A Diner’s Special: PJ’s but Hold the Teddies : Business: Former waiters with a knack for the unusual offer patrons the chance to eat free once a month--if they show up in bedtime clothes.

Once a month at Cafe 50’s, the normally sedate diner is overrun by little ducks, teddy bears and fuzzy bunnies.

Women arrive in flannel jams with their hair in curlers. Grown men show up in their Dr. Dentons. Little girls wear their toasty nightgowns.

Craig Martin, 36, and Joey Rooney, 37, are behind this public pajama party. Former waiters with a knack for the unusual, they now own and operate Cafe 50’s restaurants in Sherman Oaks and West Los Angeles.

When the economy went to sleep a few years ago, Martin and Rooney decided to try something different to boost business.

So during July and August of 1992, anyone who showed up in pajamas on any Wednesday could eat free, an offer they took back two months later because of the unexpected wild response.

“I can’t remember exactly how many meals we gave away at the two restaurants that year, or what it cost us, but it was in the gazillions,” Rooney said.

After stopping for a while to preserve financial solvency, the pair started the pajama special again five months ago, albeit on a smaller scale.

“Now we only give away meals on the last Wednesday of the month, and from a specific menu, and people have to wear traditional pajamas,” Martin said. Traditional, he said, means something “like your grandmother would buy you, with pants and a top that buttons up and down. Nothing kinky.”

Banned are sexy negligees or two-piece, revealing pajamas. The owners aren’t looking for trouble, just business, they say.

And, people who think sweats or thermal underwear are going to make it also have another think coming.

Dining recently in their bedtime clothes was the Goben family of North Hollywood. Louise Goben is a minister at the First Christian Church of North Hollywood and her husband, Galen Goben, is a minister at the First Christian Church of Burbank.

The couple and their boys--Chris, 6, and Jeff, 1 1/2--were attired for Cafe 50’s in their most conservative pajamas. Chris was wearing his new Aladdin slippers.

Before they got to the restaurant, Galen Goben decided to stop at the ATM for a little cash. He is still wondering if any of his parishioners saw him running around a mall dressed in his bathrobe and slippers at 6:30 at night.

Lee West of Canoga Park was also in her pajamas and a festive mood as she helped Carol Convey of Agoura Hills celebrate Convey’s 47th birthday at the Sherman Oaks Cafe 50’s.

West was smartly turned out in a floral-print robe and flowery pajamas. The birthday woman was a vision in pink. The women seemed to be having fun as they contemplated the menu until West, who is a manager of the Woodland Hills branch of the Bank of America, recognized one of her best customers.

He was in street clothes. She wondered just what he thought of her attire.

Others don’t seem to care, so long as the food is free.

“I can’t believe I’m sitting in my pajamas in public,” Alecia Foster, 22, a Cal State Northridge journalism student, said to her fiance, Andrew Heyl, 28, of Sherman Oaks.

Heyl grinned, ate some more and swallowed.

“The food’s good and free,” he said.