BURLINGTON – The Arion, for years a family-owned restaurant at 208-210 Main Street, closed in 1986, but those who still crave the iconic restaurant’s much-loved pizza sauce are in luck.
Curt Diewold of Burlington, grandson of Art Diewold, a bar owner and restaurateur who opened the Arion in 1946, and the son of Dick Diewold, the restaurant’s chef, owns most of the restaurant’s recipes.
While the Arion’s pizza sauce recipe was somehow lost, Diewold has perfectly recreated the product.
He sells Curt’s Arion Style Pizza Sauce by the pint jar.
The original, house-made pizza sauce recipe made 10 gallons.
If that sounds like a lot, one Friday night the Arion sold a record number of about 600 pizzas in five or six hours, cooked in the kitchen’s four ovens. The average for a night was 400, explained Diewold.
Through trial and error, and using the correct 11 seasonings but in smaller amounts, Diewold has come up with a perfect clone of the original sauce.
He’s been making the product for 10 years in his home. He garnered much practice from working at the Arion.
“I worked for the family restaurant for 20 years with my grandpa, dad and uncle (Tom),” he explained, starting as a busboy at age 10, then, through sweat and dedication, earned the job of assistant chef working alongside his father, and he also was assistant manager.
Before he passed away, Dick Diewold tasted Curt’s homemade sauce, and told his son, “’You are not going to get any closer than that. It’s pretty good.’ I knew I made it right,” said Diewold.
Comments to Diewold from people who fondly recall the sauce prompted the retired beer truck driver and supervisor to put on the chef’s apron again and combine just the right amounts of tomato sauce and paste, plus ingredients he wisely does not share.
That house-made pizza sauce was so good that a rival restaurateur went into the Arion one evening, slammed a wad of bills on the bar, and asked Arion founder Art Diewold to give up the recipe. She didn’t get it.
Curt’s sauce jar label boasts the Arion as “Burlington’s leading restaurant for nearly 50 years,” and has vintage photos of the restaurant and the Diewold father and sons.
The sauce can be ordered online for either pickup or shipping, depending on how far away customers are located.
A Burlington native who lives in Texas has ordered 20 jars at a time. Customers also hail from Virginia, Springfield, Illinois and Des Moines, along with many from Burlington.
One jar makes two or three 12-inch pizzas. A large crust may need two jars, Curt advised a customer on Facebook.
Some people, Curt said, like to pour the sauce atop pasta.
He also makes and sells pizza kits. For those he puts together crust from a restaurant vendor, a bag of mozzarella cheese and a jar of the sauce. Unlike the sauce, the kits cannot be shipped.
Besides pizzas, the Arion served many other in-demand dishes.
In 1966, “People are eating more of the costlier items on the menu — we’re putting out a lot more filet mignons, New York cuts, and extra-large T-bone steaks,” Art Diewold told The Hawk Eye. “Lobster tails too. Of course, channel cat and chicken are always popular.”
“The baked swiss steak in vegetable sauce was one of our biggest sellers,” said Curt.
He described that dish as “a tenderized steak dipped in seasoned flour then browned on a griddle, next make a brown gravy sauce (not too thick).”
That recipe calls for placing the steaks in a pan, then shredding onions and carrots on top. The sauce is then poured over the steaks, to be baked at 350 degrees for one-and-a-half hours.
“This was one of our top entrees,” Curt said.
He noted while he does not share the pizza sauce recipe, “if anyone would request any recipes from their favorite dish they remember, they can contact me on Facebook or by email.”
When the business opened, the building housed the Arion Theater, Grotto Club rooms and the Arion Jewelry store. The theater opened with an Edward G. Robinson movie, “Our Vines have Tender Grapes.”
The Arion wasn’t Art Diewold’s first venture into serving the public.
He managed Roederer’s tavern for the owners when he was in his 20s.
After that, he owned the Beer Barrel, located at 803 Jefferson St. It was the early 1930s, and Prohibition was in full reign.
In keeping with his establishment’s name, Art was only legally allowed to sell beer — no liquor by the glass.
This leads to Curt’s favorite story about his grandfather, who was very chatty and friendly.
“They had a woodburning stove behind the bar, and Grandpa kept a bottle of whiskey in the ash pan in the stove,” he said. “All the old boys were sitting at the bar, and Grandpa was telling a story, and the feds came busting in the front door and started raiding the place, just like in the movie The Untouchables,” Curt said.
“Grandpa just kept talking and talking, and they were looking in cupboards, and one of them opened up the woodburning stove, looked in there and closed it, and he said, ‘Art, you’re good this time but we’re gonna bust you next time!’
After the feds left, the guys at the bar all laughed, and imitated Art sucking in his breath.
Art opened the Brown Derby that became the Casino Cafe at 208 N. Main St., in 1936, and the rest is a long history that includes an expansion and a new name.
The Arion became one of southeast Iowa’s better-known eateries, and bus drivers steered passengers there.
It was one of the few local cafes that stayed open until midnight — way past the supper hour, and so attracted post-concert crowds that sometimes included the entertainers themselves, like Victor Borga and Spike Jones.
They are among celebrities who gave impromptu performances for the diners, as the Arion was equipped for live entertainment.
A bevy of movie starlets promoting the sale of U.S. government bonds stopped in to dine.
Art kept a drawerful of photographs of the stars of the movie and music world who had been his guests.
In 2013, a man posted a memory on the Curt’s Arion Style Pizza Facebook site, saying his parents took the kids to the Arion, where “the gentleman playing the piano would play ’Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ for me.”
Of course, there are fond pizza memories shared.
But something more than food could be had inside the hard-working family’s restaurant doors, where history and hospitality were on the menu.
The Arion was a place where waitresses stayed for years, and Art Diewold, who never considered himself too good to help them, spent the greater part of 36 years at the entrance, greeting everyone with a warm smile and a menu.
A Hawk Eye article from 1982 paid tribute to Art after his passing, saying, “His friendliness rubbed off on his sons Tom and Dick, who today operate the restaurant, to the last of his many grandchildren (including Curt) who bussed tables.”
“Dad, co-owner with his brother Tom, took over the head chef duties in the restaurant’s final years. That’s when I became assistant chef so Dad could have a day off,” explained Curt.
The Arion pizza sauce can be ordered by emailing Curt at cdiewold@gmail.com or message him on Facebook.
