ERLANGER, Ky. — Colonial Cottage, a landmark restaurant on Dixie Highway, was demolished on Monday. The restaurant was an icon of the Erlanger and Elsmere communities since its establishment in the 1930s.
The location was known for its fried chicken, cream pies and goetta. The building caught fire in 2021, and the repairs were so cost-prohibitive that the business was never able to get back on its feet, much to the dismay of both the owners and local residents.
“For us oldsters, that was the place to meet,” said Eric Rolf, an Erlanger resident who witnessed the demolition. “I knew some people who went every week.”
The restaurant’s co-owner, Matt Grimes, sold the land in November last year. The plot’s current owner is registered as KEB Real Estate Holdings, a limited liability company based out of Indiana.
Jason Manni, the CFO of Cincinnati Commercial Contracting, which was contracted to carry out the demolition as well as the construction of the plot’s planned new building, said the company’s principal was Ken Butler of Indiana, who owns numerous franchise restaurants and other real estate holdings throughout the region.
Butler could not be reached for comment, but Manni confirmed that the replacement building will be a roughly 1,000 to 1,500-square-foot dual-use restaurant building, half of which will be a Jimmy John’s. The other half, Manni said, will be vacant.
“Everybody loved the cottage,” said Erlanger Mayor Jessica Fette. “I mean, there’s no denying it was an icon of Erlanger.”
The restaurant was founded in 1933 during the Great Depression. Clara Rich, the restaurant’s founder, marketed the restaurant’s food to the only people who could afford to eat there, which at the time were tobacco farmers, said Grimes.
Rich owned the restaurant until 1973, when Verne Epperson purchased it. Epperson moved the restaurant to its location on Dixie Highway in 1987. Grimes and his wife, Noelle Grimes, purchased the restaurant from Epperson in 1999 and operated it until the fateful morning of May 8, 2021, when the building caught fire.
The precise cause of the fire is unclear, but Grimes attributed much of the damage to faulty leased equipment used to store the restaurant’s cooking oil, although he said he could never prove it.
“I had two big storage tanks, one for new cooking oil and one for used cooking oil,” Grimes said. “And that is the area of the greatest flame and fire damage. But those tanks were completely melted. They one time stood six feet tall [and] about two and a half feet around. They stood side by side, and after the fire they were about four inches tall.”
Fette said that firefighters at the scene were completely covered in grease.
“I remember our guys were absolutely covered in grease,” Fette said. “… So it just burned very, very hot [and] very, very quickly.”
Fortunately, no one was hurt in the blaze, which started in the early morning around 3 a.m., but the timing couldn’t have been worse.
Grimes said that he didn’t have any issues with insurance, but even then, the inflationary pressures on building materials and other economic travails during the pandemic made it mathematically impossible to gather enough resources to repair the building.
“After COVID, building materials were about three times what they once were,” Grimes said. “It was about the worst possible time to have a fire. I had just survived COVID, and I was a well-oiled machine at the time of the fire. I was doing more with… labor costs than I’d ever done. My food costs were zeroed in, and we were steadily increasing employment as business continued to come back.”
In the months after the fire, the potential repair expenses mounted one after another.
“Unfortunately, we would have needed all new HVAC and all new electrical,” Grimes said. “Some framing on the roof and some framing on the interior. And then new kitchen equipment… it was just too hard to find stuff.”
They even tried to move the restaurant to a completely new location in the Colonial Square plaza in Florence, where Acapulco Mexican Restaurant currently sits.
After the fire, Grimes also spent a good deal of his time helping Fette open her own restaurant, The Hive, and some of the kitchen staff who formerly worked at Colonial Cottage now work in Fette’s kitchen.
Yet, Grimes said, “about ten months later, I had done what I needed to do there, and it was time for me to move on. We had come to the realization that I wasn’t going to be able to get the cottage open.”
These days, Grimes sells commercial roofing systems for American Home Tech, a roofing company in Florence. He said he likes the job, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t “bittersweet, watching [the cottage] go down,” he said.
“I had the pleasure of watching three generations of families grow up,” Grimes said. “It hurt. This was my passion.”
“Matt Grimes.. is absolutely beloved by this community,” Fette said. “He did so much for his employees. He does so much for his community even today.”
The restaurant is gone, but its memory is enshrined on a mural under the railroad overpass on Dixie Highway near the recently unveiled 7 Mile Gardens, where local residents can view it and representations of other local landmarks.
LINKnky is a media partner of WCPO.com.
Watch Live:
