Albert Stockli: 

A Pioneering Chef

Although he spent his final years operating a country inn in the small Connecticut town of Ridgefield, Albert Stockli was one of the most renowned chefs in America, the man who helped create some of the nation’s top restaurants a half century ago. 

Probably the best of them — and once the best in the United States — was the Four Seasons (which  closed its doors in July 2016 after 57 years of serving fine food).

A native of Switzerland, Chef Stockli began cooking at the age of nine, studied in the capitals of Europe and came to this country in the 1940s. 

He joined Restaurant Associates as their chef and, created the menu at the associates-owned Mermaid Tavern, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, Trattoria, Charlie Brown’s, Zum Zum, and other famous New York City dining places. But it was the Four Seasons, which opened in 1959, that was the most famous and respected.

“The Four Seasons, probably the most important New York restaurant of the 20th century, Americanized fine dining and set in motion many of the trends that still dominate restaurant culture in the United States,” wrote William Grimes in the July 10, 2016 New York Times. “In its time, the Four Seasons was the most modern, the most daring, the most New York restaurant the city had ever seen.”

Grimes called Stockli “Restaurant Associate’s chameleon-like Swiss chef” who “emphasized fresh ingredients supplied by small producers around the United States, seasonal changes and a contemporary, international slant on flavor combinations.”

“Food historians,” Grimes said, “now see it as the starting point for a series of trends that came to define American dining: the cult of freshness and organically grown ingredients…; the inventive interpretation of regional American dishes, which became known as New American cooking; the international blending of styles and ingredients, later described as fusion.” 

“In 1959, they were naming the places where the ingredients came from,”   Jeremiah Tower, the chef at Chez Panisse in the early 1970s, said of The Four Seasons. “They would write: ‘Handpicked tomatoes from Long Island, carved tableside.’ They were the first to pick up on farm-to-table.”

However, a liver ailment in 1965 prompted Chef Stockli to leave the city’s hectic life and his partners, Restaurant Associates, and to run Stonehenge in Ridgefield. 

Already famous under founder Victor Gilbert,  Stockli’s Stonehenge gained a worldwide reputation for excellence, and many notables dined there, including scores of United Nations diplomats. 

He was known for his inventive dishes that used fresh neighborhood foods – he visited farms and dairies himself, and had a network of hunters and fishermen who would bring him game. At a deer park near Millbrook, N.Y., he even maintained his own herd of Damhirsch, a variety of deer from his homeland that he used as a source of venison.

“Everything will be made fresh on the premises,” he told Craig Claiborne, then The Times’s food editor. “We will have game in the fall, the freshest of vegetables whenever they are available. There is a well‐stocked trout stream near the restaurant and customers may have trout whenever and however they like. We will make our pates and country sausage.”

In 1970, Stockli put together a book of his favorite recipes, which Knopf published as “Splendid Fare: The Albert Stockli Cookbook,” and which is still being sold today.

Stockli was only 54 years old when he died in 1972.

Victor Gilbert: 

The Skinker

The historic monoliths on the Salisbury Plain in England inspired a historic inn in Ridgefield. When he was in the Army in World War II, Victor Gilbert was moved by a visit to Stonehenge and when he returned to America and decided to establish a country inn, he called it Stonehenge. 

Gilbert was a city boy, born in New York in 1906, the son of a well-known builder. In 1933, at the age of 27 he was managing the One Fifth Avenue Hotel and its One Fifth Bar, which in that year of the repeal of Prohibition had become one of the city’s most fashionable watering holes. There, he gave actress Dorothy Lamour one of her first jobs — as a singer.  

In 1946, he bought a Ridgefield house that had once been part of a grist mill complex, and opened Stonehenge Inn which soon became a retreat for the rich and famous. Among the guests there were Judy Garland, Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, many of the Rockefellers, and Mrs. Thomas Edison. 

Gilbert referred to himself as a “skinker” and often wrote columns for The Ridgefield Press, covering a wide variety of topics and called “Not Skinking.” He also had a radio show on WLAD in Danbury, interviewing both celebrities and ordinary folk in the Stonehenge Bar Parlour. 

He eventually became enchanted with the American Virgin Islands, opening a restaurant and a discothèque there, and becoming a partner in a hotel. He sold Stonehenge in 1963 and moved to St. Croix full time. But he never forgot Ridgefield and, when he died in 1986, he left the town $1,000 in his will “in appreciation of the warm and sincere welcome to a New Yorker who came to the country to establish his home and business.” 

