Alas, Poor Hamlet, I Knew It Well

When a restaurant closes, people lose their jobs.

When a hangout closes, people lose their Great Good Place.

Both happened when the Northridge Hamburger Hamlet closed without warning the day after Thanksgiving.

Scott Smith, who had tended bar at the Northridge Hamlet since it opened three years ago, feels worse for the restaurant’s regulars than for himself. “I know I’m going to have another job somewhere,” he says, and, indeed, he will start next week behind the bar at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.

Meanwhile, he has been getting calls from some of the dozens of people who began going to the Hamlet as much to see him as to sip his margaritas.

“I feel bad for them,” he says. “There’s all these restaurant homeless we’ve created in the community. They’re used to coming to their Hamlet, and now we’re not there.”

As Smith knows, regulars are different from occasional patrons. Regulars find something more than food and drink at a favorite hangout. They keep coming back for that high-reward, low-obligation companionship that distinguishes Great Good Places (as sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls them) from home and workplace.

The Hamlet closure hit regulars especially hard because it was so abrupt. The restaurant was open Wednesday, gone Friday. “It’s kind of like skipping town and not saying goodbye to anyone,” Smith says.

Smith, an actor as well as a bartender, came to the Hamlet from San Francisco, where he did graduate work at the American Conservatory Theatre. “I’m classically trained to work at a Hamlet,” he cracks.

Droll and erudite, Smith proposes a Shakespearean epitaph for the eatery. He cites Horatio’s farewell to his Hamlet: “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

Pretty grand language for a place famous for baby cheeseburgers, but touching nonetheless.

The problem that former Hamlet patrons face is that there are so few alternatives in hangout-poor Northridge. In the past year, the Hamlet itself had clearly been in trouble. It had gone through a protracted identity crisis, tinkering with the menu and trying to find a new look for the servers that resulted in constant uniform changes--a period one regular refers to as the “parade of ties.”

At one point, a consultant was hired to lecture the staff on charisma and service.

The food didn’t really matter at the Hamlet, nor the ambience, for that matter. Regulars survived even the hideous-Hawaiian-shirts-and-jeans period. It was the first-rate staff whom patrons looked forward to seeing once or twice a week.

Whatever else was happening in your life, they made sure you could decompress for a while. Which is no doubt why prosecutor Marcia Clark quietly dropped in at the Northridge spot several times during the Simpson trial.

Diana Warneke and her husband, Doug, are two of Smith’s “restaurant homeless.” The Chatsworth couple used to come in every Friday night after playing tennis. They would sit in the wood-paneled bar and have a drink--a schooner of light beer for him, a glass of Kendall Jackson Chardonnay for her.

“Once in a while I would really splurge and have a Hamlet Long Island iced tea,” confesses Diana Warneke, office manager for a 3M distributor in Chatsworth. Doug is a printing consultant.

They would talk with bartender Elizabeth D’Onofrio, whose loyal following called her Lacey, and then they’d have dinner.

Sometimes they brought their 9-year-old grandson, Justin Norraik, with them. D’Onofrio, who has a 7-year-old son, Hawken, always fussed over him.

“We’re devastated,” said Warneke. “Where are we going to go now? We’re going to miss Lacey terribly.”

As Warneke explains, the Hamlet was where they began their weekends. “We knew the weekend was upon us, and we could relax and unwind and regroup.”

Lacey would often have their drinks ready before they got to the bar. “It felt like we were going to a really good friend’s place,” Warneke says. “This was a ritual for us, and we’re going to be lost without it.”

Ginger Russell-Stahley and husband Robert Stahley were also regulars. Russell-Stahley grew up in Southern California and has eaten at Hamlets all her life, she says. The Northridge couple eat out “Tuesday and Thursday like clockwork,” and once the local Hamlet opened, it quickly became a favorite.

“They went through that phase where they changed the menu a lot and put them in funny shirts, but we kept going back because of Scott.”

“I’m so upset,” says Russell-Stahley, who sells advertising for KTTV-TV Channel 11 in Hollywood.

The couple would often go horseback riding with friends on Sundays, then stop in for an early supper. Stahley, a retired college professor who is now an actor, would talk shop with Smith. The couple have five horses, and occasionally Smith would come over and ride what they refer to as “the guest horse.”

Russell-Stahley says the spot had a cozy appeal that she identifies more with the East than with Southern California. “We, in California especially, miss that Eastern ‘Cheers’ thing,” she says, alluding to the sitcom bar where everybody knows your name.

“The staff was so nice--it really did feel like a neighborhood place, even though it was part of a chain.”

The couple also regularly visit Skoby’s Country Inn and Angelo’s in Chatsworth, but say they are sick about losing their neighborhood haunt.

“It’s just one more thing that’s gone from Northridge,” she says. Ever since the earthquake, the local amenities seem to have dwindled, she says. “Houses are for sale. Businesses are gone. What’s happening there?”

Like Smith, D’Onofrio will probably have another job soon. She may work as a server at the Agoura Hamlet.

And she, too, is an actor. Her scene was cut from the current Jim Carrey movie, “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.” But last time she looked she was still in “The Whole Wide World,” an independent film going to the Sundance Film Festival in January. The movie stars her brother, Vincent D’Onofrio.

“I play Mrs. Smith, the soda jerk / pharmacy owner,” she says, with a laugh.

But the regulars are still without prospects. Smith jokes that he may have to start making house calls or set up a counseling program. When regulars ask him to suggest alternatives, he teases: “It wouldn’t be the same without me.”

The Hamlet didn’t just have regulars. It had faithful. Howard Schwartz is an optician who works in the same mall and dropped in almost every day. He knows it sounds sentimental, but he says nothing will replace the Hamlet for him, because of the people who worked there.

“Look for another place? I would rather put a rest to that phase of my life and go home.”