Copies and Originals : Appetite for Diners Looks Insatiable

The “dehorns” used to be the problem at Mickey’s Dining Car.

Dehorns?

“Ya know, down and outers. Someone halfway between a bum and a wino and a person that ain’t got no job. ‘Dehorns.’ That’s what we call them here,” explains Mary Kiritschenko as if she were talking with someone from another planet. “They used to hang out here and pass out here. We had fights. This place was wild. I could write a book.”

That is the past. Now life at Mickey’s diner is becoming, well, chic.

“Now we get all those yuppies and preppies, ya know, and all their yuppie kids in here.”

Porsches Replace Drunks

There are Porsches and Audis in the parking lot where drunks and vagrants once slept. There are bottles of La Croix Mineral Water--a Wisconsin version of Perrier--in the pie cooler. “We’ve had it about two weeks now,” says Mary, squinching her nose in a show of disdain.

“La Croix and some herbal tea, those are our only concessions to yuppiedom,” says Eric Mattson, whose father and a partner opened Mickey’s almost half a century ago, in the waning years of the Depression.

But take away the mineral water and the fancy tea, and Mickey’s reverts to its pure and simple 1930s diner roots, an Art Deco, blue-collar American relic with 20 counter stools and four booths--a relic that is being mimicked across the country from Indianapolis to Beverly Hills. When it’s time to go out for dinner, the diner is in.

New Diners

Diners are turning up everywhere from shopping malls to downtown business districts. There are the Diner on Sycamore Street in Cincinnati, the Fog City Diner in San Francisco and five Ed Debevic’s diners from Chicago to Torrance, Calif.

“There’s been a real resurgence of interest in diners,” says Anne Papa, spokeswoman for the National Restaurant Assn. “Right now they’re very popular.”

“These new ones are imitations,” says Jack Nachbar, professor of popular culture at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University. “They tend to be trendy.”

“We get a lot of calls from people who want to know if we can still build old-fashioned diners,” says Harold Kullman, whose Avenel, N.J., factory has fabricated diners since 1927. “We just built a couple of Art Deco diners. There’s a certain interest in diners because of nostalgia.”

“Experienced restaurateurs . . . have discovered that diners fill a viable niche in the market,” writes Cecelia Niepold, managing editor of Restaurants USA. Many of the restaurateurs are from large companies.

But what is a diner?

For the purist, for the historian, for the late-night straggler and the trucker who wants breakfast when he wants it, the diner is a place like Mickey’s, an architectural museum piece and a culinary anachronism.

Finished in creamy yellow and red porcelain, stainless steel and glass, Mickey’s sits like a streamlined railroad car on a street corner on the edge of downtown St. Paul, across from the Greyhound and Trailways bus depots.

“It’s virtually like it was when they brought it here,” says Mattson. “I’ve never painted it. I don’t have a key for the front door.” In fact, there is no lock. Mickey’s never closes.

“We’ve had the same refrigerator since 1940. We’d change it but we don’t know how to get it out and get another one in, so we just keep changing the door handles when they wear out. And for the sake of our customers’ health we use only real lard on the grill,” he says, nodding toward an antique cast-iron grill.

Cook Started in 1944

That is where Rose Erdes, dressed in her black uniform with white trim, simultaneously fries a pile of hash brown potatoes, two three-egg omelets and a few pancakes, takes care of customers at 10 stools at her end of the counter, carries on two conversations, catches all of Mary’s short-order calls and never misses an order or burns a pancake--just as she has been doing since she started there in 1944.

“The soup is still homemade; the chili is a World War II recipe, and all the cooking is done on that little (3 feet by 18 inches) grill. All our recipes are 40 or 50 years old,” Mattson says. “Oh yeah, we don’t peel our potatoes anymore. It seems potato skins have suddenly gotten healthy.”

Mickey’s was built in Elizabeth, N.J., in a factory owned by Jerry O’Mahony, who was to diners what George M. Pullman was to railroad cars--an innovator who mass-produced quality dining cars.

Shipped by Rail

In fact, Mickey’s and other diners of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s resembled trains because they were shipped on flatbed railroad cars and had to fit into tunnels, under trestles and, of course, on the flatbed.

Factory-made diners came complete with stools, booths, equipment, operating manuals, bookkeeping tips, everything except the dishes, glasses, silverware and gum-chewing, wisecracking waitresses quick to call a customer “honey.”

“We got the gift of gab here,” says Mary, who manages Mickey’s. “And we know how to be rude.”

