Mel ‘n’ Rose’s Translates ‘50s Diner Through ‘80s Hindsight

Remember when diners--the eateries called diners, that is--were an endangered species? Now they’re everywhere, with their jukeboxes and waitress uniforms and Coca Cola collectibles. At Mel ‘n’ Rose’s Coffee Shop, the nostalgia decor includes a row of electric toasters, a weighing machine, a big collection of old lunch boxes and a great big sign that says “EAT.”

But there’s something odd about Mel ‘n’ Rose’s: the lighting. A diner is supposed to have bright, antiseptic lights, pitiless fluorescent lights, lights that say, “Come in out of the night, stranger, we’re as clean and modern as a streamlined express train,” and subliminally add, “Eat fast and get out, bub.” Not so Mel ‘n’ Rose’s, where the lighting is actually pretty dim.

This low glare quotient is a little hard on the chipperness we expect from a diner. It brings to mind that other ‘50s, the decade of Bohemian coffeehouses, where one was supposed to nurse one’s coffee in the gloom and think bitter, defensive thoughts. Here one can only nurse one’s coffee in the gloom after giving one’s order to a waitress in an Andrews Sisters hairdo.

The reason must be that Mel ‘n’ Rose’s is on Melrose Avenue. Of course--Melrose, where everything despised by the avant-garde in the ‘50s is back, only this time being sold as avant-garde. Here it makes a certain weird sense for a ‘50s coffee shop to be run a little like a ‘50s coffeehouse.

The food is not quite ‘50s, though. Buffalo wings are an anachronism, and so is chicken sate , though maybe the fact that neither is particularly spicy is retro enough. Along with the homemade potato chips the menu actually lists carrot chips: microscopically thin slices of carrot, deep-fried. They’re a little flavorless, like an early ‘80s avant-garde experiment that didn’t work. The black bean soup is thick and unusually good (I sort of wish they gave you the chopped onion on the side rather than mixing it in), but of course black beans, unless combined with bacon, are an ‘80s bean.

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When we move into the entrees, though, we’re mostly in nostalgia city. The meat loaf, in particular. It’s not the nouvelle-style meat loaf with corn kernels popularized by 72 Market Street, just a meat loaf, but of incredibly light texture and pleasantly spiced with cumin. It comes with lightly fried red onion slices, real mashed potatoes and gravy and julienne zucchini and crookneck squash tossed in butter (OK, now we’re back in the ‘80s).

There’s a classic/non-classic chicken pot pie, with the ideal chicken pie filling, light and sweet with peas and carrots in yellow gravy. The non-classic part is that the crust is not a pie crust but a fleuron of puff pastry that I refuse to believe was baked on top of this filling. I’m not complaining, though.

The macaroni and cheese is luscious, thick with cheese. Cajun pasta, meaning noodles with a dryish and slightly hot tomato sauce, is mixed with Louisiana hot sausage. A smoked pork chop dinner, one of most exotic things on this menu, is made with an excellent chop cured like a ham. It’s very satisfyingly smoky, though perhaps a little salty. The mashed potatoes and gravy help with the saltiness problem.

The burgers strike me as a little too ‘50s, despite the occasionally up-to-date toppings that are available (at 80 cents apiece). The patties are not the thick, lean, luxurious sort favored by burger revivalists but rather greasy and ordinary. It’s a view of the ‘50s in one of its less flattering aspects.

The fountain lists a “California egg cream,” an unusually honest name (it’s made with ordinary soda water instead of seltzer). The apple pie belongs to the solid-mass school of pie making, where there is always something between the pieces of fruit. A somewhat stodgy pie, that is, but it’s automatically warmed up for you. The chocolate blackout cake is the correct sort, which is to say it tastes just like Duncan Hines devil’s food cake.

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The best dessert by far is the maple apple brown betty, a brown betty being the perfectly respectable mixture of cooked fruit and toasted bread crumbs that a lot of cooks are currently serving when they say they’re serving a cobbler. With its bit of maple flavoring, this is a remarkably good one.

Mel ‘n Rose’s on Melrose. Strange as it may be, the logic is unarguable.

Recommended dishes: black bean soup, $2.50; meat loaf dinner, $8.95; Cajun pasta, $7.95; chicken pot pie, $5.95; maple apple brown betty, $2.75.

Mel ‘n’ Rose’s Coffee Shop, 7313 Melrose Ave., L.A. (213) 930-0256. Open continuously for breakfast, lunch and dinner Sunday through Thursday 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Friday and Saturday until 1 a.m. No alcoholic beverages. Parking lot. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $16 to $44.