Quote:
Originally Posted by ethereal_reality
Los Angeles Herald 1890
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Thx
e_r. Jerry Illich, with his 24-hour restaurant, sounds like a colorful and well-loved character. I don't recall ever hearing of him before.
The Croat Connection
by Charles Perry
If you want Croatian food around here, you go
down to San Pedro, where fishermen from Dalmatia
have lived and worked since early in the 20th century.
But we already had Croatian restaurateurs in
the 1870s.
One was Jake Maritich (whose name also appears
as Giacomo Maritich, showing the close cultural
connections of Dalmatia with Italy). In 1877 he had
a restaurant on Main Street, right across from the
more prominent restaurant of his fellow countryman
Jerry Illich.
Illich had been born on the island of Brazza (now
Otok Brac) in 1850. At the age of 13 he went to
sea, and seven years later he jumped ship in San
Francisco and started working in restaurants. Very
possibly Illich got to know the Croatian family who
had established San Francisco’s famous Tadich seafood
restaurant during the Gold Rush.
Around 1877 he moved down to Los Angeles,
which had just started growing explosively after the
transcontinental railway connection went through.
He started a small chophouse at 145 N. Main and
expanded it to two floors. He made it into a fashionable hangout –
he particularly catered to journalists
and politicians. The Kansas Club, later influential in
L.A. city politics, was founded at a dinner at Jerry
Illich’s.
In the process, he provided unwelcome competition for
another recent immigrant, Victor Dol, who
had opened the first serious French restaurant in
town in 1876 – later remembered as the first restaurant
in Los Angeles that didn’t have dirt floors and
barefoot cooks. At his Commercial Restaurant, just
a block south of where Illich infuriatingly moved in,
Dol was also catering to the City Hall crowd.
Both restaurants boasted that they had the finest
ingredients, especially seafood, though the cuisine
was different. When Illich died, it was remembered
that he had “served ‘paste’ and other foreign dishes.”
Pasta, that is. As a Dalmatian, Illich would have had
an Italian streak in his cuisine.
The Dol-Illich rivalry became legend. Dol advertised his
restaurant as “the Delmonico’s of Los
Angeles.” Illich referred to his own place as “the
Delmonico’s of Los Angeles.” In the 1880s, Dol left
the Commercial and opened a restaurant grandly
titled La Maison Doree, after the most fashionable
restaurant in Paris at the time. Illich brought in a
French chef as a partner (referred to in a newspaper
ad as “the clever French cook, Mr. Bailhe”) and
named the restaurant . . . La Maison Doree. One
imagines some heated words passed between Dol
and Illich.
Meanwhile, he continued to run Jerry Illich’s, the
largest restaurant in town – and a 24-hour restaurant,
by the way. In 1896 he moved it to a three-story
building at 219 W. Third St.
He retired just before the end of the century. In
1902 he died of Bright’s disease (the Los Angeles
Times regularly reporting to the public on his condition)
and was buried with a Masonic funeral. The
carriages of his mourners extended for two blocks,
and hundreds more came by trolley. Not bad for an
immigrant kid.
http://chscsite.org/wp-content/uploa...ummer-2004.pdf
He's buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery