WOOSTER — To understand the story behind The Grande Ranch restaurant, you're probably going to need a pencil, paper and a good memory.
Even Angela Chenevey, the third generation of the family that been the backbone of the restaurant since 1945, makes hash marks on a scrap piece of paper to make sure she has the right head count of aunts, uncles, cousins, sons, daughters and grandchildren who have kept the place running over the years.
First, there were her grandparents, John and Antoinette Grande, who bought what was best described as a roadhouse and opened what was then El Rancho Grande.
Join the conversation at Facebook.com/columbusdispatch and connect with us on Twitter @DispatchAlertsHer grandfather had been an only child who went on to become father to 13, including Chenevey's mother, Adrienne Withrow. He was a cement finisher, building roads from Wooster south to Texas. His three brothers-in-law, who had been in the service during World War II, came home and encouraged the couple to purchase what was then known as Crowley's.
Spending a lot of time on the road with a wife and 13 children at home, “I think he might have thought (buying a local business) was a good idea,” said Adrienne Withrow, the seventh girl and 11th of the Grande 13. “That's just my speculation.”
And it was Adrienne Withrow, who 10 years ago at the not-so-tender age of 70 decided to re-open the restaurant on what was once U.S. Route 30, now bypassed and better known as East Lincoln Way.
“I wanted to honor my mother's recipes and hospitality,” she said.
After a decade, Adrienne Withrow decided in October it was time to retire. This would be the second time; she'd already finished a 21-year career with UPS, she said. The decision came, Angela Withrow said, “after a long, hard consideration by my mother.”
So on Friday night, the staff dished out all manner of pizza and pasta and potatoes to the public for the last time. Saturday was a special finale — just family and friends who had become family over the years.
There were tears, to be sure, and a whole lot of good memories.
It was believed, Adrienne Withrow recalled, that Crowley's used to be a way station for mobsters — including Baby Face Nelson — who needed a meal on their way from Canton to Chicago. But after the Grande family took over, there were expansions — more dining space, more kitchen space, a new front entry foyer.
Still, the original part of the building is where most of the eating has gone on; the same rolltop coolers behind the bar work just fine.
Some of Adrienne's fondest childhood memories, she said, were made in that building. “I remember peeling 50 pounds of potatoes with my sister” Marilyn, she said, “and putting them in stainless pots of water.”
And then there was the time “my mom had a holy fit when my older brothers tried to encourage her to change the price of a hamburger from 25 cents to 30 cents,” Adrienne Withrow said.
Surely, her mother thought, that would run off all her customers.
Local legend has it that Antoinette Grande served the region's very first piece of pizza from the family restaurant. And what is known, Adrienne Withrow said, is that she'd make what the family later came to call a “party pizza” and serve it for 10 cents a slice.
Antoinette and John Grande ran the family business until the late 1960s, when Adrienne Withrow's brother and sister-in-law, Frank and Helen Grande, took over and later their daughter and son-in-law, Fran and Gary Fuller.
In 2006, El Rancho Grande moved to downtown Wooster and a new home just west of the Wayne County Courthouse, leaving the East Lincoln Way building — still owned by the Grande siblings — empty.
Adrienne Withrow's husband had passed away in 2004 and, not one to sit around, she starting thinking about re-opening the place. “I did not want to lose my family's name,” she said. So while El Rancho Grande operated downtown, plans were made for The Grande Ranch to open to the east.
And at the same time, Adrienne's daughter, Angela, was about to see her job in a local bank eliminated. Her new husband, Alan Chenevey, was considering getting away from a career in real estate.
It took a while to get the old place ready, something the Adrienne Withrow said would not have been possible without her son-in-law. “Alan has been my savior so many times,” she said. “We were attached at the hip, doing all sorts of stuff.”
And in 2008, The Grande Ranche opened, using many of Antoinette Grande's original recipes, most of which were never actually written down but rather passed by word and observation down through the generations.
“It's been a lot of work,” Allen Chenevey said, most of it shouldered, as always, by the family.
So we're back to those hash marks.
Angela Chenevey counts, with some help from her mother, what she can best estimate at 36 family members who have worked at The Grande Ranch in the past decade.
“They come and they go,” Adrienne Withrow said.
“And sometimes,” her daughter added, “they come back and go again.”
Adrienne Withrow ticks off some of the list: her son, Dirk; her niece, Rita Schmell; her sister, Marilyn Raby, and Marilyn's son, Andrew; her grandson, Jake Withrow; her son, Richard Withrow.
And wait — also Suzanne Kachmar (aka “The Pizza Queen”) — who is no relation, but sure seems like it.
And the list, as they say, goes on.
Working alongside so many family members means “lots of joy and lots of challenges,” according to Angela Chenevey, who admitted saying things to family she'd probably never say to a non-blood co-worker. But “any challenge is overcome by love,” she said. “Any day and any shift.”
“At the end of the day, everyone hugs and kisses good-bye,” said her mother.
Saying good-bye to the customers, who have come in droves as the restaurant was in its last days, was the hardest. “It's not just lip service when we say they come as customers,” Angela Chenevey said, “and leave as friends.”
But it's time to move on, to give Adrienne Withrow a break, time to go see the California branch of the family, time for Angela and Alan Chenevey to take a step back. Time for the next generation — Amy Chenevey Crosland — to carry on the family's culinary tradition, in the form of Miss Amy's Bakery, which already has its own following at its location on Smithville-Western Road.
Everyone will forge their own path, the three agree.
Still, there have been lots of good memories.
And lots of cheese, Alan Chenevey said. Eight tons in 10 years.
And that's plenty.
tmosser@the-daily-record.com
https://www.dispatch.com/lifestyle/20181223/restaurant-in-wooster-closes-after-73-years-of-meals-memories 2018-12-23 14:50:51Z
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