The Old Bissell Building, 1997

Here’s a scene that looks remarkably the same today as when the picture was taken in the summer of 1997, except for two big things, one obvious and one not so obvious.

Not so obvious is the fact that the Bissell Building in the background is not the same “Bissell Building” that’s there today. This one burned to the ground in the spring of 2005, but was replaced by a virtually identical structure. They look alike but aren’t the same.

Today’s storefronts belong to Interiors and Designs by Ursula, where Bissell Pharmacy was, and the Village Tavern, where Gail’s Station House was. (After the fire Bissell’s moved a half block east to the old Toy Caboose building on Governor Street while Gail’s never reopened.)

What’s really visually different is the sidewalk seating for the restaurant. Back then, Gail’s Station House provided two, maybe three little tables on the sidewalk out front. Gail’s was the only restaurant in town with sidewalk seating 20 years ago!

Today, there’s the equivalent of a whole dining room sitting outside the Village Tavern, complete with huge planters. It looks as if close to 40 people could dine on the 2018 sidewalk.

What’s more, every single restaurant on Main Street today has — in season — outdoor seating on the sidewalk.

Also different are the trees at the extreme right. Then they were little more than saplings, part of a recent renewal of Main Street that included those fancy lantern-like lights. Some of those young trees died in the heat of the 2005 fire, but one survived and is as tall as the new “Bissell Building” today.

Tony Wilmot: 

Mr. Baseball

If anyone could be called Mr. Baseball in Ridgefield during the last quarter of the 20th Century, it was Anthony “Tony” Wilmot. He not only starred on the local and collegiate diamonds, but coached winning Ridgefield High School teams.

Wilmot was born in Greenwich in 1963, the sixth and last child of Clifford and Jeremy Wilmot — his mother was a former Ridgefield selectman who was active in efforts to document Ridgefield history and save its historic buildings.

He came to Ridgefield as a child and “exhibited many talents at an early age,” his family said. “He was an acclaimed tennis player and an ardent golfer. But it was when he discovered baseball that he’d found the activity at which he would excel and that would consume him for the rest of his life — first as a player, then a coach and always as a passionate promoter of fair play and healthy competition.”

His talent began being recognized in Little League where he was a top pitcher and once hurled a perfect game.  He was captain of the varsity baseball team at Ridgefield High School, where he graduated in 1982. He earned a scholarship to Texas Christian University, where he was captain of the NCAA Division I baseball team and where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1986. 

“Tony set the school single-season record for total hits and extra base hits,” Tom Belote said when Wilmot was honored by the Ridgefield Old Timers in 2010. “These accomplishments were achieved when TCU was part of the Southwest Conference, a conference considered by many to be the best college baseball conference in the country.”

Wilmot later served as head coach of the RHS varsity baseball team for six years, amassing a 77-43 record. He was also an assistant coach for the Western Connecticut State University Colonials. In addition, he gave his time and talent to the special needs kids who played in the Holland Division of Ridgefield Little League.

After college Wilmot went to work for Anheuser Busch in New York City, but eventually joined with his sister, Jessica, and learned the restaurant business at her Ancient Mariner.

In 2009, Tony and his wife, Kristina Traynor, also a restaurateur, opened their own restaurant, the Bar & Grille on Route 7. It was a sports-oriented establishment, where fans could gather to watch the games on 11 wall-mounted TVs and enjoy food prepared by two graduates of the Culinary Institute of America.

“I didn't want to be a typical sports bar,”  Wilmot said when Bar and Grille opened. “When I think of a sports bar, I think of deep-fried food, banners all over the place, waitresses in referee tops. This restaurant’s nicer than that.”

Tony Wilmot died in 2014 from influenza-related complications. He was 50 years old. 

Albert Tramer: 

The Last Outpost

From the 1920s until 1962, one of the most popular — and most beautiful — places to dine or spend a weekend in southwestern Connecticut was the Outpost Inn on Danbury Road. Guests seeking an escape in the country included Marilyn Monroe and her then husband, playwright Arthur Miller; Walt Disney and his family; and Broadway star Ethel Merman.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt drove herself over to have lunch there one day.

