RESTAURANTS : MILLIE’S: UNMODERN AND OFFBEAT

There is a wonderful, familiar squalor about Millie’s on Sunset in Silver Lake. It looks like your first New York apartment transmogrified into a diner, its main decorative feature, like that apartment, a thick coat of semigloss enamel paint that keeps heaven-knows-what, for a time, sealed into the walls.

Hit Millie’s at the right time on a hungover Sunday morning, and you won’t have a long wait for one of the counter’s eight stools, the best place to sit for breakfast. You don’t have to talk--thank goodness, because you can’t, yet, anyway--and you can watch the action; a cook who looks like an English rock star at the range, showering mounds of hash browns with enough black pepper to add a fiery edge to the rising steam filling the room.

He’s not all. The place is a Jim Jarmusch movie as restaurant, downbeat, offbeat, what we used to call a scene. In a corner, a post-punk woman in black lipstick, hair of purple, orange and black, holds a cigarette in one hand, a forkful of eggs in another. The girl washing dishes in the back room has come to work in a pair of men’s flannel pajamas. The kid sitting next to you appears never to have seen the sun, skin white as a brat-pack vampire, eyes like clear plastic, clothes black, the stamp of last night’s punk club on the back of his hand. He’s wolfing down pork chops smothered in pepper-flecked white gravy, hash browns, a fresh-baked biscuit loaded with peach jam, washing the whole thing down with a glass of milk.

Greasy-spoon squalor, of course, is not for everyone. Millie’s would not appeal, for instance, to a mom who can’t visit her kid’s off-campus apartment without arming herself with a can of Comet and a Brillo pad.

But there is no better place to find a cure for a comatose Sunday morning: on the jukebox, reggae, rockabilly, Fats Domino doing “Blueberry Hill”; on the counter before you salvation in the form of a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and something called a Devil’s Mess--scrambled eggs and spicy sausage, onion, peppers, cheese, all messed together and heavily spiked with curry and cayenne, buried under a layer of sliced avocados. Who was it--Lillian Hellman?-- who said she needed alcohol just to bring her blood temperature up to that of normal people? She should have tried a Devil’s Mess washed down with some of Millie’s jet-fuel-strength coffee.

The story is that Millie’s was owned by two men named Paul, one of whom, the one who plays in a band called Radio Ranch and the Straight Shooters, has departed, taking with him his Depression-ware china and a good part of the ‘30s paraphernalia that was the decor. A few yellowed Coca-Cola signs remain, though, a funky mirror, some weird old post cards stuck into the hood over the stove and an ancient rotating electric fan still caked with the kitchen grease of decades.

The remaining Paul has now expanded the place into a pint-size space next door that accommodates five small tables, and he’s serving dinner, which, like breakfast, is good, strong stuff, and cheap too.

There’re liver and onions, fresh fish, chicken broiled to order, beef stroganoff and daily specials, all served with wonderful roasted potatoes, red cabbage and fresh green vegetables--a great plate of food for about $8. You can’t go wrong with the chicken or the bowls of linguini heaped with seafood from a kitchen not shy of garlic. If you’re really lucky, the night’s special will be lamb, a great, tender, garlicky hunk of it lopped off from a roasted leg, served with fresh rosemary that’s been crisped in butter. That, with a salad of leaf lettuce, endive and onion in a good vinaigrette, makes a fine meal.

But even if you got there one night and they were out of that day’s special (roast pork) and you ordered the stroganoff, which tasted like some of your first attempts at cooking in that apartment in New York . . . even if, that night, the kitchen was off and your dinner guest complained about his soup, the jukebox was particularly jangling and the conversation wasn’t going so well either, you’d be back again.

A meal is just a meal, but Millie’s is what we used to call fun.

Millie’s, 3524 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 662-5720. Street parking. No alcohol. Open for breakfast Tuesday-Friday 8 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday 8 a.m.-5 p.m. For dinner Monday-Friday, 5 p.m.-11 p.m. No credit cards accepted. Breakfast for two: $15. Dinner for two: $20-$25.