“We’ve been going on three weeks being booked every night,” Eric Engel said. “There’s really just been a lot of business.”

   Established in 1923, Riverside Inn was begun by Howard Garrison, a young artist who had always wanted to open a restaurant. Throughout Prohibition, Garrison turned Riverside into a renowned speakeasy and culinary gem for anyone who loved classic American cooking. The speakeasy had bootlegged whiskey, slot machines, and dancing all of which were illegal, if not frowned upon. Garrison found trouble with the law more than once in this time but kept his restaurant’s fame going well past Prohibition. 

   After his retirement in 1970 he sold the restaurant to Jack Engel, who then passed on the restaurant to his son Eric in 1978.

   “I worked it for about 10 years before managing it,” Engel said. “So I was pretty comfortable with the place.”

   Ever since, Riverside has continued its legacy of fine dining without losing its local charm. It has been the host of countless wedding receptions, formal meetings, and simple dinner occasions. 

   “It’s been a long time since I’ve been down there,” senior Dylan Jackson said. “ We used to go down there a lot when I was younger. My dad used to always go down there for homecoming dinners back when he went to Glendale.”

   Others remember a certain famous menu item.

“They’re fried chicken is amazing,” senior Keegan Martin said. “We went down there for cheerleading a while back,”

   The restaurant has a very unique style to it, from murals and paintings on the wall, many done by the original owner, to statues and fountains in most every room. The fireplace in the main dining area is adorned with paintings of watermelons on the brick and there is always a piano player serenading the customers while getting tips in an old courvoisier glass. There is even a greenhouse next to the old speakeasy room, where you can see all kinds of plants growing next to Italian villa style windows of the old inn. If you do brave the speakeasy room, you’ll swear you can still smell smoke as you gaze at time-ravaged photos of the restaurant’s past.

   To the back of the restaurant is a huge patio bordering the Finley River. There’s a bridge slightly hidden behind some of the larger trees and the river gives a certain atmosphere to the back patio, I remember wedding receptions here as a kid. Lampposts adorn the wall next to the river, and statues and small garden ornaments add to the old-time feel of the place. However, an eerie reminder of why the restaurant has to be closed down is just around the corner. The roof nearest the bridge is buckled and rippled from water damage, and some of the lower rooms are still water stained. Though a fun place to enjoy yourself, the concrete patio and low wall was no match for years of rising water. Engel himself said that he thinks that the river is changing geologically. In 2008 the restaurant flooded 5 times, and this was too much to keep cleaning up, renovating and reopening. 

   “It used to be you could deal with one bad one every ten years or so,” Engel said. “It finally soaked in that maybe there’s more than bad luck here,”

   As far as the future of the Riverside name, and possibly reopening somewhere else, Engel is unsure.

   “I don’t plan on doing much of anything in the near future,” Engel said. “But I’ll have to think on it further down the road,”