The Outpost Inn began life in 1928 when Col. Louis D. Conley, who owned nearly 2,000 acres

of northeastern Ridgefield and nearby Danbury as part of his Outpost Nurseries, decided to create a country inn on a piece of his property along Danbury Road just north of the village.

The main inn building was a house built in 1816 by Albin Jennings, a popular Ridgefield carpenter in the early 19th Century. Jennings had waited four years to gain permission from the parents of Polly Dauchy to marry his sweetheart, and once the parents acquiesced, he built this house

for his new bride. It had a number of features that demonstrated his skill as a fine builder, including a spiral staircase near the front entrance.

Over the years, the inn had had several managers or owners. The last owner was Albert

Tramer, a Swiss-born and -trained chef who had held positions in some of New York City’s top restaurants, and his wife, Gloria, who helped run the inn.

Born in 1905, Albert D. Tramer came to the United States in 1924. By the late 1930s, he

owned and operated La Petite Swiss, The Swiss Chalet, and the Tramer Restaurant in the city, taking time out during World War II to serve as a Navy chief petty officer in the South Pacific.

In 1953, the Tramers bought what was then called the Hearthstone Outpost Inn. They lived on

the inn grounds with their three daughters; he commuted between Outpost and his New York restaurants for a couple of years before deciding to devote his full time to the Ridgefield operation.

Outpost attracted not only celebrities, but local organizations, such as Rotary and the Jaycees, who would meet there — Rotary was so pleased with the accommodations the Tramers provided that

the club gave them a silver bowl in appreciation. Major magazines used its elegant setting and gardens for photo shoots. And townspeople enjoyed not only the food, but Outpost Pond.

“The pond along Route 35 was always open to the townspeople for ice skating during the winter and was hugely popular,” said Tramer’s daughter, Diane Wilush. “Often Albert would serve

hot chocolate to the skaters.”

In 1962, Tramer sold the place to Carl Shapley, son of Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley and brother of Nobel economist Lloyd Shapley. Carl operated The Shapley School, a prep school, which soon got into financial troubles and closed in 1967.

Soon after, David Paul — who was building Casagmo at the time — bought the property at a public auction, and developed Fox Hill, the town’s first condominiums. Plans were to turn the main inn building into a community center, but the building caught fire in 1968 and was eventually razed.

Tramer worked for a while as director of the restaurant at The Westport Inn. He retired and moved to Florida in 1973 where he died in 1994 at the age of 88. Gloria Tramer died 10 years later.

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.

Albert Tramer: 

The Last Outpost

From the 1920s until 1962, one of the most popular — and most beautiful — places to dine or spend a weekend in southwestern Connecticut was the Outpost Inn on Danbury Road. Guests seeking an escape in the country included Marilyn Monroe and her then husband, playwright Arthur Miller; Walt Disney and his family; and Broadway star Ethel Merman.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt drove herself over to have lunch there one day.

The Outpost Inn began life in 1928 when Col. Louis D. Conley, who owned nearly 2,000 acres of northeastern Ridgefield and nearby Danbury as part of his Outpost Nurseries, decided to create a

country inn on a piece of his property along Danbury Road just north of the village.

The main inn building was a house built in 1816 by Albin Jennings, a popular Ridgefield carpenter in the early 19th Century. Jennings had waited four years to gain permission from the parents of Polly Dauchy to marry his sweetheart, and once the parents acquiesced, he built this house

for his new bride. It had a number of features that demonstrated his skill as a fine builder, including a spiral staircase near the front entrance.

Over the years, the inn had had several managers or owners. The last owner was Albert Tramer, a Swiss-born and -trained chef who had held positions in some of New York City’s top restaurants, and his wife, Gloria, who helped run the inn.

Born in 1905, Albert D. Tramer came to the United States in 1924. By the late 1930s, he

owned and operated La Petite Swiss, The Swiss Chalet, and the Tramer Restaurant in the city, taking time out during World War II to serve as a Navy chief petty officer in the South Pacific.

In 1953, the Tramers bought what was then called the Hearthstone Outpost Inn. They lived on the inn grounds with their three daughters; he commuted between Outpost and his New York restaurants for a couple of years before deciding to devote his full time to the Ridgefield operation.

