I gave colleague Maureen Tomczak a slice of my (truly fabulous) Basque cheesecake, and the memories came flooding back to her.

Basque cheesecake is sublimely light and decadently rich. The taste of it brought her back to her high school days in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when she worked as a waitress at the Woolworth’s in River Roads Mall in Jennings, MIssouri.

I didn’t know that Woolworth’s had restaurants. We were a G.C. Murphy family, and I think Woolworth’s was upscale and high-class compared to Murphy’s. The Murphy’s we went to did have what was once a lunch counter, but it was closed by the time I came around.

I thought Woolworth’s had lunch counters, too — there was that famous one in Greensboro, North Carolina. But Tomczak said the Woolworth’s in River Roads Mall did not have a lunch counter. Instead, it had, on an ascending scale of fanciness, a takeout counter with no seating and two full restaurants.

The takeout counter was the most casual: It sold hot dogs, hamburgers, fries, doughnuts and the like. It also had pizza by the slice, just a few years before pizza became a national obsession.

Tomczak worked most of the time at the mid-level culinary emporium, a sit-down restaurant called the Steamboat Room. It offered modest American fare, which she served while wearing her uniform, a crinkly, knee-length blue-green dress with a white apron. The uniform seemed designed specifically to repel the grease that would inevitably be spilled on it, she says.

The menu ran the gamut from a hamburger platter to a cheeseburger platter to a frankfurter dinner, with stops along the way for a ham-and-egg plater or a grilled ham and french-fried potato platter. The restaurant also served club sandwiches, grilled sandwiches (such as grilled old English cheese and tomato) and hot dinners such as chicken stew and chop suey.

The hot dinners came with a slice of buttered white bread. “Their soft, white bread with a square of butter was indescribably delicious,” Tomczak says.

The Steamboat Room was especially popular with teens on Saturdays, she says. High school kids would come in and flirt with each other over plates of French fries and Cokes. Always, one plate of French fries and two Cokes.

The item that Tomczak liked most was the cheesecake. It was exquisitely light, like a chiffon pie, and maybe 4 inches high. It had a graham cracker crust, with more graham crackers crushed on top like a crumble. The cheesecake had to be brought out of the kitchen in enormous trays, which had to be moved about on a cart.

You can find knockoff recipes for Woolworth cheesecake online, incidentally. Along with the graham cracker crust, they require cream cheese, chilled evaporated milk, sugar, vanilla, hot and cold water, and a box of lemon Jell-O.

The fanciest restaurant at the Woolworth’s, according to Tomczak, was called Harvest House Cafeteria. Harvest House is where you would go if you wanted something substantial, like Salisbury steak. You could get a roast turkey dinner or baked ham every Sunday, according to ads from the time. On Fridays, the lunch special was baked tuna fish and noodles.

The Harvest House was a cafeteria, so the food was served direct from steam tables. I asked Tomczak why a cafeteria with steam tables would be considered better food than a sit-down restaurant, and she said it all came from the same kitchen.

The F.W. Woolworth Co. was one of the largest retail chains in the world for much of the 20th century. It began to fade in the 1980s and went out of business in 1997. But its successful athletic shoe division stayed in business under the name Foot Locker.

Recently, Dick’s Sporting Goods stores announced they would be buying Foot Locker for $2.4 billion.

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