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Whenever Luke Neddenriep walks into the JT Basque Bar & Dining Room, he can remember his first meal in a restaurant, "I was a little guy," said Neddenriep, eighty-two, a lifelong Gardnerville resident. "My dad ordered steak. I hated gristle and fat on a steak. I liked the meat, but not the fat. I cut all that off. Before we left, he said, 'You know, we have to pay for that fat whether you eat it or not, so you'd better eat it.' I ate the whole damn works."
That was a long time ago. But the century-old building housing JT remains a Gardnerville landmark where a town's memories linger. Neddenriep still can walk to the JT from where he lives.
"I forced it down," Neddenriep said of the dinner. He figures he cleaned his plate on a day sometime in the mid-1920s. The JT wasn't the JT when Neddenriep was a fussy kid, but rather was Rahbeck's Gardnerville Hotel. Now names don't matter. People have been eating and drinking in the white, wooden, two -story building since it was moved from the Virginia City area to Gardnerville about 1896.
"No, actually, before that," said J.B. Lekumberry, who owns and operates the JT Basque Bar & Dining Room with his sister Marie. "There is a picture of it here in1896. It sat in Genoa for a year."
Genoa? That bit of information starts a debate between brother and sister. "Do we know for sure?" Marie asked of the building's supposed stop in Nevada's historic heart on its way to Gardnerville. J.B. isn't sure, but he likes the story.
"That's what the historic folks say,' J.B. said with a grin. "It sounds good." One thing is certain, said Marie: "It's always been eating place and saloon."
For years, those eating places and saloons, owned mostly by Basques such as the Lukumberrys, have given Gardnerville much of its character. Across the street from JT, the Overland Hotel, another Basque bar-restaurant - built in 1902 - carries on a unique local tradition. Every year, on the first Friday in June, the Carson Valley Nut Club meets and eats at the Overland.
"They have a bunch of drinks and they have dinner," said local author and historian Ray Smith, a club member. "Dinner is always mountain oysters." More specifically, the oysters come from sheep. "There are no officers, there are no minutes and there are no bylaws," Smith said of the men-only club of mostly longtime ranchers and their kids. "It started around the mid-1930's. It's a get-together. A bunch of ranchers in the early days thought it would be a good idea to get together and have dinner. Very few people know about it."
Elvira Cenoz, sixty-seven, the Spanish Basque who runs the Overland, has a problem. "You don't have too many sheep," Cenoz said with a laugh. "Every year the club is growing. There are two or three generations of families in it. But the sheep aren't growing."
Carson Valley is, with its subdivisions filled mainly with retirees, Lake Tahoe casino workers or state government employees in Carson City. "There was no suburban experience," Marie Lekumberry said. "Now it's all suburban."
The JT and Overland are links with the past. "It might have evolved, but that core of what a Basque restaurant was about still exists here," said J.B. Lekumberry. "It's not like we're just a dinner house. It's very much a social place."
Gardnerville's Basque establishments also come with reputations. "All your old restaurants were here, all your old bootleggers were here," said Neddenriep with a chuckle. "A lot of bootleg whiskey went from here to Reno. They couldn't drink it all here." Neddenriep's family operated the general store in Gardnerville for sixty-nine years.
Illegal booze was a popular Carson Valley product during Prohibition from 1920 to 1933. "The Carson Valley was considered one of the most flagrant bootlegging areas in the country," Smith said. "Every little canyon had a still. It was remote, but relatively close to population centers."
Regardless of legalities, whiskey from the stills was needed to stay in business.
IMPORTANT DATES & FACTS FOR GARDNERVILLE
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