“What time does Anna start?” a customer asks from one of the 20 stools at the long counter.

“What time does she start if she gets here late?” snaps Mary. “I don’t sleep with her. How do I know what time she gets here?”

The atmosphere of Mickey’s and the personality of Mary--who occasionally lends money to regular customers down on their luck--are what restaurateurs Richard Melman and Lee Cohn want to recreate in their Ed Debevic’s diners. Four have opened since 1984, two in Chicago, one in Phoenix and one in Torrance. A fifth will open next month in Beverly Hills.

‘Certain Characters’ Sought

“We have a casting director working with us,” says Melman, president of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, the largest restaurant operator in Chicago. “There are certain characters that we’re looking for,” he says, estimating that as many as 75% of his employees in Beverly Hills will be actors and actresses playing roles as waiters and waitresses. In Chicago, he says, about 30% of the staff comes from theatrical ranks.

So do the surroundings. Ed Debevic’s is a Hollywood set designer’s image of a diner, a place filled with instant nostalgia: 1950s music blasts from jukebox speakers; the walls and ceiling are hung with ‘50s memorabilia and commercial logos. It is as much theater as it is restaurant.

“A lot of people think the ‘50s were the big diner era, and that’s not the case,” says popular culture professor Nachbar. “The ‘50s were the era of the drive-in. But a lot of people are associating diners with the ‘50s. Diners are more a phenomenon of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s. The genuine blue-collar, funky diner is, by and large, a thing of the past.”

‘They’re Not Diners’

“The diner is really just a site. It’s like saying a Georgian home. Who says you can’t do a million different things in a diner?” says Melman, whose creativity has helped make him Chicago’s biggest restaurateur.

“What they do on the West Coast is, they put in something to look like a diner,” says Joseph W. Swingle, president of Swingle Diners, one of four manufacturers still in business in the East. “They may call them diners, but they’re not diners. And they’re not serving diner food.”

Indeed. In San Francisco, the Fog City Diner menu includes lamb chops with mint pesto, grilled sausages and polenta with tomatoes, salads with roasted eggplant and peppers, mint and Dijon beets, goat cheese and marinated celery root--definitely not diner food.

“Ours is an interpretation of the diner,” says Bill Higgins, one of three owners of the strictly upscale, stainless steel and neon Fog City Diner. A free-standing, streamlined building, Fog City makes no effort to recreate the 1950s.

No Reference to Past

“There’s no play-acting or reference to a bygone era, the Korean War or bowling,” says Higgins, who was once a Melman associate.

Upscale dining is how Philip R. Adelman, a Cincinnati developer and restaurateur, describes his chain of diners opening in the Midwest.

“I think a diner is really a significant American architectural form . . . not a fad,” said Adelman, one of several partners in The Diner on Sycamore in Cincinnati, The Diner on 86th Street in Indianapolis and a third diner under construction in Dayton, Ohio.

The Sycamore building was once a true diner. Adelman and his partners moved it from Massillon, Ohio, where it was languishing at the side of old U.S. 30, one of the highways where traffic vanished after completion of the interstate system. It weighs 65 tons and cost $1.3 million to move. The new one in Indianapolis, a replica from the ground up, cost $1.8 million--too much to recoup at classic diner prices.

‘Casual Meal’

“Eating in a diner is like having a sandwich in the kitchen with a friend. It’s a casual meal,” says Tulane University architecture professor and diner historian David Slovic. “It’s not like you go to somebody’s house and sit in the dining room. But that’s what’s happening with places like the Fog City. They’re serving you a meal you might have in your dining room with company.

“They’re not the kind of places where you rush in, have a bite, say ‘OK, I’ll see you tomorrow,’ and rush out. That is what the diner was really founded on, a good solid meal, home cooked, for a low price.”

Which is what they serve at Mickey’s.

“It grates me a little bit when you get a bunch of yuppies in a room with 200 people and call that a diner,” says Mickey’s owner Mattson. “You’re not going to find a bunch of yuppie ingredients like blue cheese here. I can’t get customers to eat grapefruits or apples. How am I going to get them to eat sprouts?”

“And you get more than good food here,” says cook Rose Erdes, whom some people call the Omelet Queen of St. Paul. “You got to pay $5.50 to go to a movie, and here you’ve got a free show 24 hours a day.”

“Ya, you should see me when someone tries to skip out without paying,” Mary says. “I chase them down the street and I catch them.”

Mattson says: “Everything here is the real thing.”

Researcher Wendy Leopold in Chicago contributed to this article.