Diners at Dora’s Got a Side Order of Comfort They Say They’ll Miss

The hamburgers at Dora’s came straight from the grill, steamy slabs of low-fat ground chuck, and the soup, thick with vegetables and meat, was ladled out of a big pot.

“Fast Food,” said the sign on the little ramshackle restaurant on Green Street. But generations of Pasadenans used the place--founded 59 years ago by a grandmotherly lady named Dora Aizenstat--as a point of comparison with fast food of a more commercial nature. There was no comparison.

“It’s not like something that comes from under a heat lamp,” Peter Kang, a student at Citrus Community College in Glendora, said while sitting at the front table contemplating a Dora’s cheeseburger. “You can see them make the food.”

Amid much moaning and groaning, the restaurant--officially “Dora’s Oak Knoll Sandwich Shop”--closed Friday with a celebration that included a rock band and big pots of the eatery’s famous clam chowder.

“Hey, man, you still have time to reconsider,” salesman Sherman Jordan, a regular, shouted at owner-cook Al Aizenstat, Dora’s grandson, on Wednesday.

“All I can think about is being in the Caribbean,” said Aizenstat, who took over the place the day after he graduated from Arcadia High School eight years ago.

“We’ll still be here when you get back,” said Jordan, not to be denied.

“I’ve been thinking about it long and hard,” said the 25-year-old restaurateur.

It was either close it down or tear it down and rebuild, he said.

The restaurant, a battered-looking shack with a neon Budweiser sign and a telephone booth in the front, had become a bit of an eyesore. A broken window was patched with plywood, and the chipped facade was desperately in need of a paint job. More important to Aizenstat, the place had long suffered from a lack of such basics as an adequate ventilation system. The existing exhaust fan blew hot air on the customers outside.

“We’ve been getting temperatures of 165 degrees by the grill,” Aizenstat said the other day. “That’s not sound.”

And the little kitchen had never been big enough to accommodate a deep fryer.

“I can’t tell you how much money we would have made if we could have sold French fries,” Aizenstat said.

So when the owner of the lot, at Green Street and Oak Knoll Avenue, put the parcel on the market recently, it forced Aizenstat to make a decision. There was no point in investing in the place with a new owner coming in, he said. And business was trailing off a bit because of the recession.

“More people are brown-bagging,” he said.

He added--somewhat doubtfully--that he may reopen in a new location. He’s taking customers’ addresses and phone numbers to notify them, just in case.

Dora’s consisted of a pair of huts: the kitchen building, including a horseshoe-shaped counter, and an enclosed sitting area.

The atmosphere was always informal, with customers--90% of them regulars--and staff calling each other by their first names.

The food was cheap--$2.65 for one of those burgers, $3.85 for bacon and eggs--and the service friendly.

“You never got an attitude--like, ‘I don’t want to be here,’ ” Jordan said of the help, recently consisting of Katy Miller, Linette Vaughn and 13-year-old B.J. Buono.

There were always plenty of folks around who remembered the old days, when Dora herself, born and raised in Nashville, Tenn., was frying burgers at 10 cents apiece.

“We put love into our hamburgers,” Dora used to boast.

“She was a motherly person. And chubby,” said Anita Goldfarb, who was married to Dora’s brother, Abe Goldfarb. “She always used to say, ‘Don’t you think I’ve lost some weight?’ But she never lost an ounce.”

When Dora died in 1976 at age 77, Al Aizenstat’s father and mother, Al and Shirley, took over. Al Sr. was a character.

“He was a bit of a foul mouth and he’d tell it like it is,” Aizenstat said of his father. But he was also a genius with fast food. “He expanded the menus,” Aizenstat said.

And he was something of a soft touch.

“If someone without money wanted food, he’d give him a broom and tell him to sweep the parking lot,” the restaurateur said.

His mother was the calming force, he added. “She was the calm seas when things got going with my father.”

The main topic of conversation among the regulars in recent weeks has been where to go after Dora’s closes.

“I don’t know,” said attorney Timothy Hummel, whose office is nearby. “I guess I’ll bring lunches. My father--he’s in his 80s. This is the only place he’ll go to lunch.”