Eating & Lodging: Ritz Hi Hat Restaurant: Depression-era restaurants

Today, the bottom floor of the blue building at 118 North Main St. sits vacant. But 70 years ago, two side-by-side restaurants fed many of Culpeper’s social butterflies.

The Ritz Restaurant opened in 1934 in the long, narrow space of 116 North Main St. A few years later, the Hi Hat Restaurant opened next door and in the early 1940s, owners John and Elizabeth Plevakis combined the two into the Ritz Hi Hat, where patrons could get a complete turkey dinner for a mere 50 cents.

“It was a restaurant for everything you’d want to eat,” said longtime employee Myrtle Leake. Leake, now 88, started working for the Plevakises in 1946 and stayed with them until Elizabeth’s death in 1999.

Leake recalled stories of serving by lantern and candlelight during blackouts, as well as Army convoys in the ’40s coming through town to eat at the restaurant.

The Ritz Hi Hat closed in 1968 after John’s death in 1966 and the location saw a variety of businesses come and go - from a barbershop to
a jeweler to an antique store - until its current vacancy