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My Bio

20. August 2009 by admin.

I am a retired Director of Operations for Lums restaurants living in Florida. I was associated with Lums from 1980 till 1992. Our Restaurants were in upstate New York (Plattsburg & Lake Placid) and in Vermont (Burlington, Barre-Montplier, White River Junction, & Rutland). We also had a Bonanza Steak house, Kinfolks (a theme New England fare restaurant) and a fish house the Shanty-on-the Shore which is still operating on Battery street in Burlington.

I was  the general manager of Valle’s steak houses from 1972-1980, I managed Valle’s in Springfield Va , Richmond Va, and Tampa Fl.

I left Valle’s after Don Valle passed away

Dennis

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LUMS RESTAURANT menu

19. August 2009 by admin.

LUMS had a great menu that developed over time. It began with such icons as  hotdogs steamed in beer with different toppings, frosty schooners of beer, great roast beef sandwich and french fries served in red plastic baskets with waxed paper underliners.  Also on the menu were different burgers and sandwiches, one of my favorites was the tuna melt on an english muffin topped with swiss cheese(because I was always trying to loose weight). Later my good friend

Bob Thom introduced breakfast menu to LUMS. A lot of breakfast items were served in ceramic skillets. Bob’s background was with International House of Pancakes. The breakfast menu was an instant hit. Then came along the famous OLLIEBURGER and  Ollie Gleichenhaus who was already famous in Miami Beach. LUMS added a few different ways to prepare the OLLIEBURGER from the original one Ollie had at Miami Beach. Later Uncle Miltie (Milton Berle) was the spokeman for LUMS and the frosty schooners of beer. The schooners were a real pain because they chipped around the edges when stored in the mug froster. Along the way the salad bar  & dinner menu was added to round out the family restaurant concept. Then the next icon from Friedrich Jahn was Wiernerwauld Chicken. This was a great item but it had to be prepared 24 hours ahead of time . Then in the dessert line LUMS added a great Key Lime Pie. 

This site sells the original Ollieburger seasonings and the Ollie fry seasoning. Go to dennisdb61@aol.com to order. We also sell the Wiernerwauld Chicken rub to prep the chickens with and direction to prep the chickens. We have the hotdogs steamed in beer recipe as well as the great roast beef rub and our famous Key Lime Pie recipe that we used at LUMS.  All of this can be ordered thru Dennis at  dennisdb61@aol.com.

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How John Y Brown met Ollie Gleichenhaus

19. August 2009 by admin.

At a Kentucky Derby breakfast in the Governor’s mansion nine years ago, a young lawyer with a hunger for riches ran into a courtly old gent with a recipe for fried chicken. The rest is history: John Y. Brown Jr. built an $830 million empire around Colonel Harland Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken. Having made his fortune, Brown sold out last year to Heublein Inc., a food and liquor distributor, and went into semi-retirement at age 37. But then he met Ollie Gleichenhaus, who runs a seven-stool hamburger joint in

Miami Beach. Now Brown is determined to make him the Colonel Sanders of hamburgers. 

Ollie is hardly the patriarchal

Kentucky colonel type. A 60-year-old native of

Brooklyn, he looks and sounds more like Archie Bunker’s big brother. But his hamburgers are something else: one-third pound of lean meat seasoned with 32 spices and a special sauce. Gleichenhaus, who insults customers and employees with equal abandon, takes his seasoning seriously; he often chastises patrons who unknowingly ask for ketchup or mustard.Actually, Brown’s discovery of Gleichenhaus was not exactly serendipitous. Brown, the son of a longtime politician, retired from the chicken business in part because he wanted to become the Democratic candidate for Senator from

Kentucky this fall, but then former Republican Governor Louie Nunn was nominated for the Senate, and Brown decided that maybe he would wait until 1974. He needed something to do meanwhile, an activity that would still leave him time for political jobs like organizing the telethon that netted more than $2,000,000 for the Democratic National Committee last month. Last August, accordingly, he bought Lum’s, a 340-outlet beer-and-hot-dog chain, for $4,000,000 in cash.Lum’s franchises lost $150,000 last year—partly, says Brown, because “they did not have very good food. I figured that upgrading it would be my first task.” So Brown recruited a platoon of young executives and told them to scour the country until they found the perfect hamburger.A month later they returned with Gleichenhaus. “I told John I was happy, I don’t need this,” Ollie recalls. “Then he told me he’d make me famous, bigger than the Colonel. He said my name would be in lights, on T shirts and plates, everywhere. He hit me in a weak spot.”Lum’s hired Ollie to train its personnel, and it is now testing Ollie-burgers—at a high 95¢ each—in its

Ohio outlets. Gleichenhaus is not entirely sure that Lum’s countermen can duplicate his masterpiece: “Those yo-yos are looking for a short way to make my burgers, but there’s no way other than the right way.” Even so, Brown intends to go nationwide with Ollie-burgers within a year, and has prepared 63 television commercials featuring Ollie in “an Archie Bunker kind of approach.” The rest may some day be history

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Hi, Welcome to LUMS RESTAURANTS!

9. August 2009 by admin.

This blog is dedicated to all the people who made LUMS restaurants an icon in the fabric of American eateries.

I also dedicate this site to our own LUMS group in Vermont & upstate New York.  Special gratitude to my wife (Ginny) my brother

& chef (Butch) award-winning chef (Conrad) all who are not with us anymore in this world, And to my friends Terry Spillaine  and Bob Thom  who made it all possible.

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