The Club Cafe, a New Mexico culinary institution and a Route 66 landmark for 55 years, closed its doors this week-a victim of the national recession and the arrival of fast-food chain restaurants in Santa Rosa.
A somber Ron Chavez, who saved the cafe from extinction 19 years ago and rebuilt it into an internationally acclaimed slice of Americana, said he couldn`t pay on a loan taken out last year to help the business through a lean winter.
The Club Cafe`s closing means that 54 Santa Rosa-area residents will lose their jobs, including five of his children, Chavez said. He also expects to lose his house, which he used as collateral for the last-ditch effort to keep the restaurant afloat.
”I just couldn`t keep it going,” he said. ”There were a lot of people who recognized it, and appreciated it. But it`s very hard to be a cult business where only a few people appreciate it.”
The Club Cafe`s demise signals the loss of yet another relic from the country`s last major westward push, a remnant that linked the ugly days of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression to the heady days of Route 66 and Americans` love of cross-country car travel.
Like many businesses along the old Route 66, the Club Cafe appears to have fallen victim to changing travel styles and tastes. Superhighways now bypass most small towns such as Santa Rosa. And chain restaurants,
strategically located at the interstate`s edge, claim the major share of motorists eager to exit quickly, grab food at a drive-through and return to their journeys.
The Club Cafe (circa 1937) was known for its sourdough biscuits, Mexican fare featuring blue corn tortillas and home-style cooking. It also was familiar to generations of motorists because of its highway billboards depicting a smiling, rotund gentleman who conveyed an image of satisfaction beyond his dining experience.
Chavez said renewed interest in Route 66, rekindled through the 1990 publication of Michael Wallis` top-selling ”Route 66: The Mother Road” and this year through the highway`s 66th anniversary, wasn`t sufficient to withstand the recession and the arrival of McDonald`s at the edge of town alongside Interstate 40.
He also said he couldn`t shoulder a $6,000 increase in his state worker compensation insurance premium in a year when business was slower than expected.
Tom Snyder, president of the national Route 66 Association based in Oxnard, Calif., said he is distressed by the Club Cafe`s closing because he believes interest is rising again.
”My feeling is he was caught just about a year in between,” said Snyder. ”In another year, we`ll have 40,000 to 50,000 cars going down Route 66. Right now, we have about 10,000. That`s not enough to stay alive on.”
The closing is hard on Chavez, 56, and not just because the cafe has been a family operation.
He was born into a large, poor family in the tiny village of Puerto de Luna, about 11 miles southeast of Santa Rosa in the New Mexico desert. At about age 11, Chavez got his first job shining shoes and peddling newspapers outside the Club Cafe at the end of World War II.
In the 1950s, he was the morning cook at the Club, one of the hottest eateries on Route 66 between Chicago and Santa Monica, Calif.
”You just had to open the doors,” he recalled last spring. ”We opened at 5, and by 5:15 this place was packed. It never was empty, even to change for lunch.”
Chavez spent 18 years in California, managing meat markets in Monterey and Los Angeles. But his heart remained in Santa Rosa. So in 1973, he and his wife, Frances, invested their life savings in the struggling Club Cafe, knowing it was an uphill fight.
”You could tell I loved what I did,” he said. ”If I was in it for getting rich, I`d have dropped it 19 years ago.”
He added: ”I can count a half-dozen other times I almost went under. We always bounced back.
”This time I couldn`t.”
