n 1990, Susan Orlean published a book called Saturday Night, in which she set out to document how Americans spend their weekly reprieve from work. “Saturday night,” she wrote, “is when you want to do what you want to do and not what you have to do.” One thing people want to do on Saturday night is go out to dinner, so Orlean dedicated a chapter to the restaurant experience. She set this section of the book at the Hilltop Steakhouse, in Saugus, Massachusetts.
The Hilltop occupied a zoning-law-less stretch of Route 1 just north of Boston. A few miles to the south was Weylu’s, a maximalist Chinese restaurant that looked as if it had been airlifted to Essex County from the Forbidden City. A few miles to the north was The Ship, a seafood place in the shape of a schooner that had somehow run aground along the landlocked highway.
Even with these neighbors, the Hilltop stood out. It had a 68-foot neon cactus sign, a herd of life-size fiberglass cattle grazing out front, and an ever-present line of customers waiting for one of the 1,400 seats in its six dining rooms, each named for an Old West outpost, from Dodge City to Santa Fe. Attached to the restaurant, in the rear, was the Butcher Shop. According to Orlean, it was the largest refrigerated store in the world. At the peak of the Hilltop’s popularity, it was not uncommon for patrons to eat a steak in the restaurant, bundle up for a visit to the butcher shop, and emerge into the 7-acre parking lot with a full stomach and an armload of sirloin for home.
John SwansburgEmblazoned on the Hilltop’s cactus, in a flowery script, was the signature of its founder, Frank Giuffrida. The son of Sicilian immigrants, Giuffrida grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, an old mill town on the banks of the Merrimack River. His father died when Giuffrida was still a boy, so Frank dropped out of school and started working in the family business, a butcher shop. In the early 1960s, he sold that store and used the proceeds to buy what he described as a seedy gin mill on Route 1 called the Gyro Club. There he would fulfill the lifelong dream of a John Wayne–loving meat-cutter: opening a Western-themed steakhouse, with his wife Irene serving as hostess.
Giuffrida’s formula was large portions at low prices; he bet that he could make up for his thin margins with high volume. It worked. In 1987, the Boston Globe reported that the Hilltop was spending $20,000 a year just to supply its patrons with doggie bags. People couldn’t finish their $11 steaks—and they couldn’t get enough of the place. By the time Orlean interviewed Frank and Irene, they had built the Hilltop into a local institution doing business on a national scale. “Last year, the Hilltop grossed forty-seven million dollars and served food to two and a half million people,” Orlean wrote. “This represents more food sold and more people served than at any other single restaurant in the country.” New York City’s Tavern on the Green was a distant second.
Categories: Americas, United States