Saturday, October 15, 2011

Bygone Business: Rochester Bar-B-Q & Pizza

Anyone who lived at the north end of Rochester during the 1960s and early 1970s probably remembers a small take-out store called Rochester Bar-B-Q & Pizza.  James and Lorraine Schultz opened the establishment in a small, one-story building at 812 N. Main Street  (just north of the Romeo and Main intersection) under the name Bar-B-Q Kitchen, in March 1963.  The Rochester store was a franchise of a Detroit company called Bar-B-Q Kitchens, Inc. that had launched its first store in Port Austin six years earlier.

The menu at the Rochester Bar-B-Q Kitchen featured chicken, duck, turkey, ham, spare ribs, pork roll and strip  steak. Pizza was added to the bill of fare later on, and the name was changed to Rochester Bar-B-Q & Pizza.  The little store suffered a couple of fires, and was gone by the mid-1970s.  The building has long since been torn down.

My mother remembers that the Bar-B-Q Kitchen had really great cole slaw.  Anybody else remember eating here?

2 comments:

  1. my mother loved the french fries there--thick, brown and served up in a wax paper sleeve. she would make me run in to get them, offer me one or two and finish the rest herself! i think they cost 19 cents in the early/mid-60s.

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  2. I remember the restaurant because my Mother and Step Father owned the place in the mid 1960s.there names were Robert and Doris byers and I remember the first fire there I was 9 or 10 years old. I am sad that it was torn down. That was one of the great things I remember growing up in the Great State of Rochester Michigan some day I will go back to visit the place were I grew up I miss Michigan thanks for all the awesome memories.

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