If you spent any time at all in Chapel Hill in the 1940s through the 1970s, you were probably affected in some way by an Austrian refugee named Theodor Danziger who had fled Europe when Hitler’s Nazis were setting out to wipe Jews from the face of the earth.
Somehow Danziger and his wife Bibi found their way to Chapel Hill – with the help of Quakers, I have read – and there they began opening restaurants that catered to the college crowd as well as young sophisticates hungry for the kinds of experience their dining atmosphere offered.
Danziger’s Old World Coffee Shop on Franklin Street, the Zoom Zoom Room a block west, the Ranch House around the corner and down the road and, perhaps most famous, the Ram’s Head Rathskeller on Amber Alley down some steps from Franklin.
The story goes that the Rathskeller, a dark, dingy place with a warren of rooms done up variously like a cave, a train car and a bohemian eatery, was the first place in North Carolina to serve pizza not long after World War II ended.
Everyone has a Rathskeller story; mine dates to about 1963 when I was in high school and had just gotten my driver’s license. My big sister, by then a sophomore at Carolina, invited me over for dinner. We ate in the Cave Room. I had the Gambler, a thin skirt steak served on a hot-as-hades flat skillet covered in onions, garlic bread and green peas. (My friend David Perlmutt says he can still hear that platter sizzle from his days at the Rat.) I had a frosty mug of cider and thought I could get used to Chapel Hill real quick.
Over the years there would be more Gamblers, big hamburgers, beef stroganoff and a kind of soupy, salty lasagna that Sports Illustrated is said to have described as a bowl of cheese.
Everything good ends way too soon. In Chapel Hill the list of cultural casualties includes the Goody Shop, Jeff’s Campus Confectionary, the Porthole and a ramshackle beer joint called the Shack where my Geology 31 lab met a couple of times for some serious discussion, perhaps even about rocks.
The Rat, alas, closed down not long ago, and Danny Hooley’s story in The News & Observer describes where some of it went during a Saturday auction.
Some years ago a friend – an unschooled lout who had gone to UVa and thus didn’t enjoy our more refined sensibilities – complained that he had eaten at the Rathskeller and that the food just wasn’t that good. What’s the big deal, he wondered.
What, I wanted to know, is your point? You don’t go to the Rathskeller for the food, for crying out loud. You go for the experience of what it’s like to be in a college town again, when the place is jumping and folks are lined up out the door and anything is possible.
But not now. You can’t go to the Rathskeller at all now – another sign of the end of civilization.