Outpost attracted not only celebrities, but local organizations, such as Rotary and the Jaycees,

who would meet there — Rotary was so pleased with the accommodations the Tramers provided that the club gave them a silver bowl in appreciation. Major magazines used its elegant setting and gardens for photo shoots. And townspeople enjoyed not only the food, but Outpost Pond.

“The pond along Route 35 was always open to the townspeople for ice skating during the

winter and was hugely popular,” said Tramer’s daughter, Diane Wilush. “Often Albert would serve hot chocolate to the skaters.”

In 1962, Tramer sold the place to Carl Shapley, son of Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley

and brother of Nobel economist Lloyd Shapley. Carl operated The Shapley School, a prep school, which soon got into financial troubles and closed in 1967.

Soon after, David Paul — who was building Casagmo at the time — bought the property at a

public auction, and developed Fox Hill, the town’s first condominiums. Plans were to turn the main inn building into a community center, but the building caught fire in 1968 and was eventually razed.

Tramer worked for a while as director of the restaurant at The Westport Inn. He retired and moved to Florida in 1973 where he died in 1994 at the age of 88. Gloria Tramer died 10 years later.

Walter Tode: 

A Top-10 Chef

Ridgefield has been the home of the kitchens of some of the finest chefs of the 20th Century, but few were on a level of Walter Tode. Once listed among the 10 best chefs of the world, Tode owned and operated The Inn at Ridgefield — also called Tode’s — for 20 years.

Walker Karl Tode (rhymes with Cody) was born in Nancy, France, near the German border, in 1908 and even as a child, loved to cook. His parents paid to have him apprentice, at age 13, at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. He went on to work at a casino in Germany, then in Rio de Janeiro. He returned to Germany where he earned a degree in hotel management at the University of Heidelberg.

“I was then imported to the Fort Sumter Hotel in Charleston, S.C., U.S.A, the youngest chef they’d ever hired,” Tode told an interviewer in 1965. (The interviewer, Fred Reynolds, also described Tode as a man with “Charles Boyer charm, the Eric von Stroheim authority, the Roland Young [“Topper”] build and walk.”

Tode next worked at the Ambassador Hotel in New York, became executive chef for the Roney chain of hotels, and in 1935, opened and ran Jack Dempsey’s, a famous New York restaurant on Broadway, across from the old Madison Square Garden. The restaurant lasted until 1974, but Tode left in 1940 to open new restaurants in hotels in Miami Beach. 

In 1945, he came back north and briefly took over the kitchen at the Silver Spring Country Club. He liked Connecticut and a year later, bought the former Kane Inn on West Lane — once the

home of George Pratt  Ingersoll, ambassador to Siam.

His new restaurant, with what interviewer Reynolds called “elegant, intimate opulence,” drew diners from throughout Fairfield and Westchester Counties, as well as New York City.  

Tode suggested he had an advantage over most American restaurateurs. “Too few restaurant owners come up through the fine kitchens,” Tode said.

That “elegant, intimate opulence” of the dining rooms remained largely unchanged during his years at The Inn, even though he’d sometimes try to update the decor. “Every time I get ready to

make changes, people scream,” he told a magazine in 1966.

In 1951, Tode was named one of the 10 Outstanding Chefs of the World by the International Societe Gastronome in Strasbourg, France, one of only two Americans so honored.

While running The Inn, he also served as director of food service for American Airlines, was a consultant for Intercontinental Hotels, and was an associate professor at Cornell University, where he taught in the School of Hotel Administration. He also took a shot at producing gourmet foods for wholesale distribution, establishing the “Gastronomical Galley” line of foods in 1959. It did not last long.

Tode also made headlines in 1961 for getting into an early morning disagreement with his

bartender, and punching him in the face which reportedly broke his jaw. He was arrested, and fined $200 for assault and breach of the peace. However, he was also sued by the bartender for $15,000 ($120,000 in 2016 dollars), but a Superior Court judge ruled in Tode’s favor.

In 1967, after 21 years of operating The Inn and 46 years of creating fine foods, Tode sold the restaurant (which is now Bernard’s) and essentially retired, although he taught classes in the area for several years. He died in Danbury in 1984 at the age of 75. 

Fred Orrico: 

The King of Neptune

Back in 1955, two men had a conversation at the famous Clam Box restaurant in Cos Cob where they both worked.

“What do you say we go into business and open our own place?” asked Fred Orrico, a kitchen steward.

