Ernie Byfield
American businessman
Ernest Lessing Byfield (November 3, 1889 – 10 February 1950) was an American hotelier and restaurateur from the 1930s through the 1950s in Chicago, Illinois. Byfield operated the Hotel Sherman Co., including the Ambassador East and West, the Sherman House Hotel, the Fort Dearborn and the Drake hotels and The Pump Room and College Inn restaurants.
Biography
Byfield was born to a Jewish family in Chicago on November 3, 1889. His father, Joseph, the son of innkeepers in Hungary, immigrated to Chicago in 1867 as a teen and changed the family name from Beifeld to Byfield. His father worked for Marshall Field & Company and then went into business with his brother.
Byfield is most famous as the creator and owner of The Pump Room, a restaurant and bar at his Ambassador East hotel that was frequented by the luminaries of the stage and screen from the 1930s to the present. The Pump Room was the preferred stopping-off point for celebrities changing trains in Chicago while travelling between New York City and Los Angeles. Stage and screen stars of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s would be invited to join Byfield in Booth 1 at the restaurant and would often boast to their friends that they had "lunched with Ernie" while they were in Chicago. The Pump Room has been described as the most famous restaurant in Chicago and was known for bringing theatrics to the restaurant business. The number of flambé dishes served by his restaurant, The Pump Room, was noted and started a trend in the post-war United States.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ernie Byfield” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.