A column I wrote and published in November included a reference to Chef Louis Szathmary, an acclaimed name from the culinary field, yet one I really wasn’t familiar with from my own nearly three decades of food writing.
His name came up in that previous column while I was chatting with Chef Russ Adams to answer a reader’s recipe request. Adams is a 1978 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in New York and a member of the family dining dynasty who owned Strongbow Inn restaurant in Valparaiso for 75 years until it closed in 2015.
While chatting with Adams, who celebrated his 64th birthday on Feb. 5, he referenced Chef Szathmary as one of the many notables who had dined at Strongbow’s Inn during their decades. When I alerted to Adams that I was unfamiliar with Chef Szathmary, he explained: “Oh, he was a big deal in the 1980s and 90s.”
After doing my own homework, I was surprised at what an amazing career and kitchen legacy Chef Louis Szathmary has left the culinary field. Based for much of his professional life in Chicago, his restaurant notoriety came from running his flagship restaurant in the Windy City called The Bakery, a small 25-seat storefront restaurant that was located at 2214 N. Lincoln Avenue.
Opened in 1963, the restaurant closed in 1989 and Chef Szathmary died at age 77 in 1996. Given I didn’t begin my own food writing career until 1993, it isn’t such a surprise why the name of “Chef Louis Szathmary” had long escaped my mind.
According to his own recounted biography, Chef Louis was “born on June 2, 1919, on a train heading from Transylvania to Budapest, as his parents fled the post-World War I Hungarian-Romanian War. By 1951, he had made his way to New York with little more than a single $1 to begin his new life and job prospects, with started with him working as a short-order cook.
He moved to Chicago, whose trainyards and meat packing industry earned it the title “the butcher city to the world.” He accepted a position in 1959 with Armour Meats and Co. assisting with developing a new line of frozen food entrees for both home and commercial use, the latter for airlines to creating first class seating dining menus and also for hotels to use for “gourmet” featured selections on room service menus. “Fresh frozen” in “polybags,” his Continental menu entrees were both popular and easy to prepare, ready in just minutes by dropping the frozen plastic pouch entrees into boiling water to reheat.
When Stouffer Hotels International launched as major luxury hotel chain of the 1960s and 1970s, one of the most requested signature menu items heralded by hotel guests was a spinach soufflé, which was one of the “fresh and fast frozen” recipe selections Chef Szathmary devised. The Stouffer Hotel chain had the item packaged and mass produced for frozen entrée sales, first for their hotel properties, and then, because of demand, also made available in supermarkets.
By 1991, just as Chicago was celebrated as the latest landscape for a new Stouffer luxury hotel at 1 W. Wacker Drive, the company decided to move away from the hotel business and concentrate on a frozen food line including everything from frozen tuna casserole and Salisbury steak to macaroni and cheese. As for the new $102 million Stouffer Riviere Hotel boasting 565 rooms dubbed “our crowning jewel,” by William N. Hulett, president of what was then-Cleveland-based Stouffer Hotel Co., the high-rise hotel was sold to Renaissance Hotels and renamed.
Chef Szathmary’s mastery of food preservation science even allowed him to delve into freeze-dried foods and some of his recipes were used by the NASA space program for astronauts’ dining on their missions. But Chef Louis’ first passion remained his restaurants, which were made successful by both his innovations and larger-than-life personality. With his signature long, twirled mustache, he joined his wife Sada and daughter Magda welcoming guests, including notable regulars like Hugh Hefner, Frank Zappa and orchestra conductor Arthur Fielder, to The Bakery which had a BYOB policy (Bring Your Own Bottle/Booze), something very forward-thinking for dining policies at that time. His menu featured favorites like liver pate, beef Wellington, roast duckling and of course, a large glass case of pastries and bakery items.
Later, he opened a second restaurant in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago at 1339 N. Wells, called The Cave, which featured faux cavern-like walls for the interior with prehistoric hieroglyphics as the décor. His eccentric taste and style skyrocketed him as a national celebrity chef long before the days of The Food Network. He was featured in major magazines and a contributor on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” as well as and in-demand guests for TV talk shows, including those hosted by Phil Donahue, Dinah Shore, Mike Douglas and the even the newcomer of the late 1980s, Oprah Winfrey’s show. He wrote many bestselling cookbooks and a nationally distributed newspaper column in the 1970s and 1980s for the Chicago Daily News and Sun-Times Syndicate.
Today, Chef Louis Szathmary’s know-how still lives on with Stouffer’s still popular frozen spinach soufflé sold in supermarkets. And though some say he was the model for Jim Henson’s Muppet The Swedish Chef, it was Chef Szathmary’s almost caricature-like appearance and colorful personality that was used as the tribute inspiration for “Chef Louis,” the animated French chef and arch enemy of Sebastian the Crab in Disney’s 1989 feature film “The Little Mermaid.”
With a bit of test kitchen experimentation, I developed my own at-home version of Chef Louis Szathmary’s Stouffer’s Frozen Spinach soufflé, which my family enjoyed during the Christmas holidays. And yes, it also freezes quite nicely.
Columnist Philip Potempa has published four cookbooks and is the director of marketing at Theatre at the Center. He can be reached at pmpotempa@comhs.org or mail your questions: From the Farm, P.O. Box 68, San Pierre, IN 46374.
Phil’s Spinach Soufflé
Makes 8 serving slices
6 tablespoons butter, divided use
1 small onion, diced
3 tablespoons flour
1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup half and half
1 cup (packed) cooked spinach, drained and chopped
3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
1 cup shredded cheese, either Swiss or gruyere
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
5 eggs
1/2 teaspoon creme of tartar
Dash of salt and pepper
Directions:
1. Use butter to grease a 9-inch-by-13-inch baking pan.
2. In a large skillet, sauté onion in 3 tablespoons butter until tender. Transfer to a small bowl and set aside.
3. Using same skillet, melt remaining butter over a medium heat and add flour, whisking to combine. Slowly add milk and half and half to the flour mixture, whisking over medium heat to incorporate as mixture thickens slightly.
4. Add spinach, cooked onions and cheeses to the skillet mixture and cook just long enough so cheeses melt and are combined with other ingredients and remove from heat.
5. In a large clean bowl beat eggs and a cream of tartar and remaining ingredients. Slowly mix in the still warm skillet ingredients folded into the egg mixture.
6. Pour contents of bowl into baking pan and bake in 400-degree oven for 25-30 minutes or until soufflé is set and firm across top and tests down in center.
