Flashback Friday: 1950s Wichita spent Sundays watching planes from this airport restaurant

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

This week’s featured restaurant, Dobbs House, was a popular white tablecloth restaurant that opened in 1954 at Wichita’s then-new Municipal Airport.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, many Wichita families would load up in the car after church on Sundays and drive out to the Municipal Airport, where they would park then watch TWA, Braniff Airways and Continental Airlines planes take off and land.

For the lucky families, these outings sometimes included lunch or dinner at Dobbs House, a white-tablecloth restaurant that was part of the new Wichita Municipal Airport when it opened in 1954. Wichitans who had a chance to eat there remember the restaurant as a cheerful place where locals would often go to celebrate birthdays or other special occasions.

The restaurant was run by Dobbs International, an airline catering service that in 1954 operated 19 airport restaurants in 14 cities. But Wichita’s Dobbs House was the company’s “showplace,” a company spokesman told The Wichita Eagle that year.

“Our new airport restaurant will be one of the finest in the world,” he said.

An old photo of the restaurant shows a two-tiered dining room that featured big picture windows facing the airport runways. Tables were set with white napkins and lined with chairs that had a distinct mid-century style. A waitress overlooking the dining room wore a long, dark-colored dress with a big white collar and a white waist apron.

On Halloween 1954, the new airport put on an open house for the public, and Dobbs House took out an advertisement in the Wichita Eagle letting customers know what to expect.

The restaurant, the ad said, was “modern and beautiful” and had “lovely new furnishings with deep carpets on the floors and imported Egyptian cotton drapes.”

It had a view, too.

“If you like big picture windows, The Dobbs House has them, and no matter where you sit in the big dining room you can see through the big plate glass windows onto the field.”

Diners were treated to a portable beef cart that would roll through the dining room so they could select their steaks and designate how they wanted them cooked — medium, rare or well done.

The restaurant also had a “fine buffet section” and five private dining rooms. The main dining room could seat 140 and was open from 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, “serving both complete dinners and a la carte service.”

The ad concluded with a hard-to-resist invitation:

“Interstate visitors have been fascinated by the new airport and by the Dobbs House. Come out soon. You will be proud.”

Dobbs International also ran a 24-hour coffee shop in the new airport, and it provided all the food served on flights. The company had also served Wichita’s airport at its previous building, which opened in 1935 at 3350 George Washington Blvd., where the Kansas Aviation Museum is now.

Dobbs House restaurant remained open at the airport until 1992, when Dobbs International agreed to sell its concession rights at 23 airports to Marriott’s Host International. By then, Wichita’s airport had long since been renamed Mid-Continent, and Dobbs House had transitioned into a buffet-style cafeteria.

As the 1990s progressed, the airport got a food court called “Harvest” that Host International filled with Pizza Hut and Burger King counters, a hot dog counter, a sandwich and salad cafe called Citi Deli and a cocktail lounge called The Landing.

When Wichita got a brand new airport in 2014, the city hired Georgia-based MSE Branded Foods to run food services, and that company filled the terminal with both Dunkin’ and Chick-fil-A counters as well as a branch of Wichita’s River City Brewing Co.

But Sunday family outings for airplane watching and white tablecloth dinners at the airport are a thing of the distant past.

For one, Wichitans in 2024 can’t get to the airport restaurants without a plane ticket.

And Chick-fil-A-isn’t even open on Sundays.

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