Started by the Reid family
Robert “Bob” Reid and his wife, Mary, owned and operated the Goody Goody restaurant for many years. It was owned by his parents for years before that.
“The restaurant was originally on West Third Street, in the 3500 block,” Reid once told the Dayton Daily News. “Then sometime in the early 1940s, we moved to Salem Avenue. My parents actually started it in Florida, and when they moved to the Dayton area, opened the first restaurant here in the 1930s.”
Reid was just a little bit off there, his parents actually started the restaurant in 1926, before moving to Florida. They started it up again when they moved back. The restaurant was located at 2841 Salem Ave. before the street was renumbered and changing to 2899 Salem Ave.
The Reid family owned the restaurant until 1971, when they sold the business.
• More restaurants we miss: Grub Steak | Key Hole | Anticoli’s
A popular spot
The Salem Avenue restaurant was fancy. It was a Tudor-style building with a large dining room that seated about 140.
“We were in tune with the times, so there was drive-in service with carhops, as they were called then, serving patrons in the parking lot,” said Reid.
The Goody Goody restaurant was also popular as an after-school stop for many students from Fairview High School.
They had a dessert called “Easy Way” which was cake, ice cream and chocolate syrup that the customers liked. Other favorite desserts were the butterscotch and pecan pie.
“Also on weekends, many stopped there after going to dances at the Lakeside ballroom,” Reid said.
“Many of our customers came to call the restaurant ‘Goody’s’ for short.”
Hamburger sauce
The Goody Goody menu listed an assortment of burgers that were served on a toasted bun.
While the toasted bun was a nice touch, it was the famous sauce that made them stand out.
Dayton Daily News readers wrote in to our food and restaurant editors several times over the years asking for the recipe for the hamburger sauce.
The one most commonly offered was:
• 1 No. 15 can tomatoes, crushed
• 1 medium-sized onion, diced
• 1 tsp. celery seed
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• Cook slowly and stir often.
There was also a “Double Jumbo” burger on the menu and the “Zee” burger, which came with shredded lettuce, tomato and special Zee sauce.
The Zee sauce was different than the regular “red tomato-type” sauce, was “obviously an egg-based concoction of the mayonnaise genre.”
“Dining Out’ review
In 1969 the Dayton Daily News’ anonymous restaurant critic visited Goody Goody and gave it a glowing review in their “Dining Out” column.
They described how one entered from the side door and the main dining area was a combination of tables and semi-booths.
Daily specials included items such as “Pot roast of beef with home-made Goody Goody noodles,” Veal Parmigiana, chicken casserole and more.
They admitted that the famous cream onion soup, that was based on an old family recipe, lived up to the hype.
In conclusion, the critic gave some advice.
“Next time you’re in the ‘Dining Out’ mood but you’re tired of entrees passed off as ‘French this,’ ‘Polynesian that,’ ‘Italian that’ ... etc., try the hearty and refreshing change-of-pace staples at the Goody Goody. You’ll rediscover the pleasures of American home-cooked foods, served in a genteel atmosphere by bustling waitresses,” they said.
New owner
Ralph Koch purchased the name and business of the Goody Goody restaurant at 2899 Salem Ave. from the Robert Reid family in 1971.
He had a lot of ideas about what he was going to do with it.
In 1976 he introduced what he had hoped would be the first of a large line of foods packaged for grocery stores. It was a 12-ounce package of onion soup, made from Goody Goody’s old family recipe.
The famous hamburger sauce was to soon follow. After that, their dinner salad and clam chowder were to follow.
“We built our reputation over 50 years on the hamburger sauce,” Koch said.
The runaway best seller in the restaurant was their butterscotch meringue pie, but that was too hard to figure out for grocery store sales. Koch considered selling it as an entire pie, a tart or a basic pudding with a do-it-yourself pie shell.
The Goody Goody foods came in red, white and blue packages to go along with the bicentennial of 1976. That year, Goody Goody restaurant was celebrating it’s 50th anniversary and 40 years on Salem Ave.
Koch opened up a second restaurant at Sugar Isle Golf County Club in New Carlisle, called Goody’s at Sugar Isle, in early 1977. It was managed by Koch’s son, Larry.
Only the top selling items from the Dayton restaurant were offered at the new location. A few key employees were also transferred to the Sugar Isle location.
Destroyed by fire
The restaurant caught fire on a few different occasions. One of the worst was in 1953, but it was contained to the kitchen and after restoration it was able to be reopened.
That was not the case with the fire that destroyed the Salem location in August 1977. The brick structure had a tile roof that hampered firefighters from getting at the blaze.
Waitress Wanda Speers watched the fire in tears.
“It’s a poor way to lose a business,” she said.
The restaurant was heavily damaged and Koch decided not to rebuild.
Instead, he decided to try franchising Goody Goody restaurants.
“Franchising is what I originally bought Goody’s for,” said Koch.
The first Goody Goody’s Little Kitchen was the first to open, in 1983, at 2101 E. Dorothy Lane in Kettering. It occupied a former Burger Chef property across from Rike’s Kettering Shopping Center.
Another Goody Goody’s Little Kitchen, in Woodbourne Market Square on Far Hills Ave., was open briefly as a cafeteria style restaurant, but ultimately failed.
About the Author
