Beadle’s Cafeteria Adds Some Spice to Tasty Traditions

Ernest Vavra says he has spent $170,243.83 at Beadle’s Cafeteria in the past 33 years--and he has the receipts to prove it.

“If it wasn’t for Beadle’s, I wouldn’t know where to go,” says Vavra, a large, grizzled man of 83, as he picked over the last crumbs of his lemon meringue pie. “Other restaurants don’t appeal to me. This is where I like to eat.”

In fact, Vavra has been eating at least one meal a day, seven days a week, at Beadle’s since it opened on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena in 1956. He used to come with his wife when they both worked at the Sears store nearby. Since her death, he has come alone. “We’d send the troops out after him if he didn’t show up,” says general manager Jane Arvizu.

On a recent Sunday, he loaded his green plastic tray with a fried chicken dinner (one breast, one leg), mashed potatoes, canned corn, carrots, coleslaw, prunes, pie and a cup of coffee. Then, as is his routine, Vavra took his $7.85 receipt and placed it carefully in his shirt pocket.

“One nice thing about Beadle’s is this,” he says, holding up a white cloth napkin before tucking it, de rigueur, in his collar. “This place has a high-class clientele. Lawyers and Wall Street guys eat here.”

Maybe so. But Pasadena’s young professionals seem more inclined to frequent the tonier eateries that have sprung up all around Beadle’s during the past few years.

But those trendier establishments--and thousands of others like them across Los Angeles County--”come and go like gangbusters,” says Stanley Kyker, vice president of the California Restaurant Assn. Indeed, he explains, the average life span of an eating place in the county is only two years. Half of them close within the first year of operation.

Beadle’s Cafeteria, however, endures. But it is something of a rare breed.

Although California has more restaurants than any other state in the country, only 2% are cafeteria-style, according to a 1987 U.S. Census Bureau survey.

Cafeterias enjoyed their heyday in America between 1915 and the 1920s, lost some popularity with the advent of luncheonettes and soda fountains in the ‘30s, then plummeted further with the introduction of fast-food establishments in the ‘50s, Kyker says.

Edmond Clinton, manager of the chain of five Los Angeles-area Clifton’s cafeterias, estimates there are now about 15 cafeterias in the area, including two in Pasadena--Beadle’s and the Pasadena Cafeteria, both owned by Gordon Hammond.

Jack and Marina Stewart know how difficult it is to find a cafeteria in Los Angeles these days. They travel to the San Gabriel Valley from Hollywood about three times a week to eat at either Beadle’s or the Pasadena Cafeteria.

“If you go to another restaurant and order ham, you don’t know what you’re getting,” Jack Stewart says. “Here you can see what you are getting. It’s all right there in front of you.”

For Michael Trent, a 64-year-old handicapper who often plays the horses at nearby Santa Anita Park race track, Beadle’s is more than a place to eat. Sometimes it’s a credit agency.

One time, the wiry chain-smoker recalls, he lost 50 bucks at the races and was flat broke. “I told the cashier, ‘Put it on the cuff.’ I knew they’d accept it; they have a credit box.”

(Arvizu confirms that the management occasionally extends credit to regulars.)

Beadle’s “gives me a chance to get out of the house and be social,” Trent adds. “I meet a lot of people here. We sit around, drink coffee and talk about everything imaginable. The price is right, the food is good and nobody gives you the bum’s rush.”

That’s true, Trent says, even on Sundays, when families show up in droves.

By 11 a.m. on a recent Sunday, the first of an eventual total of about 1,800 customers began to arrive. By noon, the line stretched to the back parking lot.

Once inside the door, the customers faced about 200 feet and 15 minutes before they reached the cashier, where tray carriers were standing ready to help older customers to their tables. “Things change as time goes on, but this place stays the same,” says Frank Knaus, 85.

Well, almost. Arvizu, who manages the cafeteria for Hammond, her father, says that in early March Beadle’s will relocate about 100 feet to a new building on East Green Street.

And despite promises to customers that there will be no “cactus or ferns” adorning the new cafeteria, Arvizu reluctantly concedes that Beadle’s will make some concessions to modernity.

Pea-green colored walls, brown Formica tables and chairs, and crystal chandeliers will no longer be part of the decor. In their place will come a new color scheme: peach and evergreen. In an attempt to lure younger working patrons from the nine-story office complex next to the new location, breakfast will be served for the first time. A salad bar, deli take-out counter and bakery also will be added.

But the heart of Beadle’s, Arvizu pledges, will stay the same: Steam tables filled with chicken pot pie, liver and onions, Swiss steak, macaroni and cheese, yams and mashed potatoes with pools of melted butter.

There will still be a panoply of salads, perched on ice and passed to customers through an open-bottom glass partition: Waldorf and ambrosia, green cubes of Jell-O, cottage cheese.

And women in brown uniforms and aprons will continue to pepper customers with questions as they walk down the line: “White meat or dark? Clear gravy or cream? Roll or biscuit? Cake or pie?” With the crowd behind, this is no place for the indecisive.

Although the Hammond clan insists that the changes will be minimal, restaurant experts say that to appeal to a younger clientele, Beadle’s will have to be more health-conscious. It’s “still serving mashed potatoes, white rolls and Jell-O,” says Kyker, of the restaurant association. “That type of food has no substance, and it’s not what Californians want.”

Hammond, though, believes it is. On any given Sunday, he notes, he serves up 250 pounds of real mashed potatoes, carves 320 pounds of roast turkey and sells 250 chicken pot pies.

“Fancy is not in our vocabulary,” says Hammond, 77. “We’re not trying ‘to put on the dog’ from the food or decoration standpoint. We’re just trying to keep it plain, simple and nice.”

Hammond, who still works just about every day, left his family’s Tennessee farm in 1931, headed west and got his start in the restaurant business by busing tables. “I was a country boy who milked cows,” he says. “I was getting up in size and having disagreements with my stepfather, so I took off.”

Hammond began his career at Boos Brothers, one of California’s first cafeterias. It was started by four siblings--Horace, John, Cyrus and Henry Boos--in 1906. By 1920, they had a chain of seven cafeterias that had become so widely known that Los Angeles was dubbed by some “the capital of Southern Cafeteria.”

When the Boos brothers sold two of their restaurants to Clifford E. Clinton, who launched the Clifton’s chain, Hammond joined the new owner and worked for him until 1950.

He then struck out on his own, buying the Pasadena Cafeteria at 325 E. Colorado Blvd. from Earle J. Beadle. In 1967, he bought Beadle’s Cafeteria.

On the recent Sunday, many of the customers had come straight from church.

“Sunday is a family day,” says Karen Fleming, who comes with her children, husband and father every weekend. “We were raised at church and on home cooking--pot roast, mashed potatoes and peas. If you’re not going to eat at home, then you might as well eat some place where you can get that kind of food.”

Fleming’s 16-year-old daughter, Sharyl, rarely misses the trip to Beadle’s with her family.

“Most everyone who comes here is older,” she says. “You hardly ever see anyone my age. But I’ve come here all my life, and I’ll probably bring my kids here too.”