My wife and I met her sister one Friday night in Iowa City just to hang out and listen to some live music on the Ped Mall in the downtown area. We decided to go get something to eat and pizza came up in the conversation. We talked about a couple three different places and the venerable Airliner came up as one of the places to go get a pizza. We walked down Clinton Street and turned into the Airliner. I figured it was probably the first time in over 30 years since I was last in there. (see map)
The Airliner was one of my many hangouts during my college days at the University of Iowa. More of the sorority and fraternity types would hang out at the Airliner and my roommates and I would usually cruise the " 'liner" first during Friday and/or Saturday evenings before heading over to a place with live music and/or cheap beer. The gaming area at the Airliner was one of my favorite places. In fact, I flunked a summer school class during my time at Iowa because I liked playing the video game Galaga much better than I liked attending a 10:30 a.m. class. (Actually, I got on incomplete on the course because I feigned ignorance on the "drop" date for the class. I was just lazy that summer.)
The Airliner has been a staple of collegians since the mid-1940's. That was when Joe and Edris Rinnela opened the Airliner - named after a diner the two remembered that was near Midway Airport in Chicago. It didn't hurt that during World War II, the University of Iowa was the home to one of four Navy pre-flight training sites at college campuses around the country where cadets underwent strenuous physical training, as well as basic aerial navigation, communications, and ground flight training. Many Navy airmen got their start at the University of Iowa PreFlight - and many bellied up to the bar at the Airliner for drinks and beers.
Local lore has it that former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw frequented the Airliner during his one year at the University of Iowa in the late 50's. In fact, he frequented the place so much that he ended up flunking out of school and went back home to South Dakota to go to college there. A booth at the Airliner is named in Brokaw's honor.
Joe Rinnela died unexpectedly in 1956 at the age of 52. The Rinnela family continued to run the restaurant before selling it in the 60's. However, in 1970, the brother of one of Joe Rinnela's daughter's-in-law - Doug Tvedt - took over the Airliner. Tvedt steered the Airliner in one of its most profitable periods. Tvedt also sponsored an Amateur Athletic Union men's basketball team that was one of the top teams in the nation for a number of years. The basketball team - comprised primarily of former University of Iowa basketball players - won the national AAU championship in 1980.
Doug Tvedt and his wife, Gail, had seven children - all went to the University of Iowa and all worked at the Airliner from time to time. However, in 1988, Doug and Gail sold the Airliner and moved to Florida. I'm not certain who owned the Airliner from 1988 to 1992, but two local men came in to buy the bar/restaurant in 1992.
Brad Lohaus was a former Iowa basketball player who was then playing for the Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA. Randy Larson was an Iowa City attorney who was friendly with many Iowa basketball players over the years. The two stepped in to buy the Airliner and start a new chapter for the venerable bar. The one thing that has me confused is that I've read where the Rinnela family started serving pizza when they opened in 1944. I don't think that's correct as I sort of remember that Lohaus and Larson put a pizza oven in when they took over the place. I never knew the Airliner had pizza when I used to go there on a regular basis in the 80's - at least I don't remember them having pizza. But with Larson and Lohaus in charge, the Airliner made a name for itself for its pizza.
Lohaus and Larson ran the restaurant as a partnership until 2001 when Larson sold his share to Lohaus who had retired from the NBA just three years before. Larson went on to open a couple pizza places in the Iowa City - Bob's Your Uncle - but sold the business in 2015. Larson is also the person behind the popular Monica's Italian restaurant along the Coralville strip. (Click here to see the Road Tips entry on Monica's).
With Lohaus in charge by himself, things started to go downhill at the Airliner - and fast. The bar was hit with a violation for serving underaged drinkers in July 2002. Not learning their lesson from that, the bar then was cited for serving underaged drinkers again in April of 2003 and then again in May of 2003. The third citation prompted a 90-day suspension of their liquor license that they started serving in June of 2004. The Airliner continued to sell food in the day time, but shut down at night when they quit serving food. But by mid-July of 2004, Lohaus shut down the Airliner and walked away from the business.
