Delivering triple service

For the DiMino triplets, who are practically the face of Montrose’s Rocky Cola Café, three is definitely not a crowd.

All three work at the retro-style restaurant on Honolulu Avenue that boasts red vinyl booths, stainless-steel trim and a menu that specializes in comfort food like milkshakes and Monte Cristo sandwiches.

But on Tuesday nights — the only shift in which they all wait tables together — customers get a triple dose of the DiMino sisters, Lucy, Antoinette and Mary Ellen.

Now age 44, the sisters have been making heads spin to look twice for years.

“This is more than a job,” said Lucy, the general manager who’s worked at the café for 18 years. “It’s like a home.”

The eatery has garnered awards for the best family restaurant, Antoinette, who’s worked there for six years, said.

And the triplets might have something to do with that since Lucy and Antoinette’s sons also work there — it’s a real family affair.

Mary Ellen has been on the job for only about 18 months but they’ve all worked within a stone’s throw from each other for decades, they said.

While Lucy was at the café, Antoinette worked at a bank down the street and Mary Ellen at a gift shop on Honolulu Avenue.

“We all three have been on Honolulu forever,” Antoinette said.

She and Lucy sat at a half-circle booth before their shift, while Mary Ellen had already begun whizzing to and fro between her customers, the computer and the kitchen, smiling the entire time.

Mary Ellen is fraternal and Lucy and Antoinette are identical, but customers still compare, contrast and confuse them, the sisters said.

Antoinette related an anecdote about when she worked at the bank and a customer who’d seen all three sisters at their individual jobs said, “I’m so sorry you have to work so hard.”

The sisters were born last in a family of seven children — the first four were boys — to Sicilian parents who’d arrived in the United States at an early age.

The family lived in Tujunga in the house their father built, and the sisters still live in Tujunga.

The triplets came as a surprise to their parents — their mother Clara was 40 when she had them.

Just two days before they were born two months premature, the doctor told the DiMinos that he could hear three heartbeats.

They might have been a surprise to their parents but they were no accident, Lucy said.

Lucy, a trained astrologer, pointed out that the DiMino daughters were born on July 3, at 3 a.m., each weighing 3 pounds and 3 minutes apart.

“The connection that we have is amazing,” she said.

And the sisters have nothing but praise for each other. Antoinette left the booth to give Mary Ellen a hand with her tables and Lucy didn’t hesitate to compliment them, calling Antoinette hilarious and Mary Ellen a sweet angel.

Sweetness seems to be a family trait. Try as one might to get the sisters to admit to making mischief on customers by trying to confuse them at the restaurant, they don’t.

Antoinette said people occasionally get mixed up about which sister is waiting on them but that they don’t play that up — not since they were young anyway.

Lucy laughed as she recalled filling in for Antoinette in a ceramics class while Antoinette was out with her boyfriend.

The family that works together also plays together.

“We don’t have any friends and we don’t care,” Antoinette said about how when she picks up the phone to talk to someone, it’s always one of her sisters she calls.

The sisters, who’ve become a fixture in the community, also love their customers and Montrose’s small-town feel, they said.

Lucy’s sons, Scott and Lucas, and Antoinette’s son, Joseph, complete the family team that helps each other through shifts, pitching in when one gets busy.

But Rocky Cola Café isn’t the first time the sisters have worked together.

Their father owned DiMino’s Sportswear, where he manufactured ladies blouses, and all seven children helped out there, Lucy said.

Mary Ellen said of working with her sisters: “They’re great people so I’m happy to be around them.”

Though they share the opinion that they love working together, and, as Antoinette said, they shared a hairbrush all through high school, one thing they couldn’t agree on was their favorite Rocky Cola Café menu item.

Lucy said she likes the bacon cheeseburger while Mary Ellen said the spicy chicken wrap was her favorite. Antoinette said she’d eat burgers for a week and wraps the next.

The milkshakes got a triple endorsement from the sisters, however:

“Did I mention the milkshakes for a week?” Antoinette said.