A 24-hour restaurant called the Ideal opened in Toledo in the wake of the Spanish flu pandemic.

Located in a former hardware store and featuring steak on the dinner menu, its Greek immigrant owners covered the interior in white paint and stainless steel as a sign of cleanliness.

One hundred years later and now named Mancy's Steakhouse, the family-run eatery at 953 Phillips Ave. is still around — and emerging from a second pandemic. It will celebrate reaching the century mark with champagne toasts and music next week.

“For 100 years, it's been one of the iconic institutions in our city,” Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz said in a recent video promoting the anniversary. Mancy's came before the University of Toledo moved to its current campus, the mayor noted, before Owens Corning incorporated, before the invention of the Jeep.

These days the steakhouse is run by the third generation of Mancy family members — cousins Gus, 57, and Mike, 56. The first two generations prepared them well for a pandemic-type event, Gus said in an interview this week, urging a conservative business approach that included saving for a rainy day.

The two cousins plus a couple of chefs worked through the coronavirus shutdown last year, offering to-go meal kits and mustering about a tenth of their normal revenue.

But since then the flagship Mancy’s restaurant has surged back to full strength, along with the family's younger eateries Mancy's Italian Grill, Mancy's Bluewater Grill, Shorty's True American Roadhouse, and Mancy's Ideal.

On a recent Monday evening — what had been a slower weeknight before the virus — restaurant staff juggled 163 reservations and an hourlong wait for walk-ins. A Saturday evening reservation is best made a month in advance.

“It's been a crazy run,” Mike said of the last few months.

The challenge now, Gus said, is simply keeping pace with pent-up demand. Mancy's has been managing about 130 percent of its pre-pandemic business with just 90 percent of its staff.

People want to go out and celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, and business gatherings as much as ever, he said, but restaurants including Mancy's are struggling to find enough strong applicants amid the labor shortage.

“You have demand, and you have this (labor) gap,” he said. “And we need to fill that gap every day. We can't take too many reservations for a lot of reasons. You don't want to cripple yourself — quality of food and quality of service are paramount.”

'No vacations'

The Ideal was not the first restaurant that cousins and business partners Gus Mancy and Nicholas Graham tried in Toledo, but it was the one that had staying power.

You could buy a chicken dinner for 35 cents in the early years, or a filet mignon with mushrooms for 85 cents.

“We had a rough time at first,” the elder Gus Mancy, who had immigrated from Crete, told The Blade in 1964. “This was all German in here, and we couldn't even speak much English.”

The original business partners barely ever stopped working, rotating 12-hour shifts for the first couple decades of the restaurant's existence. On Christmas Eve of 1946, they finally agreed to close the restaurant for the holiday but realized they didn't have keys: The place had never been locked.

“There were no vacations,” the younger Gus Mancy said this week. “That's what they did — they worked, and they supported their families.”

By the mid-1960s, a second Mancy generation had taken over — twins John and George, who brought fresh ideas. The restaurant turned its focus to lunch and dinner and transformed into a more upscale experience.

Surf and turf and a lobster broiler featured as top-priced items on the 1973 menu, at $8.95 each.

“It was a fun thing, because when we took over, we changed things, and brought in the antiques, and that type of decor,” John Mancy, 84, said in a recent interview. “It was just a really nice time building a business back then.”

Mary Alice Powell, The Blade's then-food editor, helped the restaurant find notoriety when she wrote a glowing article, John recalled. “After that,” he said, “the restaurant boomed.”

In the ensuing years it would attract high-profile names including Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Hoffa, who showed up for a cigar smoke-filled dinner party not long before his disappearance. By the 1970s Esquire magazine had named it among the top 40 steakhouses in the country.

Since that article by Ms. Powell, who would later write that Mancy's was her favorite restaurant in Toledo, The Blade continued to cover the restaurant closely. It reported extensively on a 1973 fire that destroyed the original building along with 9,000 pounds of beef, as well as its triumphant reopening on the same Phillips Avenue property. A clown that still greets diners as they enter the restaurant is the only remnant of the original building that lives on.

And The Blade's Bill of Fare reviews regularly praised the place through the decades.

“Mancy's is a very good roadhouse, verging on gourmet status,” said one anonymous newspaper reviewer in 1991. “Fact is, you can't talk about eating out in the Toledo area without mentioning the top-drawer steakhouse,” wrote another three years later.

The restaurant's ambiance has hardly shifted, either. A description of the low-lit interior — from a 1996 feature marking 75 years — still accurately ticks off the key features of the “charmingly busy burlesque” atmosphere today: Tiffany-style lamps, stained glass, “classy nudes” on the walls and a “warren of rooms” where couples and parties can tuck away.

And the steaks? Gus said the keys to success remain the same: age and butcher them in-house, season them with “magic dust” — a fine salt and course salt — and cook them in garlic butter.

'Beats you down'

Not many restaurants survive past a decade or two, and only a select few family-run operations can claim a lifespan even nearing Mancy's in the Toledo area.

There's a reason for that, said a fatigued-looking Mike Mancy as he watched the lunch crowd trickle in on Tuesday.

“It beats you down, for sure,” he said. “It's like no other business. Anybody in any other business has no clue or understanding of what it takes to run a restaurant ... every day there's something thrown at you.

“You never know how busy you're going to be,” he added. “Especially staffing-wise now, it's a nightmare. There are so many different things coming at you, and you've got to be able and willing to make quick decisions on the fly. And hopefully you make them right.”

Tom Cousino, of Cousino's Steakhouse in Oregon, which opened in 1946 and is now run by Mr. Cousino’s son, is one of those few who knows what it's like to survive in the competitive upscale restaurant industry for decades on end.

He said too often independent restaurants owned by top chefs “are run by passion and not good business sense,” which leads to short lifespans.

“The Mancys certainly had Gus, Sr., who I'm sure taught some very pointed business practices,” Mr. Cousino said. He added: “They've been an inspiration to most all of the restaurateurs of Toledo.”

'Always going to love steak'

Both Mike and Gus said they are optimistic they can pass on Mancy's Steakhouse — and the family's other restaurants — to the fourth generation.

“Every one of us has a child that is interested,” said Gus, listing off his brothers, John and George, as well as his other cousin, Nick, and whose children are gaining experience at restaurants. Some are working at the family eateries. Others have gone outside, Gus said, just as the third generation of Mancys was required to do, to take their “lumps” from another dining company before returning to Toledo.

But will Mancy's Steakhouse need to evolve in the coming decades to keep up with evolving tastes and fine dining preferences? Probably not much, the current owners predict, just as it didn't change radically in the last 100.

Mike said it's hard to think much beyond his packed nightly restaurant of the past few months. Clearly they’re still doing something right.

“It's hard to see in the future where this isn't an iconic place,” he said. “Because obviously people love the old-school ambiance. You don't really see that anywhere anymore, especially in Toledo.

“And people are always going to love steak, as far as I can see.”

First Published October 17, 2021, 12:00 p.m.