Alice Brock | Restaurant-ing through history

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November 26, 2024 · 12:11 pm

Goodbye, Alice

Last week Alice Brock of Alice’s Restaurant made her exit from Earth. I wrote a post about her long ago, but thought I’d add a bit more about her life, including more of her colorful quotations. She didn’t find running restaurants easy and made that clear in interviews and in her 1975 book My Life As a Restaurant. [photos by Jane McWhorter, from Alice’s book]

In addition to opening and running three different restaurants in Western Massachusetts over a number of years, she worked with a franchise that was to create nationwide string of restaurants, not surprisingly named Alice’s Restaurant. In 1969 announcements were made that the first four would be located in Boston, New York, Nashville, and Los Angeles. The goal for the first three years was 500! Just how many of them materialized is difficult to determine, but it’s certain the total fell far short.

Alice derived some income from her association with the enterprise. She was paid to be a menu consultant, promoter, and for “just being Alice.” She fulfilled the third goal when she quit the job less than a year after the launch. Once she sampled the food at the New York pilot location she declared, “The food was no good. It wasn’t honest. It was like the movie – a lot of gravy but no meat.”

She spoke her mind, as her quotations make clear.

About her first restaurant in Stockbridge MA:
“. . . a year after I had opened the restaurant, I dragged my body in through the door and freaked out. I felt that instead of owning it, it owned me. . . . I had a terrible urge to smash everything. I telephoned Eastern Airlines and booked myself on the midnight flight to Puerto Rico. I emptied the cash box, gave away all the food.”

Working in a restaurant kitchen:
“. . . if you open the kitchen door, it’s like the door to Hell – everyone’s screaming and crying and cursing, and pots are being slammed around, sweat is pouring off everyone, and it’s a hundred and thirty degrees.”

Running a restaurant:
“Running a restaurant isn’t really satisfying. In fact, next to running a hospital emergency ward, I think this is the worst thing you can do.”

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November 22, 2008 · 3:42 pm

The saga of Alice’s restaurants

A 1965 Thanksgiving dinner at the former church where Alice Brock and her husband Ray lived inspired Arlo Guthrie’s ballad of his arrest and subsequent draft board rejection for illegally disposing of trash. But “Alice’s Restaurant” also created vibrations so strong they imbued Alice’s whole career as a restaurant proprietor. Although she enjoyed a degree of success, her career was also filled with disappointments such as a nationwide chain of Alice’s Restaurants and a TV show (Cookin’ with Alice) that did not materialize.

In April 1966 she opened the first of her three restaurants, The Back Room, in an old luncheonette in Stockbridge which Alice described as “painted two-tone institutional green, and … definitely not the kind of place where I would eat, much less own.” Alice ran it for one year before she “freaked out” and closed it. In her book My Life as a Restaurant, she declares, “I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I would never have another restaurant.” Not so – she would have two more.

After a year as consultant on the Arthur Penn movie built around Guthrie’s song, Alice decided to try again. But now she was a counterculture celebrity, portrayed in the film as a “dope-taking, free-loving woman,” a depiction which she insisted was false but which would bedevil her relations with town authorities whose approval she needed to open or expand a restaurant.

She would tussle with the town of Stockbridge throughout the four years she operated her second restaurant, “Alice’s.” Located in a semi-ramshackle former liquor store on Route 183, it began in the summer of 1972 as a roadside stand called “Take Out Alice.” Partly because of her celebrity and partly because she provided superior roadside fare – sushi, borscht, salmon mousse, and cream cheese & walnuts on homemade bread – she attracted volumes of summer visitors.

The next year she was granted permission to add a small dining room, but further expansion requests were denied, leading her to move the restaurant to Lenox, near Tanglewood, in 1976. In 1979 she closed Alice at Avaloch (shown below), the Lenox restaurant-plus-motel, after difficulties with the property’s sewage system and other adversities, permanently ending her restaurant career.

Alice'sRestavalochinnLenox In interviews and in her two books Alice espoused the value of fresh ingredients, garlic, meals with friends, and an experimental approach to cooking. Her words convey a free-wheeling, irreverent outlook. Some examples:
* On cooking: “Hell, you can make a soufflé in a garbage can lid if you want to.”
* On busy nights: “Oh, if only you could just cry and it would be over, but it won’t be over. Crying will come to nothing but wasted time, and you could cry forever, but this night is existing, the dining room is filling, the orders … are lining up on their clothespins.”
* On her Lenox restaurant: “We still serve everyone from schlumps to snobs.”
* On being a restaurateur: “Crazy, the restaurant has become my life, there is no life outside it, only in relation to it.”