On Feb. 3, 1974, the night he debuted his cavernous Chuck’s Steak House on Southeast 17th Street in Fort Lauderdale, Paul Proffer took a celebratory dip in the ocean.
Chuck’s grand-opening night had been fittingly grandiose. Spotlights danced across the parking lot and 17th Street. Hundreds shuffled into booths, admired the fish tanks, queued up at the all-you-can-eat salad bar – a rarity at the time. Night swimming on Fort Lauderdale Beach seemed like the perfect ending. In 57 years of running restaurants, Proffer always preferred his openings to his closings.
“Openings always gave me the best memories,” Proffer says. “What’s happening now makes me feel like such a heel.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated his business, and after 46 years of delicious chops, endless salad and live music, Chuck’s Steak House will shutter its last remaining location on Commercial Boulevard on Aug. 8.
The Fort Lauderdale fixture had been open for dine-in, takeout and delivery since March’s lockdown, but sluggish revenues – about 30 percent of Chuck’s pre-pandemic sales – forced Proffer to close. Of his 40 original employees, only 16 are still working.
“It’s a total disaster,” says Proffer, 79, who lives in Fort Lauderdale but has ridden out the pandemic at his part-time home in Reno, Nev. “We sold 26 dinners on Monday. It’s been horrible.”
This month Proffer sold the Chuck’s Steak House building at 2428 E. Commercial Blvd., plus the land underneath, for $1.6 million to Frank Pettineo, whose Pettineo Insurance Agency is next door. Proffer and his business partner, Gino SantaLucia, broke the news to longtime employees on Wednesday. Two of those employees are his daughter, Maureen Jordan, and nephew, Matthew Benivegna.
“This has been the saddest day,” says Jordan, a partner at Chuck’s and an employee since 1978. “Quite honestly, it’s pretty shocking.”
At its height in the 1980s, Chuck’s Steak House operated four South Florida locations: two in Fort Lauderdale, one in Plantation on State Road 7 and another in Boca Raton, across the street from Boca Town Center Mall. The original 17th Street location closed in 2013. The Commercial Boulevard steakhouse opened in 1985.
The first Chuck’s opened not in Florida but in Waikiki, Hawaii, in 1959 by Chuck Rolles, the restaurant’s namesake. Rolles, who died in 2018, later expanded to Los Angeles in 1963, where he met Proffer, a bread delivery truck driver who brought fresh loaves to the restaurant.
“I delivered bread for four years, and when I finished my route I worked tables at Chuck’s five nights a week,” Proffer recalls with a laugh. “I was in cramps all the time.”
By 1969, Rolles had Proffer open another Chuck’s Steak House in East Haven, Conn., and four years later Proffer moved to Fort Lauderdale with his future wife, Louise, whom he met in Connecticut. When the Fort Lauderdale Chuck’s opened, every night hummed with hundreds of customers.
“Every Saturday night with one cook – one cook – we would do 900 dinners,” Proffer says. “This was back when you could slap a steak and baked potato on the plate and charge $2.95. Now there are all these steamed veggies and mashed potatoes for side dishes and four chefs are now doing 400 dinners.”
Jordan, 57, started working at Chuck’s 17th Street a week after her 16th birthday. She remembers the day when she, her parents and her siblings piled into a station wagon bound for Fort Lauderdale, and slept on the floor of the not-yet-open 17th Street restaurant until they found a hotel.
“When we opened we got swarmed every night,” Jordan says. “Back in those days folks passed around big bowls of Charles chips at the bar and sliced their own raisin pumpernickel. It’s not like that anymore and probably won’t be again.”
Most locations folded over the years, although independently owned Chuck’s still exist in Connecticut, South Carolina and Massachusetts. At 8,000 square feet, the last Chuck’s location on Commercial Boulevard was big enough to book local musicians such as Dave Roppolo. John Day, a singer who played 17th Street, even became business partners with Proffer, running Coconuts on the Intracoastal and Mango’s on Las Olas Boulevard until the latter closed in 2017.
Veteran manager Scott Stempkowski joined 17th Street Chuck’s in 1985, after a stint working at its Melbourne location. He bounced around Chuck’s Fort Lauderdale and Plantation outposts, first as a cook and later as a bookkeeper, meat cutter and manager. Two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic forced Chuck’s to close in March, Proffer offered him a partnership at the Commercial location.
“Then the whole world fell apart,” Stempkowski says. “Paul told me he’d never sell the business, but I’ve been here a long time and saw the numbers. I feel nothing but gratitude. I’ve seen [Paul[ help out so many people. He’s always been straightforward with me.”
For longtime customers who want to memorialize Chuck’s, Proffer says the restaurant will auction off everything it has – kitchen equipment, Chuck’s-branded dinnerware, even the seating booths – sometime in mid-August.
But Proffer isn’t about to let his last memory of Chuck’s Steak House be about its closing. Next year, when the “COVID-19 nightmare is over,” Proffer says he’s exploring plans to open a new Chuck’s in Fort Lauderdale.
“I’m going to be very excited when we have our next grand opening,” he says.
Chuck’s Steak House, at 2428 E. Commercial Blvd., is open 4-9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 4-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Call 954-772-2850 or go to ChucksFlorida.com.
