WASHINGTON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY (Washington County, Utah)
THE COSMOPOLITAN RESTAURANT
Silver Reef, Utah
LOCATION
1915 Wells Fargo RoadSilver Reef, UT 84746
Situated on the southwest corner of Main and Center Streets. This is currently just north of the
Silver Reef Museum.
DESCRIPTION
TBDHISTORY
This building was first constructed in 1877 by Mrs. Margaret Grambs, a native of Bavaria.The original building burned to the ground on May 30, 1879 along with much of the town. It was immediately
rebuilt on a larger scale and run on by Mrs. Grambs as a restaurant until 1894.
When Mrs. Grambs abandoned the restaurant in 1894, her two Chinese cooks carried the equipment and
utensils to Delamar, Nevada, a gold mining town where her nephew Edward F. Frudenthal was involved.
Margaret moved to Salt Lake City where she ran a small boarding house. The restaurant building was dismantled,
dismantled, leaving its crude stone foundations which were soon overgrown with sagebrush and cactus.
For six weeks during the summer of 1987, Dr. Robert L. Schuyler brought a team from the University of
Pennsylvania to do an archealogical survey in the back yard of the Cosmpolitan Restaurant. Only the
foundation of the restaurant existed at that time.
The Cosmopolitan Restaurant was later reconstructed on the site of the old Cosmopolitan Saloon and
appears much as it did back in the late 1800s. It served European cuisine until it was closed in 2010.
The building is currently owned by Washington County and is often used for community events.
It can also be rented for private events - see the Silver Reef Museum for details.
PHOTOS
USHS-0004 1880s photo of the front of the Cosmopolitan Restaurant
USHS-0005 1880s photo of the inside of the Cosmopolitan Restaurant
Photos on the web:
Modern photo of the Cosmopolitan Restaurant
REFERENCES
Silver Reef Project: Creation of a "Historic Ethnography" For a Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Mining Town on the Western Frontier
University of Pennsylvania, University Museum Research Projects, pp. 61-63
http://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/.../Silver.pdf