The legendary restaurant you never heard of
“One night in his tiny place, the address of which I cannot publish lest it bring him more customers, I asked him how many patrons his place accommodated. ‘Thirty-two,’ shrugged Jimmie. ‘Depends how I feel.’ Jimmie operates his place not to satisfy his customers, but to satisfy Jimmie. Jimmie’s has no regular hours and no regular prices. You can usually tell, though, when Jimmie’s is open. That’s when the front shade is pulled down and the door is closed. This discourages customers from coming in and bothering Jimmie.”
– Earl Wilson
Newspaper Columnist
When the discussion turns to fondly-remembered restaurants of yore in Atlantic City, certain names, depending on one’s age, appear again and again.
Among them are Abe’s, Captain Starn’s, Hackney’s, Kornblau’s, The Great Josh’s, Lou’s, Orsatti’s, Grabel’s, Sid Hartfield’s (my father called it Sid Heartburn’s), Mammy’s, Shumsky’s, Arthur’s Villa, Wash’s, The Midway Inn, The Shelburne, Vienna Restaurant, Zaberers, recently detailed in these pages, and probably dozens of other long-forgotten eateries.
One name that hardly ever comes up is a venue that was called “Jimmie’s Just a Hobby,” located at 2012 Pacific Ave. Word about Jimmie’s came by way of one of our area’s iconic treasures, Atlantic City historian/author/curator Vicki Gold Levi, aka “Miss Atlantic City.” Vicki’s track record and accomplishments related to Atlantic City are legion.
Among many other things, she was a consultant on the “Boardwalk Empire” HBO television series, co-author of one of the first and best books on Atlantic City history, and was recently the subject of a delightful profile on PBS. She’s also a regular reader of Shore Local Newsmagazine and this column.
Vicki recently asked me if I had ever heard of Jimmie’s, a restaurant she remembered well. I only knew that it was a long-closed restaurant once located on Pacific Avenue.
Vicki was determined to find out more so she called on Stockton University Archivist Heather Perez to see if any details about the history of “Jimmie’s Just a Hobby” could be uncovered. Perez, thankfully, discovered virtually everything about this obscure venue, with the exception, unfortunately, of photographs.
James and Madeline Chagaris appear in the City Directory in 1924 as owners of a lunchroom at 105 South Virginia Ave., according to Perez’s research. A year later, it became a delicatessen, and from 1926 to 1928, it was a full-scale restaurant. By 1931, the business had moved to 190 South Kentucky Ave. and was named Jimmie’s Delicious Sandwich Shop. The operation moved again in 1938 to 2012 Pacific Ave.
Perez believes that the restaurant first started operating under the name of “Jimmie’s Just a Hobby” at that location sometime between 1941 and 1946.
According to Vicki Gold Levi, it opened only during the summer. It was an invitation-only restaurant, opened at 6 p.m., and seated 32 customers.
The menu consisted of only what Jimmie and his partners wanted to serve. Among the exclusive invitees were Jimmie’s favorite stars and performers who happened to be in town.
Perez found a 1964 review of a meal at Jimmie’s, which read in part:
“A dry tasting bread with a whipped butter spread. It (was served) along with tomato juice and Jersey tomatoes, and then a marinated, sliced, pan-fried in special sauce beef steak that is a masterpiece. For dessert he keeps a cheesecake in a miniature safe, and when you taste it you’ll envy Jimmy Valentine. The wife scribbles a figure on a piece of paper and that’s the check: Usually $6.00 per person.”
Perez found that Jimmie went to Miami Beach and opened a restaurant on 41st Street during the winter. There was a quotation on a Miami Beach menu from Jimmie’s in 1972 that read: “You will eat what we give you and you will enjoy it! You’ll stay healthy and live longer.”
In the papers that Perez discovered, she found the recollections of an Atlantic City customer of Jimmie’s named Rey Barry, who shared this memory of the restaurant:
“When I was around 12, my dad took a business trip to Atlantic City and took me along,” Barry wrote. “This was the 1950s when the city was just a beach resort with no legalized gambling.
“Dad knew of an unusual restaurant there called ‘Jimmie’s Just a Hobby.’ If you didn’t know Jimmie you didn’t get in. Jimmie also had a restaurant in Miami Beach where dad met him. At the hobby shop, Jimmie made one, price-fixed gourmet meal a night – no substitutions – and fed it to all the customers who fit in the room for his only nightly serving. Our night was filet mignon that was so good, you don’t forget.”
Bert Bernstein was a Miami Beach-based detective lieutenant. In his book, “My Life in Crime,” Bernstein referenced Jimmie’s. Bernstein wrote:
“I took notice of a storefront on 41st Street with the sign, ‘Jimmie’s Just a Hobby.’ I managed to dig into his background and learned that Jimmie was a chef with a peculiar reputation. He came from Atlantic City to Miami Beach during the winter season. But this little site was not open to the public, per se.
“Jimmie’s place was small and he accepted certain patrons. His business flourished from early evening to very late at night. He had many top-notch club and hotel performers come into his place, especially Frank Sinatra, and his retinue of friends, male and female.
“If you thought you could drop in for dinner, you were brusquely told to ‘get out’ as Jimmie fed whoever he wanted, fed them whatever he was making that night, and charged them whatever price he demanded… or not at all. This was true for the visiting wiseguys from Jersey and Philly, but I don’t think he turned any of them down.”
Perez’s research shows that Jimmie closed up shop in Atlantic City around 1965, but it seems that he kept the Miami Beach location open well into the 1970s. The year of his passing is unknown.
Today, though Atlantic City’s Chef Vola’s might rival Jimmie’s in terms of how challenging it is to actually secure seats at the table, Jimmie’s was an absolute, never-to-be duplicated, one-of-a-kind type of place. And that’s probably because no restaurateur today could afford to do what Jimmie did. There was, after all, only one Jimmie.
Bruce Klauber is the author of four books, an award-winning music journalist, concert and record producer and publicist, producer of the Warner Brothers and Hudson Music “Jazz Legends” film series, and performs both as a drummer and vocalist.
