutchinson and Great Bend.

The first Wichita Spaghetti Jack’s opened in May 1992 in a 3,000 square-foot-space at Cherry Creek Shopping Center, Harry and South Rock Road. The restaurant had seating for 100, but Stoico told The Wichita Eagle that he expected carryout customers would make up a big segment of his business, just as they had in Hutchinson and Great Bend.

Stoico, who was well known to Wichita from his starring role in Sub & Stuff television commercials, also told The Eagle he had big plans for expansion and would add six company-owned stores in Wichita as well as franchised restaurants across the region.

And Spaghetti Jack’s, which Stoico said served “90 percent of a full service Italian restaurant at one-half the price,” did grow quickly, especially in Wichita. In 1993, new Spaghetti Jack’s restaurants opened at both Central and Hillside and at Pawnee and Seneca, in the Westway Shopping Center. Stoico’s first franchised Spaghetti Jack’s opened in Shawnee in 1993

Two more Wichita restaurants opened in 1994, and both were franchised by Ed Wong, whose family had owned Wichita restaurants since the 1920s, and Don Venhaus. One was at 209 S. West St. and had the company’s first drive-through window. The other was at 47th and Broadway.

Then, in 1995, Wichita Spaghetti Jack’s restaurants opened at 756 N. Tyler and at 3151 N. Rock Road. The latter was the chain’s first freestanding restaurant, and it took up 8,600 square feet, split between the restaurant and the new headquarters space for Stoico Restaurant Group. That same year, Stoico told the Eagle that his dream was to take his company public (which he did in 1997) and to open 500 Spaghetti Jack’s across the country by the year 2000.

At the company’s height at the end of 1996, Stoico had 21 Sub & Stuff and 14 Spaghetti Jack’s restaurants. But the empire may have grown too quickly. In early 1988, Stoico Restaurant Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, listing assets of $100,000 and debts of $1.3 million.

Later that year, the Quizno’s chain bought the remaining Sub & Stuff and Spaghetti Jack’s restaurants, and they slowly started to close. By late 1999, the only remaining Spaghetti Jack’s was the one at 47th and Broadway. It hung on until 2002, when Hog Wild Pit Bar-B-Q founder Gary Poulton — who had been Stoico’s first partner and executive vice president — took it over. Current Hog Wild owner T.D. O’Connell moved that restaurant across the parking lot to 630 E. 47th St. South in 2018.

Today, Wichita is probably more nostalgic for Sub & Stuff — and especially its seasoned fries — than it is for Spaghetti Jack’s. But the restaurant is still frequently brought up by nostalgic diners who can’t seem to forget the 1990s magic that was a bucket of spaghetti.

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