Remembering Wright’s: Heidelberg restaurant once drew customers ‘all the way down the block’

Editor’s note: This story will conclude in the December issue of the Signal Item.

For fans of fine dining, Wright’s Seafood Inn was something of a paradise.

Fans of singer Joni Mitchell will know the rest of the story.

Yes, a parking lot now stretches across the spot that the restaurant occupied for more than a century, serving a residential complex on the other side of Washington Street in Heidelberg.

The name of the building, David Wright Apartments, acknowledges the longtime owner of what once served as probably the borough’s prime attraction.

“They waited in line all the way down the block to get in the place,” Collier resident Mary Alice Norcik recalled. “It was something.”

As Dave Wright’s granddaughter, Mary Alice grew up with the family business. And that means literally.

“I was actually born in the building,” she said, relating a story told by her late mother, Alice Davis: “She has me. My grandfather’s down in the bar celebrating. And he was bringing everybody upstairs to see her, after she just had me.”

Decades later, Norcik had an unfortunately close-up view of the restaurant’s demise. She was living in the house next door when the 2004 remnants of Hurricane Ivan caused Chartiers Creek to spill its banks despite supposedly adequate flood-control measures, causing serious damage to Washington Street homes and businesses.

Wright’s had a brief resurrection a few years after that, but under different ownership.

Today, the Inn is relegated to fond memories of people who traveled from all over areas south and west of Pittsburgh — heck, they even drove over bridges and through tunnels — to get their seafood fixes.

The early years

Family history sets its founding in 1898, when W.C. and Mary Jane Wright opened the creekside Valley Hotel, five years before Heidelberg’s incorporation as a borough. Dave, their son, shifted the emphasis from lodging to dining after he took over the establishment in the 1920s.

“My grandfather went to Florida, and that’s when he tasted the fresh fish down there,” Norcik explained. “And when he came back, he searched around to the fish markets and was able to get halibut and all of the different seafoods.”

His wife, Verne, took a significant role in building the restaurant business.

“She was hands-on for everything. Let’s put it that way,” Norcik said. “We had a very small kitchen at that time, one fryer. Grandma and my mother did most of the cooking.”

Verne and Dave’s daughter, Alice, and her husband, Paul Davis, helped the family steer through the uncertainty of the Great Depression. Along the way, they had two children, Mary Alice and younger brother David.

Shortly after Dave Wright’s death in 1956, recent college graduate Dave Davis took over as manager. Within a couple of years, he embarked on a venture that brought regional attention to the restaurant.

The breakthrough

“A guy used to come to the bar. He was in advertising,” Davis recalled. “He came to me and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’”

The ad man recommended taking out a full newspaper page, at substantial cost, calling attention to the availability of lobster dinners — complete with homemade rolls, fries and slaw — for $2.75 a plate. Adding a second lobster upped the price to $4.50.

“That’s what we did. And sure enough, that filled the place the first weekend,” Davis said. “Then, instead of ordering maybe 50 lobsters in a box, I’d be ordering 150. Our supplier couldn’t keep up.”

At the time, attempting to consume a large red crustacean basically was a novelty for Western Pennsylvanians. In fact, Wright’s had illustrated place mats printed to guide novices.

Davis even appeared on a Pittsburgh show called “Kay’s Kitchen” to give viewers a how-to-eat-lobster demonstration. It didn’t go as planned.

“I wanted it to look better on TV, so I took the butter brush and brushed the lobster so it would glisten,” he said. It also made the shell slippery. “So when I tried to crack a claw, I couldn’t, and I grunted.”

Host Kay Neuman took that as a cue.

“She imitated my talk by saying, ‘And I see you take your claws and your nutcracker, and you’” — Davis made a noise of her repeating his utterance — “Because I grunted on TV.”

After he married the former Jan Reilly in 1972, she joined him in running the restaurant, coming up with a variety of recipes to reflect current culinary styles.

“We had staffing who were enthused about it, too. You couldn’t do anything if the chefs didn’t want to follow through,” she said. “It was a real team effort.”

Throughout its existence, Wright’s was a place for local residents to find steady employment in any number of capacities.

“Dave took great pride — great pride — in offering young people an opportunity for their first job,” Jan said. “Certainly, more than one went up through the ranks. But if not, people did come back to him and say, ‘We learned so much by working here.’ He loved taking those young people under his wing.”

Plenty of employees did stick around.

“We had waitresses who were there for 50 years,” Norcik reported, and she was a steady presence in the kitchen, herself, up through the record rainfall that deluged the Pittsburgh area in September 2004.

A 106-year era had ended.