STORY BY CORIE LYNN
Restaurants in Hays line Vine Street and are sprinkled through downtown, but tucked back into one neighborhood is a sandwich shop unlike any other.
According to Amy Jensen, the current owner of Professor’s Classic Sandwich Shop, Rick and Clara Rossell first opened the shop in 1976 as Professor Pittewurst Panaceatic Inn before the Brown family took over several years later.
“And then in ‘99, Kris Munsch, he’s actually the industrial arts professor at Fort Hays,” Jensen said, “he turned it into a steakhouse then where it had a full bar and that’s actually who we bought it from.”
Munsch described buying the restaurant as happening by accident, an accident that began the first time he and his wife went to Professor’s to eat.
“[The owner, Bernie Brown] came out and said hi to us and we were talking,” said Munsch, “I said, ‘This is a really cool place,’ and he’s like, ‘You oughta buy it.’”
Munsch, who owned Sip ‘n Spin at the time, said that his wife was against it, but he met with Brown several days later and bought it.
“Then we got it, closed it down, and turned it into Professor’s Steakhouse,” he said.
Even as the restaurant changed hands over the course of forty years and took on new life with each owner, one thing stayed the same: the menu.
According to Munsch, the original menu with the recipes were passed to him when he bought it from Brown, and, though he reopened Professor’s as a steakhouse, he sold the sandwiches on the lunch menu.
“That’s what everybody knew. Professor’s Panaceatic Inn, that’s why everybody loved it. Really it was the sandwiches and the spaghetti,” he said.
In 2003, when the Jensen family bought it from Munsch, they leased the building and grew mushrooms in the basement before opening the current incarnation of Professor’s.
They, like Kris Munsch, added their own twists to the restaurant.
“[I]f you open up Professor’s,” said Amy Jensen, “you have to have the sandwiches that were on the original Professor Pittewurst Panaceatic menu, and so we just kind of incorporated the mushrooms into different menu items themselves.”
Besides adding their own mushrooms to the food, the family adds their own honey. According to Jensen, they sell honey lemonade rather than soda and a honey cookie comes with each meal.
“We also grow a lot of our own food like tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers, things that we use in a salad, during growing time,” she said.
Like Munsch, Jensen found that customers come back to the shop because of the sandwiches.
“What’s kind of cool now is that there’s people who went to college in the seventies, their kids are in college now and they’re bringing them and saying, ‘You gotta try the Consumption Cure because it’s my favorite sandwich!’” said Jensen.
Besides the food, long-time customers also return to the building, which was originally part of a train depot moved from Yocemento, Kansas, for sentimental reasons.
“People got married here. People came here to dance. They have a lot of memories so I think that’s what keeps people coming back,” Jensen said.
Professor’s Classic Sandwich Shop is located at 521 E 11th St in Hays, KS. Additional information, including the hours and menu, can be found on its website.
