Building Manhattan Project morale through homemade meals.
August 29, 2022
During the war, Warner expanded her roadside business from a sleepy tourist soda stop into a full-service restaurant exclusively serving Los Alamos scientists. They drove halfway to Santa Fe and stopped at Otowi Crossing near a wood suspension bridge too rickety for Army trucks to cross.
Soon-to-be Lab Director J. Robert Oppenheimer met Warner in the summer of 1937. According to a published collection of her writing, In the Shadow of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer said, "We had tea and chocolate cake and talk; it was my first unforgettable meeting."
Years later, after the then-secret Lab was up and running, Oppenheimer convinced his boss, General Leslie Groves, to allow scientists to visit Warner's establishment for dinner, as long as it was closed to the public.
Booked months in advance
Harold Agnew made in-person reservations, "a minute after midnight when Edith said she had a couple of openings and would give them on a first-come basis on a certain date..."
Throughout the war, Warner served dinner at $2 a head and didn't accept tips. She served five to six couples a night, sometimes having two seatings. No running water, no electricity, and a wood stove made for a 16-hour shift. According to her 1944 Christmas letter, Warner entertained five nights a week "until my arm rebelled and then my gallbladder," and then she scaled back service to three nights.
Warner had no phone. According to In the Shadow of Los Alamos, future Lab director Harold Agnew made in-person reservations, "a minute after midnight when Edith said she had a couple of openings and would give them on a first-come basis on a certain date. He said he wasn't the only one there at that hour with the same idea."
Oppenheimer had a standing weekly reservation. Other regulars included the Lab's top scientists Norris Bradbury, Phillip Morrison, Edward Teller, Stanislaw Ulam, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, and Niels Bohr. All used pseudonyms to make their reservations.
Garden-fresh dining
Warner served garden-to-table dinners by firelight and allowed no alcohol in her home. A typical meal included boiled corn, five varieties of squash (she grew 10), ragout (seasoned meat stewed with vegetables; pronounced ra-goo), and chocolate cake with raspberries.
In Standing by and Making Do, Jean Bacher, Lab staff member and wife of physicist Robert Bacher, recalled, "The vegetables were from her own garden, and the bread was homemade, often from home-ground flour... Miss Warner's salads seemed like food for the gods." Twice a week, Warner sold surplus vegetables to women who lived in Los Alamos.
A decades-long partnership
The tea room wasn't a solo venture. Atilano "Tilano" Montoya procured the well water, kept the woodstove fed, and assisted with anything else Warner needed.
Warner and Montoya never publicly shared if theirs was a platonic or romantic partnership. They met when she hired him circa 1928 to build an adobe fireplace. Within several years, Montoya became Warner's roommate.
They were an unusual pair. At the time, Warner was in her mid-30s and unmarried in the southwestern wilderness. She was the freight agent for the Los Alamos Ranch School that would became the site of the Lab.
For $25 a month, Warner secured shipments at the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad's Chili Line stop at Otowi Crossing. A tea room for tourists was her side business. It became crucial to Warner's income when the Chili Line stopped service in 1941.
Montoya, who was 20 years older than Warner, was a former governor of the nearby San Ildefonso Pueblo. In his younger years, he danced his way across London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin with Frank C. Bostock, a world-famous animal trainer, who had seen the dancers and invited them on his European tour. Montoya was also a carpenter and handyman, and known for his quiet kindness and storytelling.
Warner continued running her tea room through 1946 — after World War II ended in September 1945 and her most- famous diners had left Los Alamos.
"For many," wrote Warner in her 1947 Christmas letter, "the little house at the river was a landmark, for some an experience. For me it was two decades of living and learning. I had hoped to live out my life 'where the river makes noise.'" She would have stayed, but a two-lane modern bridge replaced the wood suspension bridge. There was more traffic, more noise, and steel where gardens and chickens used to be.
Across the river and into history
Warner and Montoya moved into a new home a mile across the river in Los Alamos Canyon. Tony Peña of San Ildefonso Pueblo organized the construction with the help of the Pueblo people and scientists from the Hill, such as physicists Philip Morrison and Nicholas Metropolis as well as second Lab director, Norris Bradbury, and his wife, Lois.
After Warner died of cancer in 1951, Niels Bohr, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and a restaurant patron she deeply admired, wrote to her sister: "The memory of Edith Warner, a noble personality, and of the enchanting environment in which she lived, will always be cherished by everyone who met her."
Before Warner's eternal rest, she mail-ordered two years' worth of blue jeans from a Montgomery Ward catalog for Montoya. He died almost two years later. 🔎
Bake Edith Warner’s famous chocolate cake! Recipe Download ›