Gilbert had been a collector of old clocks and at some point, he donated a magnificent grandfather’s clock to the town; it has stood in or near the selectmen’s office in the town hall for many years. 

Peter Walters: 

The Personable Pianist

For a quarter of the 20th Century, almost anyone in Ridgefield who loved music knew Peter Walters. Once called “the personable pianist” by The Bridgeport Post, Walters loved playing in his hometown after a career that took him to venues around the country — including an appearance with the Boston Pops and a couple of runs with Broadway hits.

     Born in 1913 in Tonawanda, N.Y.,  Peter Louis Walters learned the piano from his father, a piano teacher. 

     “I took my very first lesson when I was three,” he said in a 1971 Press interview with Linette Burton. “I practiced five or 10 minutes a day and while my father gave piano lessons, I’d crawl under the piano so I could hear.”

     When he was five, Walters made his first public appearance — at a Tonawanda woman’s club meeting. “I sat on a box and used extended pedals so I could reach them. Occasionally I’d fall off.”

      He studied classical piano at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, finishing the four-year course in three. After graduation he entered a performance competition, sponsored by Mason and Hamlin, the piano-maker; the winner got a $2,000 grand piano and a chance to perform with the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler. He won, and did a concert with the Pops.

While he wanted to become a classical pianist, Walters had to turn to hotels, restaurants and nightclubs for employment. In the 1930s, “classical music was at the bottom,” he said. “There just weren’t any jobs.”

His first real employment — at $19 a week — was playing at a restaurant in Boston. But he was soon hired to perform with the Johnny Long and Leighton Noble Orchestras at the Statler Hotel in Boston. It was there that he met his wife, Barbara Beaumont, a singer with Long’s orchestra.

 He was working a stint at the Beachcomber in Boston in the early 1940s when he had “an altercation with the owner. It was during the war and artists were doing a lot of benefits. But the owner wanted me to do benefits for his friends, not servicemen, between my first and second shows. I refused and was fired on the spot.”

Fortunately, a friend told him about a new Broadway musical in rehearsals that needed a pianist. He signed on with “Mexican Hayride,” moved to New York and never returned to Boston. (“Mexican Hayride” starred June Havoc, later a longtime resident of Wilton who created the popular Cannon Crossing boutique shopping area at Cannondale Station.)

After a year and a half with that show, he joined the national tour of the Cole Porter musical, “Let’s Face It.” But he and his wife soon tired of weeks on the road in “crummy boarding houses” and he took at job at The Music Box in Greenwich Village, which “needed someone to accompany opera singers who dropped into the place. I’d learn the arias they were singing that season and play for them. We had more free entertainment than you could shake a stick at.” Among the stars he accompanied were Lawrence Tibbett, Eleanor Steber, Eugene Connelly, and Winifred Heidt.

He played at many other Manhattan venues such as the Little Club and the Monte Carlo, as well as top  hotels. “I was the busiest pianist in New York,” he said.

While playing at the Hotel Madison in 1948, he was heard by Victor Gilbert, who had recently created the Stonehenge Inn in Ridgefield. Gilbert hired him to play for two weekends. “I stayed for 12 years,” Walters said.

 At Stonehenge he would play “soft background music, show tunes and light classics,” he said.  “No rock and roll. The customers don’t want it.”

He and Barbara moved to Ridgefield in 1950, buying a house next to a pond at the end of Hayes Lane.

After Stonehenge, Walters spent 12 years with The Inn at Ridgefield (now Bernard’s). He also performed for the Outpost and Fox Hill Inns in Ridgefield, and the Westnor in Westport.

He recorded two albums for Decca Records: “Portraits in Ivory” in 1956 and “Peter Walters’ Velvet Touch” in 1965. He also appeared on Art Linkletter’s “House Party” television show in March 1964, along with his brother, Bob, also a pianist; Walter played a classical work on the show and Bob, jazz.

In 1986, the Walters moved to Florida where Peter died two years later at the age of 74. 

“Playing a piano is a crazy way to make a living, but it’s better than working,” Walters said in 1971. “You are with people who are out to enjoy themselves.  It never gets boring.”