Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | winter 2006
Customers inside Jennifer Vollmer's Green Gables Restaurant

 


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Jennifer Vollmer: This restaurant life

It’s easy to imagine Jennifer Seff Vollmer, age 4, frying chicken in her family’s restaurant. She practically lived in the kitchen.

Vollmer’s grandfather, Albert Seff, owned three restaurants in Sioux City, Iowa: the Green Gables, which he opened in 1929, the Normandy, and the Silver Steer. As a kid, Jennifer “annoyed the cooks on a daily basis” at the Normandy, where both of her parents worked.

“My friends would come to the Normandy to play with me instead of to my house,” Vollmer said. “All my birthday parties were there. That is where I grew up.”
But it is the Green Gables where Vollmer now spends her days – and brings her own children, 10-year-old Macy, 7-year-old Max, and 3-year-old Maddy.

Beginning in high school, Vollmer worked the ice cream fountain at the Gables. She spent a summer there making matzo balls (“My dad was trying to torture me”), and she returned as the restaurant’s general manager through an internship with Iowa State University during the summer of 1991 while working toward a degree in hotel and restaurant management.
When she graduated from ISU in 1992, she knew she’d eventually take over the family business, but first she got some big-time restaurant experience in Dallas, Texas, where she managed a seafood grill and then a Starbucks coffee shop.

She returned to her hometown in 1996 after her father, Bob Seff, told her he was going to sell the family’s last remaining restaurant.

“It was just out of the blue,” Vollmer remembers. “He said he was ready to sell, and I said, ‘You can’t sell the Gables! It’s been in the family for 70 years!’” So Vollmer, her husband, John, and baby Macy moved to Sioux City and took over ownership of the venerable Green Gables Restaurant.

Located at 18th and Pierce, the Green Gables is equal parts New York deli (you can order matzo ball soup and corned beef on rye), mom-and-pop diner (where else would you get liver & onions and chicken pot pie, served to you by a waitress who’s been working there 30 years?), and French bistro (just check out the hand-painted murals and hatbox display).

Famous for its broasted “Chicken in the Gables,” reuben sandwiches, and hot fudge sundaes, many of the restaurant’s customers have been coming there for special occasions, luncheons, and after-event desserts for longer than Jennifer Vollmer has been alive.

“We have lots of regulars,” she says. “They come up to me and tell me, ‘We had our wedding breakfast at the Gables 50 years ago,’ or ‘I had my first date here.’”

Vollmer has updated (carefully) the restaurant’s décor (“My decorating philosophy is no white walls”) with the help of her mother, Nancy Wilson, an artist who painted colorful murals inside and out. She’s ditched the Muzak system in favor of what she calls “normal” music. She’s added antiques from her grandmother’s attic. And she’s modernized the menu a bit – customers now find nachos supreme and blackened chicken salad co-mingled with the chicken livers and tuna melt.

She attributes the restaurant’s 75 years of success to three things: loyal customers, consistent food, and good prices.

And lots of memories.

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