ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 13, 1997 TAG: 9702130060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
THE RESTAURANT, an institution since 1978, will be remembered as a place where wedding receptions, dates and other special events were enjoyed.
La Maison du Gourmet had always been a special place for Gregory and Donna-Jean Brock. They dined there on the first anniversary of their first date. They loved its Sunday brunches.
"It had a lot of charm," Gregory Brock said. "You could grab a small, private room and it'd have one table and you could be alone and get Four-Star service."
When it came time to pick a place for their wedding reception Oct. 12, they decided there was one place to be: La Maison.
They looked forward to eating there to celebrate their first wedding anniversary.
Now they may not be able to make it. This week La Maison closed its doors with no word on whether it will reopen.
The closing left a bit of sadness for many who have come to known La Maison since it opened in 1978. People from the Roanoke Valley and beyond remember La Maison as the place where they enjoyed wedding receptions, romantic dates, anniversary dinners and high-school French-class field trips.
"It's a shame," Brock said. "It's really a Roanoke institution in many ways."
But not everyone will mourn its passing.
Dolores Kostelni, a food-industry consultant and chef who writes restaurant reviews for The Roanoke Times, said people she knew had grown dissatisfied with La Maison's food and service.
"You would hear from people: 'We always depend on La Maison for a special evening and special company. But we've [had] a couple bad experiences, so we're not going back,''' she said.
She said that La Maison, sadly, never lived up to its expectations.
It was a beautiful old home and the restaurant "could have been wonderful." But ultimately "it was a star that only glimmered; It did not shine," she said.
The restaurant was located on Airport Road in a Georgian mansion built in 1928 by Murray Coulter, the late president of National Business College.
Pete Karageorge purchased the property and opened La Maison in 1978. Dining was a time-consuming affair, but patrons could get a gourmet meal for as little as $6.95 (for chicken in lobster sauce or filet of sole).
In those early years, Kostelni said, La Maison sometimes "seemed more intent on putting on a show than serving quality food."
She recalls how things went awry one night when a waiter put dressing on her salad by spinning the bowl around on a special stand; the bowl went flying and the salad ended up in her lap.
Still, La Maison got favorable reviews from Kostelni and restaurant critics over the years. In 1982 it won a Silver Spoon Award from the Gourmet Diners Club of America.
In January 1990, Kostelni wrote that La Maison "is an establishment that has striven to be recognized for its serious food, unique style of service and supreme ambience. La Maison du Gourmet is a good place to go for celebrations and just ordinary dinners. They are to be forgiven their faults because they try so hard to please."
Rance Marianetti bought the restaurant in May 1990. Marianetti said he spent a lot of money to refurbish the building, and tried to broaden the restaurant's clientele.
"Randy put a ton of money into that place," said Tom Hamelman, who was a chef at La Maison and later a business partner with Marianetti in a restaurant in Radford.
Marianetti said La Maison's strength was also its weakness: it was thought of as a premier "special-event restaurant."
The problem being, he said, "if you only see me on your birthday, there's just not enough birthdays."
Marianetti said he tried to bring in people who might be intimidated by the mansion's grand appearance. So he started offering a lunch buffet for $5.50 to try to build his customer base.
Hamelman said they had some success, but "in hindsight, we kind of wished we'd bagged all that and just kept it all very first class and built it from there." After a while, Hamelman said, Marianetti decided "he wanted to simplify his life."
Marianetti, who also owns the Greenwood Family Restaurant in Botetourt County, decided to sell La Maison. Thomas Taylor, who had been working as La Maison's maitre d', took it over after signing a lease-purchase contract in May 1996.
But Taylor was unable to obtain the financing to close the deal, and the restaurant closed this week. Marianetti announced he's putting the property up for auction.
Kostelni said La Maison probably suffered from competition from an increasing number of high-end restaurants. At the same time, she said, the City Market began to bustle with new restaurants and other attractions, leaving La Maison away from the center of gravity of Roanoke nights-on-the-town.
Still, no matter what its problems, Kostelni said, "La Maison was a special place. It had special written all over it."
Gregory Brock certainly thinks so. So do many others.
Guests at his wedding reception, a brunch, "relentlessly commented how wonderful it was," Brock said.
Two of the attendants at his wedding had their wedding receptions there.
"One of the main reasons they wanted to come was to have a deja vu experience," he said.
LENGTH: Long : 106 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. ERIC BRADY/Staff. La Maison du Gourmet was located onby CNBAirport Road in a Georgian mansion built in 1928. 2. Tom Hamelman,
former chef at La Maison du Gourmet, currently owns Georgetown Deli
in downtown Roanoke. 3. Gregory and Donna-Jean Brock look at their
wedding pictures with their dog, Sonya. They had their wedding
reception at La Maison in October. color.