“Sure, why not!” replied Joseph Chelednik, a chef.

The two scouted the region, finally coming upon an empty old house and real estate office on Route 7, a little north of Route 35. The spot was along a busy highway, and right between Danbury and Ridgefield.

They rented the place, knocked out some walls, and on June 28, 1955, opened the King Neptune, which was to become the most popular restaurant in the history of the town.

But the beginning was not easy.

That October, Connecticut was hit by the worst flood in more than 100 years. Pavement and bridges along Route 7 were washed away, and the new King Neptune suddenly became a difficult-to-reach destination. 

Despite that, Orrico and Chelednik hung on. “Men of extraordinary loyalty, they retained their entire staff of waitresses despite the lack of customers,” recalled Paul Baker in a tribute to Fred Orrico many years later. “In fact, they often had more waitresses than customers.”

The roads and bridges were fixed, the two soon bought the building, and the crowds began coming — many customers from New York City and some from as far away as Philadelphia. 

The choice of the upper Route 7 location proved wise. “I had no competition,” Orrico said in a

2005 interview on the 50th anniversary of the restaurant. “When I opened up, there were four restaurants in Ridgefield and 10 in Danbury. Now there’s — what? — 30 in Ridgefield and 165 in Danbury.”

The King Neptune started out seating 80 people. By 1980, 10 additions had been made to the building, which could then handle 320.

On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, hungry patrons often formed queues that ran around the outside of the building, as they awaited the loudspeaker announcements for their party to be seated.

“On Friday nights, particularly, long lines could be seen extending far beyond the entry doorway,” Baker said. “I’m not sure if King Crab made the King Neptune famous or if it was the other way around. Not far behind was the popularity of those tasty little five or six real lobster tails lined up in a dish. Diners came in droves to enjoy their incomparable fish ’n’ chips.”

King Neptune was always known for not only good food but modest prices. Back in 1955, that dinner of fish ’n’ chips cost 90 cents. 

As many as 65 people worked there when the restaurant was at its largest, including 35 servers. Over the years countless teenagers — mostly Ridgefield High School students — got their first jobs at the King Neptune.

The restaurant was particularly popular with the staff of the Ridgefield Savings Bank, later Ridgefield Bank and now Fairfield County Bank. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Orrico became a director of the bank, a post he held for 18 years.

Born in 1923 in Greenwich, Fred G. Orrico grew up in Greenwich and joined in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was serving on U.S.S. Missouri when the Japanese signed their surrender aboard the battleship. His wife, Helen Casey Orrico served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the war.

Orrico moved to Ridgefield in 1957 and continued to operate the King Neptune until his

retirement in 1985, after which sons George and Fred Jr. took over the operation. Chelednik had moved on to other pursuits some years earlier.

Orrico was well known for his love of golf, and often played at Ridgewood Country Club. For 25 years, he was chairman of Ridgefield’s Golf Course Committee, which oversees the operation of the municipal golf course in Ridgebury. He was proud of the fact that the course was not only self-supporting, but also earned money for the town. Once, in 1979 when the course faced a town budget cut, Orrico wrote: “My love of the game forces me to protect the golf course and help the citizens who want it. It is a financial success, not a burden in any way on the town.”

Paul Baker played many rounds with Orrico over the years. “He was good and knowledgeable enough to sincerely offer helpful hints to a golfer with a problem,” Baker said, adding that he also “took great delight in reminding me that he had four holes-in-one to my three.”

For many years Orrico suffered from myasthenia gravis, a disease from which he eventually died. “For years, while in its earliest stages, the affliction that took his life affected his eyelids and he had to play with those lids taped open,” Baker recalled.

In 1986, the original King Neptune property was sold to Pamby Motors for its new showroom, and the restaurant moved to a Route 7 building just south of the Route 35 intersection. There it remained until December 2005, when it was replaced by The Catch, another seafood restaurant (operated by RHS graduate Arthur Michaelsen, who now has Bartolo on Danbury Road). Son Fred Jr. is now with Gallo Ristorante at Grove and Prospect Streets, and son George is retired.

His son, John Orrico, who was killed in the Vietnam War, is also profiled in Who Was Who.  

Fred Orrico died in 2006 at the age of 82.