Any Way You Slice It, the Staff at Philippe Is on a Roll

There was the time a naked man ran into the phone booth.

And the time Mickey Rooney, impatient for his lamb sandwich, began pounding on the counter.

And the time when someone collapsed from a heart attack and the other customers, reluctant to lose their places in line, stepped over the victim and kept heading for the counter.

But most of the time, the routine at Philippe the Original, one of the city’s oldest restaurants, is relatively calm--customers queuing up patiently, 16 hours a day, to buy bacon, eggs and pancakes for breakfast and Philippe’s trademark French dip sandwiches for lunch and dinner.

At the peak of Philippe’s three-hour lunchtime crunch, there are about a dozen waitresses lined up behind the 40-foot serving counter, making enough sandwiches, serving enough coffee and dishing out enough pie to fill about 250 orders an hour.

Juanita Gonzales has been working there for 24 years--10 of them as a waitress. Her shift starts at 6 a.m. and, except for a couple of breaks, she’s on her feet until she gets off at 2:30 p.m.

“Sometimes I get tired, but I like it,” the 47-year-old waitress said. “It’s the customers. Most of them are pretty nice, and sometimes the tips are really good.”

Gonzales--whose husband, mother, stepfather and brothers have been Philippe employees at one time or another--rolls out of bed at 4:30 a.m., Friday through Tuesday.

“I’ve been doing it for 19 years,” she said with a little sigh. “It’s OK now, but it took me 10 years to get used to it.”

Donning her Philippe uniform--a tan dress with a checkered apron and a matching checkered cap--she makes the short bus trip from her home in the El Sereno area to the restaurant at Alameda and Ord streets, cater-corner from Union Station and a block from Olvera Street.

The restaurant used to be on Aliso Street, where Philippe Mathieu founded it in 1908.

Although the place was sold to brothers Frank, Harry and David Martin in 1927, Philippe has not changed a lot over the years. The menu in the ‘90s is much the same as the menu in the ‘20s, although the French dip sandwich that cost a dime 65 years ago will run you $3.55 these days.

But when the Hollywood Freeway was gouged through the neighborhood in the late 1940s, Philippe had to give ground. The Martins moved their cafe to the old brick building where it stands today--a two-story structure that once housed a machine shop on the ground floor and a brothel upstairs.

By the time Philippe opens at 6 a.m., customers are waiting at the door. Most of them are regulars.

“There’s a man who comes in and just nods at me,” Gonzales said. “I know what he wants: bacon and scrambled eggs with the bacon crispy, three black coffees with one of them to go, biscuits with strawberry jelly.

“I’ve been serving him for many years, and I still don’t know his name or who he is,” she said. “But he always leaves a good tip.”

Business begins to slacken by midmorning, enough for owners John and Richard Binder--Frank Martin’s grandsons, to relax over a cup of coffee with Gonzales and chat a bit.

During one of those brief breaks last week, they talked about the loyalty--and determination--of their customers,

“One time, we had a guy drop over with a heart attack while he was in line,” John Binder said. “The paramedics came and started working on him. The other people in line just stepped right over him. The customers really want those sandwiches.”

But Gonzales said there was one incident when the patrons were distracted.

“That was the time John hired a striptease girl to come here for the manager’s birthday,” Gonzales said. “Right out there in front of everybody, she starts taking off her clothes. It’s the only time the customers ever left their places in line.”

The Binders said the French dip sandwich, which Philippe Mathieu claimed he invented, has remained the mainstay of the menu for 85 years.

“People like to count on things,” John Binder said. “At Philippe’s, the food is the same, the red-topped tables are the same, the sawdust on the floors is the same. People like it that way.”

The decor is distinctively plain.

In three large dining rooms downstairs, patrons share oblong tables with anyone who chooses to pull up a stool. There are neon beer signs behind the counter and several restaurant critics’ reviews--one of them in Chinese--on the walls.

Upstairs, there are four smaller rooms, each furnished with the same plain tables and stools. The walls upstairs are barren except for one small framed photograph of a man identified as Frank Cooley.

The picture shows Cooley in a Philippe T-shirt, standing beside a 150-pound striped marlin he caught in Baja California in 1987.

“I don’t know who he is,” John Binder admitted. “But he mailed the picture to me, so I hung it on the wall.”

Philippe customers run the gamut of Downtown types--everything from laborers in dirty denim to business executives in three-piece suits.

“But one time, a guy came in here stark naked,” John Binder said. “He said he wanted to make a phone call, and he went into the phone booth.

“There was a police detective sitting there at the end of one of the tables, watching the whole thing,” Binder said. “The detective got up, borrowed an apron to cover the guy up and took him away.

“Before they left, the detective said: ‘I wonder where the guy kept the dime for the phone?’ ”

Gonzales said that some of the regulars always wait in her line, making sure that she is the one who serves them.

“One of them is a man who comes in once a week, and the first thing he says is: ‘Go wash your hands,’ ” Gonzales said. “I go wash them in the kitchen, but I dry them out here, by the counter, so he can see me doing it.

“Then he orders a turkey sandwich on wheat toast--very dark toast, no mayonnaise--with the sandwich cut in half. He gets black decaf in a paper cup and sliced peaches. It’s the same thing every time.”

Richard Binder said the restaurant has had its share of entertainment industry celebrities--Charlton Heston, Dick Van Patten, Pearl Bailey and Mickey Rooney.

“I remember when Rooney was here,” John Binder said, shaking his head. “Drove up in a bright red VW beetle. He was beating on the counter, saying he wanted his lamb sandwich. He was kind of obnoxious.”

But if a lunchtime visit to Philippe a few days ago was any indicator, most of the customers are pretty easygoing, Henry Bachdasarian among them.

“Two pork and Swiss, two cole slaws, two Cokes to go,” Bachdasarian said amiably.

Shouting the Coke order over her shoulder to Guadalupe Silva, who pours the coffee and other drinks, Gonzales attacked two French rolls with a large, sharp knife, deftly slicing them lengthwise and dipping them into the meaty juice that is the dip part of a French dip.

Onto each roll she placed a mound of sliced pork that completed the sandwiches. She ladled out two dishes of cole slaw from a tub under the glass countertop, grabbed the two Cokes from Silva, took Bachdasarian’s $15 and handed him $3.31 in change with a smile and a cheery “Thank you.”

Serving Bachdasarian, from start to finish, had taken about 2 1/2 minutes.

Bachdasarian, who told an observer that he stops by “as often as I can,” left a $1.75 tip.

Next in line was John Shamme, who asked for “one beef dipped, two turkey dipped, two cole slaws, a couple of fruit salads, a piece of apple pie, a coffee and two lemonades.”

Some 3 1/2 minutes later, after parting with $19.31, Shamme had his food and drinks. He left a $2.75 tip.

For the next two hours, the pace never slowed, although the tips sometimes did.

A man with a $12.59 order left a 16-cent tip. A woman with an $8.23 order looked at her 2 cents in change, thought about it for a moment, slipped the pennies into her pocket and walked away without leaving anything.

“It’s OK,” Gonzales said. “One time, a woman left me a $25 tip. She’d ordered 10 double-dip pork sandwiches to go. When you get a tip like that, you remember what they ordered.”