Since the Rinella family still owned the building and were holding a lease that still had over two years on it, they were forced into action on the Airliner. A local guy stepped in to buy the restaurant, but the deal fell through at the last minute because of language in the lease. That's when Jim Rinella - the grandson of Joe Rinella - stepped in to take over.
The first thing Rinella did was a complete renovation of the space. Since he was living in Michigan at the time, he asked his uncle Doug Tvedt to come back and oversee the project. It took nearly a year and the restaurant was reconfigured and new fixtures were put in place. The bar/restaurant reopened in the summer of 2005 and Jim Rinella continues to own the restaurant with a local manager in place.
The Airliner calls itself Iowa City's oldest bar, but I'm also sort of confused on that one, as well. I was always under the assumption that the venerable George's Buffet first opened their doors in 1939. (For the Road Tips write-up on George's Buffet from May of 2011, along with its history, click here.) But "Established 1944" is part of the logo on the awning over the front entrance of the place.
We walked in and the place had completely changed from the last time I was in the Airliner. The bar was still in the same place, but the area in front of the bar was now filled with booths. They had moved the bathrooms from behind the bar to an area that used to be where the video games and pinball machines were when I went there in the 80's.
The back room off the main dining room is where the video games used to be. Now, my wife and my sister-in-law and I got into a small argument about the upstairs at the Airliner. I had never been upstairs at the Airliner, but my wife said that's where we - as in she and me - used to play the Centipede video game when we would hang out in the early 80's. I said, "Oh, no. It was right back over there, where the bathrooms are now!" Her sister said that she remembered being upstairs at the Airliner, too. I saw some stairs by the front entrance that went up, but it was definitely dark up there. At the end, I think we agreed to disagree as I think they were thinking of someplace else along Clinton Street.
We were seated at a booth opposite the bar along the wall in the main dining room. The hostess sort of tossed 3 menus on the table top and it turned out that the booth hadn't really been cleaned off. Our server that night was a young lady by the name of Audrey. When my wife asked if she could clean off the table (it was water marks from the people previously seated there), she left in a huff, then came back with a spray bottle and spayed cleaning solution all over the table - and it sprayed onto us. She quickly wiped down the table and then left once again in a huff. "What's her problem," my sister-in-law indignantly asked.
(Spoiler alert - Audrey's attitude didn't get any better the rest of the evening.)
Audrey did come back moments later and asked if we wanted anything to drink. I saw they had the distinctive Kona Big Wave spigot on their draft beer wall and I signed up for one of those. My wife got her customary Tito's vodka and cranberry juice, while her sister got a drink from the specialty drink list at the Airliner - an Irish Mule made with Jameson whiskey, ginger beer and lime juice.
While were there for pizza, I took a look through the menu at what else the Airliner has to offer. They had burgers names after planes - the B-2 was a bacon, mushroom burger with your choice of cheese; the Stealth Bomber was a burger with Cajun spices and bleu cheese; and the F-16 was a burger topped with cheddar cheese, barbecue sauce, bacon, and onion rings. They also had sandwiches on the menu at the Airliner - a breaded chicken breast covered in Buffalo wing sauce, a pork tenderloin sandwich, a chicken parm sandwich, and a traditional grilled cheese sandwich on sourdough bread.
They also had salads, soups and a handful of appetizers on the menu. The appetizers weren't anything special or unique - cheese balls, chicken wings, chips and salsa, breadsticks, etc. My wife and sister-in-law were hungry to we ordered up some the onion rings. They were cooked to a golden brown and came with a side of ranch dressing. They were fine for what they were, but I thought they were a little expensive at $7.99 for a small plate where there were just 9 various size rings.
They have three different styles of pizza crust at the Airliner - a thin-crust they call a New York-style crust, the Airliner-style crust which is a little more thick, then they have a deep-dish Chicago-style. They have a number of specialty pizzas such as a taco pizza, a meat-lovers pizza, a traditional margherita pizza, and an alfredo chicken pizza with a white sauce.
