Tag: Swiss Chalet

Torn-Down Tuesday: Swiss Chalet on Niagara Falls Boulevard

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Not too long after the last rotisserie chicken was sold at the Swiss Chalet restaurant on Niagara Falls Boulevard in February 2010, the building was torn down, leaving fans (OK, at least me) with the hope that something might be built that could somehow fill the hole left in our hearts by the closure of one of Buffalo’s best-remembered restaurants of yesterday.

Swiss Chalet on Niagara Falls Boulevard on the last weekend the restaurant was open, 2010.

After opening successful restaurants in Montreal and Toronto, the fourth Swiss Chalet restaurant opened on Main Street in Buffalo in 1957.

Swiss Chalet restaurant on Niagara Falls Blvd., from a 1965 ad.

Western New York’s second Swiss Chalet restaurant opened on Niagara Falls Boulevard in 1965, followed through the years by a handful of other locations serving quarter- and half-chicken dinners with what former Buffalo Mayor Jimmy Griffin called the city’s best French fries in a radio ad in 1996.

Image of a Switzerland mountain chalet window, which hung in the Swiss Chalet Niagara Falls Blvd. store for decades.

The interior of the Boulevard location was made to resemble an actual Swiss Chalet, with beamed ceilings and life-sized photos of windows from Switzerland.

These same handful of Alpine window images appeared at restaurants built in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s as well, but disappeared through the years as, despite the name, Swiss Chalet moved away from the European cottage image.

There were four Buffalo area Swiss Chalet locations in 2000, several years after the closure of the original downtown location. Ten years later, the remaining three stores closed.

Ad from Gusto, March, 2000.

While the Niagara Falls Boulevard location of Swiss Chalet remains a paved-over lot, mostly serving as an overflow parking area for the nearby Outback Steakhouse, you can still delight in Chalet sauce only 20 minutes from the Peace Bridge — but you’ll need a passport to get it. Swiss Chalet lives on with more than 200 restaurants across Canada. The location closest to Buffalo is at 6666 Lundy’s Lane, Niagara Falls, Ont.

Sound familiar? In 2013, News Food Critic Andrew Galarneau wrote about Western New York Swiss Chalet fans who regularly make the trek across the border.

“Lots of Americans come once a week,” said Robyn Hildebrand, manager of one of the Niagara Falls locations, a shiny standalone store on Montrose Road with a drive-thru. “Some come multiple times a week. They usually have a list with them, of friends, people they know, orders to bring back for people in the neighborhood.”

Click here to read the rest of Galarneau’s story.

1965 ad. (Buffalo Stories archives)

Buffalo in the ’70s: Swiss Chalet downtown

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Buffalo’s love of Swiss Chalet can be seen with a stroll through the parking lot of the Canadian rotisserie chicken chain’s restaurant in Niagara Falls, Ont. At any given moment, half of the license plates in the parking lot read “NEW YORK” across the top.

Buffalo News archives

After great success with three restaurants in Montreal and Toronto, a storefront next door to the Town Casino and across the street from Shea’s Buffalo became the home of the fourth Swiss Chalet Restaurant in 1957.

With all the hustle and bustle of Buffalo’s glitzy theater district and late-night hours for folks leaving shows and clubs hungry, Swiss Chalet, with its charcoal-roasted chicken, became an instant Western New York classic.

By 1965, Western New York’s second Swiss Chalet restaurant had opened on Niagara Falls Boulevard, followed through the years by a handful of other locations serving quarter- and half-chicken dinners with what former Buffalo Mayor Jimmy Griffin called the city’s best French fries in a radio ad in 1996.

One of the new locations was right across the street from the one in the photo. After a 1984 fire at the 643 Main St. building — which for decades has now been the home of the Bijou Grille — Swiss Chalet opened across Main Street into the former Laube’s Old Spain building.

Swiss Chalet left downtown Buffalo after 39 years in 1996; the space eventually became Shea’s Smith Theatre.

The chain’s remaining Western New York stores — including the Niagara Falls Boulevard location — closed to packed seats in 2010, but the lingering taste of 53 years of chalet sauce has made international dinner travelers out of the hundreds of Buffalonians who are seen every week at the Swiss Chalet restaurants closest to the U.S. border.

The Swiss Chalet closest to the Peace Bridge is at 6666 Lundy’s Lane, Niagara Falls, Ont.