CLOSED 12/25/11

http://www.nnhs65.com/01-18-17-NNHS-Frances-_____-Pair.html

10/27/03

Image by Dave Spriggs ('64)
of VA - 10/05/03
Thanks, Dave!

- Carol Buckley Harty of NC - 10/06/03
 

While in town for the 40th Reunion of the Class of 1963, we were able to have three of our meals at the Oasis! 
Fabulous!  See?  You CAN go home again!

- Carol Buckley Harty of NC - 10/22/03
 

Hampton restaurant to close after 60 years

"I thought dad had bought a dive," he recalled. "Everything was '50s retro."

But it was a busy dive. Business people would come in for lunch as well as some of the older people from the Wythe community who would follow a well trodden path down the bustling Kecoughtan Road.

Sorokos soon came to appreciate the charms of one of the city's oldest restaurants, a place with an exotic past and a rumor of a visit by Elvis Presley.

The Christmas of 1977 is likely to hold happier memories than the Christmas of 2011, when the restaurant will close after losses mounted during the recession.

The Oasis has been a fixture in Hampton since 1952 and menus from that era list combination ham and cheese at 60 cents and a grilled hamburger for 40 cents. The food has remained as traditional as the clientele, although the building first opened as a gentleman's club in the 1940s when burlesque dancers were on the menu.

Sorokos said the restaurant was in some disrepair when his family took it over but it did a "tremendous business."

"I remember the place being packed. There was older clientele. It was just bustling but it was an old place."

When he later took it over and upgraded it he said some of the regular clientele gave him a hard time.

"They said, 'We like things the way they were.' I said, 'But there are holes in the booths and there are tin cans propping the table up.'"

Glory days

The premises at 3506 Kecoughtan Road was built in 1945 and first opened as The High Hat Club.

The Ives family opened the Oasis in 1952. Sorokos said in these days Kecoughtan Road was a major highway that petered out to the west where there was a golf course and an airfield.

"It's just a family friendly neighborhood restaurant," Sorokos said.

Sightings of Elvis are apocryphal, but Sorokos said he was told by a customer who was a child at the time that the "King of Rock 'n' Roll" visited the Oasis after playing at the Paramount in Newport News in the mid-1950s.

For the best part of three decades since, Sorokos said, trade held up at the Oasis. But there were signs of what was to come after the closure of the Sentara Hampton General Hospital off Victoria Boulevard in the 1990s. That deprived the restaurant of business.

The flow of traffic through Wythe slowed dramatically, but the Oasis managed to reinvent itself, Sorokos said. "We just thought that the neighborhood would continue to support us."

'Three lousy years'

But three years ago the recession hit and hard times came to the Oasis.

At the same time Sorokos said new chain restaurants were opening in the Power Plant and the new Peninsula Town Center, which has 17 eating establishments.

"We've had three lousy years, this being the worst of them all," Sorokos said.

He estimates the restaurant's trade has fallen more than 40 percent in the last three years. Employees were reduced from 22 to 12.

"We were supposed to have the place sold but the deal fell through last Friday," Sorokos said.

Sorokos' wife, Caroline, paid tribute to her customers. "When we got married we had 400 people at our wedding – 250 of them were Oasis grandmas and grandpas. They were my family," she said Tuesday.

The imminent closure of the restaurant has upset regular clients such as Thom Christian, 70, who said he has been eating at the Oasis all of his life.

"I am sad about it," he said. "The food is good and reasonably priced. I'll have to find another place."