I wanted to try their deep-dish pizza - I had heard good things about that. My wife and her sister were leaning more toward the thin-crust pizza, so we decided to get two. I ordered a small (10") deep-dish with sausage, pepperoni and mushroom, while my wife and her sister got a large (16") supreme pizza topped with pepperonis, Italian sausage, Canadian bacon, black olives, onions, mushrooms, green peppers, then finished off with a house-blended shredded cheese. I figured that I'd have a couple pieces of the supreme pizza in addition to my deep-dish pizza.
When both pizzas showed up at the table at the same time - about 20 minutes after we had ordered them - I knew something was amiss with my pizza. First of all, a Chicago-style deep-dish pizza usually takes a minimum of 35 minutes to cook. This pizza was misshapen and they had tried to push the dough up on the side of the pizza pan to make one of their Airliner original-crust pizzas look like a deep-dish pizza. It was a feeble attempt at trying to make this a deep-dish pizza. The toppings were all jumbled in one area and on top of all that, they added green peppers to my pizza. I like the taste of green peppers, but they don't digest well in my stomach and I end up burping them up the rest of the night. I wasn't going to quibble about the peppers - there were other things wrong with this pizza.
The main problem is that it tasted horrible. There was like some sort of industrial cleaner taste to the dough. I had a couple pieces of the pizza and it didn't get any better. It left sort of a bad aftertaste in my mouth. Between Audrey's attitude and indifference, and now this sad excuse of a deep-dish pizza, I was becoming highly disappointed in our visit to the Airliner.
The large supreme pizza was fine. It was cut tavern-style and had a very good crust that wasn't too thin, but still had some pliability. It tasted much, much better than the abysmal deep-dish pizza that I had. My wife and her sister were both happy with the pizza. I told them that I'd offer them a piece of my pizza, but I didn't want to spoil their taste buds for the pizza they ordered.
The Airliner - to me - always bordered on being a dive-bar. But I had noticed a few things about the place during our time there that sort of disappointed me compared to how nice their renovations had been years ago. I noticed that my flip-flops would stick to the floor under the table. It was like they had spilled a full pitcher of beer under the table sometime back and hadn't cleaned it up. But when I went into the restroom after I finished eating, I couldn't believe what I saw. One of the urinals was completely out of order, the other urinal was just a step above unusable, the toilet in the stall had a loose seat, and the bathroom was just completely filthy. Now, I've peed in some pretty disgusting places over the years, but they were in places where I expected the bathroom to be disgusting. For as nice as the Airliner appeared to be, it didn't take much looking around (or stepping around) to know that this place needed an enema.
They say that you can never go back to the places that you went to in your youth, and that may be true in the case of the Airliner. I was never so disappointed in going back to a place that was one of my favorite haunts when I was going to college at Iowa in the early to mid-80's. We had a server who was in a foul mood all night long, the deep-dish pizza I had completely sucked and was one of the worst tasting pizzas I ever had, and the place was filthy with the men's restroom especially disgusting. I will say that the thin-crust pizza was pretty good, however. It had been over 30 years since I was last in the Airliner and if I get back in there sometime in the next 30 years, well, that will be too soon.
Prior to Larson and Lohaus the bar was owned by Dave McCurry.
The upstairs consisted of apartments until 1995ish when they put in another bar and dance floor on that level.
Posted by: Aaron | November 03, 2021 at 11:59 PM
Wasn't there a barber shop upstairs from the airliner?
Posted by: Mark Erickson | July 17, 2023 at 09:56 AM
The Airliner had 3 rooms in the 1970’s and 1980’s- the main room with a carpeted room on one side and another room called The Hangar. The Hangar is still part of The Airliner, but the carpeted room closed in the later ‘80’s. Doug Tvedt served Chicago style pizza in the evenings in the 1980’s. When Doug and Gail Tvedt owned The Airliner in the 70’s and 80’s, there were a couple apartments above the main room.
Posted by: L Tvedt | September 01, 2023 at 07:00 PM