“Oh, Joseph,” Miss Virginia crooned two days later when we arrived at the McDonald Tea Room. “I just loved this week’s edition. Let’s get your be-yoooo-tiful family seated.”
The McDonald Tea Room enjoyed a crowd on Sundays with people not only from our area, but from St. Joseph 50 miles away and Kansas City 75 miles away. People even had traveled from other states. Nonetheless, Miss Virginia rang the little bell she kept on her desk. The staff found us a place to sit. She also asked the staff to serve us immediately with hot rolls and her fancy combination salad. The salad looked more like a floral arrangement and featured Miss Virginia’s homemade secret dressing. I nibbled at it, even though I hated salad. But I ate enough to earn a nod of approval from Mother.
Miss Virginia couldn’t quit talking about how much she “loved” my dad, something that was perplexing, especially in my mother’s presence. She looked to be in her 70s, with dyed red hair and a big hat. She was known for her large hats from New York and Paris. She also wore long white gloves stretching up to her elbows. Her dress was a striking print with a tightly cinched waist and her shoes had pointed toes, which were just then coming into fashion. Her dress crinkled as she walked due to the layers of starched petticoats beneath.
The restaurant was known for fried chicken, so that’s what we all ordered (child’s plates for my sister and I). We had something called Frozen French Pastry for dessert, which was wonderful.
The Tea Room actually had two dining rooms—the Garden Room used for lunches during the week and overflow on Sunday. This room had lots of windows and wrought-iron furniture painted green. The second room, down a few steps, contained heavy wooden furniture Mrs. McDonald’s husband had made, a grand piano and a wall full of beautiful crystal on mirrored glass shelves. This is where we ate that special day. The room had large windows at either end and was lighted with crystal chandeliers. It was named, of course, “The Crystal Room.”
The Duncan Hines Photo
“Look at that picture,” I said, as we were leaving, and my mother quickly shushed me. The photo was a key to Mrs. McDonald’s personality. Mrs. McDonald was resplendent in her hat, gloves, fur and lovely gown in the picture, which had been given some color by tinting. But the man opposite her had been left looking rather anemic in the shaded tones of black and white photography. The gentleman was the famous restaurant rater Duncan Hines, also of cake mix fame. He put the Tea Room on the map for thousands by naming Mrs. McDonald’s establishment one of the top 10 places in the United States to eat. That brought people flocking into Gallatin and the Tea Room from throughout the nation.
Virginia, as she insisted she be called, was born in Austin, Texas. She became known as Gallatin’s Yellow Rose of Texas, a title she relished. Once my dad asked how old she was. Virginia tossed her head and said, “You’ll never find out…that’s a state secret.”
But the story of her Tea Room is not. Her success is as American as it gets. She started with no experience in business, $8,000 in debt and recovering from several years of tuberculosis. She had come to Gallatin as a young fun-loving bride of Charles McDonald, a hardware salesman. His father ran a blacksmith shop in town. But when Virginia became ill, Charles quit traveling as a salesman to help nurse her. When she recovered, she decided to start a restaurant.
“You know what good cooks the women in my family are. If I only had a place to broil steaks, fry chicken and make cornbread,” she related to my father.
Starting in a Blacksmith Shop
So Charles built a counter in a corner of the old blacksmith shop, where he had opened a small hardware store to help make ends meet. Virginia saw that as a stepping stone to something with more charm—a tea room. “Everything I serve will be delicious,” she said.
Not wanting to disappoint, Charles added three tables in addition to the counter. And then he began building the Tea Room without a blueprint next door to their home, Maple Shade. Charles also went to the railway depot to spread the word to traveling salesmen about his wife’s food. The word-of-mouth advertising worked.
“I felt certain,” Miss Virginia once told my father, “that if I served the muffins my mother taught me how to make, along with tender, crisp, fried chicken, beautiful, cool salads, and other delicacies, even to a few people, they would tell others who would want to come and try them too.” And that is exactly what happened.
Others Could Not Replace Miss Virginia
And after the death of Mrs. McDonald in 1969, several other owners tried hard to make the Tea Room work with limited success. But with the Duncan Hines notoriety in the past and without Virginia, the restaurant just wasn’t the same. The beautiful restaurant and Maple Shade burned on July 4, 2001, the day my parents left Gallatin for retirement years with me and my family in Texas, putting an end to a longtime tradition.