LOOKING BACK
Young Chang
Wilhelmina Hershey, who went by Mina, loved to cook and had a penchant
for hamburgers back in the late 1920s. What began as her culinary whim
and side-job dream is known today, after many different names, as The
Village Inn.
She and her husband, Anton Hershey, worked in the Little Market on
Balboa Island. He eventually started a nursery in one of the empty lots
across the street. She decided she wanted a small room where she could
whip up and sell hamburgers, according to a history of the Inn written by
Jim Jennings, a Balboa Island resident.
The couple started a small business with the nursery and called it
Hershey’s Cafe. A liquor license and many patrons later, Tony Hershey let
the cafe spill into his nursery and renamed the place German Beer Garden,
according to Jennings’ history.
Two brothers, Art and Vaux White, leased what was by then Hershey’s
Cafe and Beer Garden from the Hersheys in the late 1930s. The new owners
changed the restaurant’s moniker yet again to Park Avenue Cafe, then to
White’s Cafe.
After the lease expired in 1957, Frank Usedom and his wife leased the
restaurant and named it The Village Inn (but the name game doesn’t stop
there). Bob Yardley, a name locals still remember, took over in 1975.
Newport Beach resident Judge Robert Gardner refers to the restaurant as
Bob Yardley’s Village Inn in his book, “Bawdy Balboa.”
But in the early ‘90s, the Hersheys’ daughter Ruth sold the property.
Under new landowners, the restaurant’s named changed to V.I.P., according
to Jennings’ account.
Longtime Newport resident Gay Wassall-Kelly calls the restaurant back
then a “local watering hole.”
“They had great dining and it was just one of these nice, dark, old
restaurants with booths and everything that everyone hung out in,” she
said. “And people from the peninsula would come over and they would come
over to the island and go back and forth.”
Lance Wagner bought the land in 1998 and changed the name back to The
Village Inn. Two years ago, Aric Toll and his family took over and are
still the owners today.
* Do you know of a person, place or event that deserves a historical
Look Back? Let us know. Contact Young Chang by fax at (949) 646-4170;
e-mail at young.chang@latimes.com; or mail her at c/o Daily Pilot, 330 W.
Bay St., Costa Mesa, CA 92627.
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