Pulling up a chair to 1920s dining

Though people flocked to the restaurant San Mateo resident Noah Williams opened on Third Avenue in 1923 for Southern favorites like baked ham and fried chicken, the popular dining room also drew a crowd for its decor and upscale atmosphere, said museum curator Dana Neitzel.

She said Williams invested some $40,000 to equip the restaurant with delicate service items like tea pots for individual servings and high-end silverware, most of which were emblazoned with the “Noah’s Ark” insignia.

“He really went all-out to make it a high class restaurant,” she said. “Forty-thousand-dollars back then was a lot of money.”

Mitch Postel, president of the San Mateo County Historical Association, said Williams, an African-American, was born into a family of railroad chefs at a time when they were well-known for high-quality cuisine and many African-Americans worked as chefs or clerks along rail lines across the country. Though Williams was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1888, he eventually followed his profession west until he arrived in San Francisco in 1915, said Postel. He said Williams worked at restaurants in San Francisco until he decided to open his own restaurant in San Mateo.

When Williams opened his first San Mateo restaurant, Noah’s Cafeteria, in 1920 on B Street, and later opened Noah’s Ark in a larger location on Third Avenue in 1923, he was giving diners a chance to experience the fine dining only accessible to rail passengers at the time, said Postel.

“For people who were really looking for luxurious ways to travel, the railroads were supreme,” he said.

Filled with San Francisco artist Richard DeTreville’s paintings of jungle animals, the restaurant referenced biblical themes while creating a classy ambiance, said Neitzel. But she noted African-American patrons are believed to only have visited the restaurant after regular business hours out of Williams’ concern white patrons might not appreciate visiting an integrated dining room. She said a local chapter of the NAACP was known to have met at the dining room on Mondays, when it was closed to the public.

“They just didn’t want to take the chance and risk losing their clients,” she said. Though lines of diners wrapping around nearby streets sustained his successful venture for several years, Postel said the business ultimately folded in 1931 during the Great Depression.

“It was a victim of those economic hard times,” he said.

Neitzel said Williams attempted to open another restaurant in Belmont in the 1930s but it never achieved the success his San Mateo restaurants had, so he gave up the restaurant business in the 1940s to become the chef for the Paulist Fathers, a community of priests, at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco.

For as much fame as Williams gained as a restaurateur, his sons, Les Williams and Barney Williams, became recognizable figures in the county as well, said Postel. He said Williams’ son Les Williams, one of the Tuskegee Airmen, became one of the first African-Americans to fly a bomber plane in World War II. Even though Les Williams returned back home to San Mateo as a hero to many, Postel said he faced difficulty in finding a space to create a dance studio, a lifelong dream he developed while attending San Mateo schools as a child.

But Les Williams was ultimately successful in opening a popular dance studio in San Mateo before enrolling in Stanford Law School to become a lawyer later in life, said Postel. He added that Les Williams’ brother, Barney Williams, dedicated much of his life to local chapters of the Boy Scouts.

Postel said Les Williams donated the collection of paintings and service items from his father’s restaurant to the museum in 1972 , and that the items will be displayed for the first time in decades when the exhibit opens Tuesday. For Neitzel, who has been spending much of the last few weeks dusting the paintings off and getting them ready for display, the hours may be well worth the effort.

“It was a good opportunity to get them out of storage [and] get them cleaned up,” she said. “I think they’re going to be very grand looking in the rotunda.”

Visit “Noah’s Ark: San Mateo’s Historic Restaurant” from Jan. 23 to April 15 at the San Mateo County History Museum, 2200 Broadway.

anna@smdailyjournal.com

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