Restaurants & Chefs
What's happened to the roadside cafeteria?
By JOHN MARIANI
What's happened to the great tradition of the roadside cafeteria?
Luby's Inc.
Well, for one thing, many have stripped away the school-lunchroom and blue-collar associations by renaming them "family restaurants" while keeping the metal-rung cafeteria lines, the steaming trays just out of the dishwasher, and the orderly array of American fare that can send you reeling with indecision.
Since none of it costs very much, you can pick up more than you know you will eat and take the rest home with a big smile on your face.
Back in 1977, my wife and I spent a 14-week-long honeymoon driving across the United States.
After learning that any restaurant with more than two stars in the Mobil Travel Guides was not worth eating in, we discovered the wonderful selection of cafeterias in the West, which even then were links in larger chains with names like Furr's, Piccadilly, and Luby's.
Brothers Roy and Key Furr opened the first Furr's in Hobbs, New Mexico, in 1946, and the second the following year in Odessa, Texas. Today there are more than 50 Furr's restaurants in half a dozen Western and Southern states.
Corbis
A cup of coffee is still a nickel at South Dakota's Wall Drug Café.
Piccadilly, famous for its carrot soufflé, first opened in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1944 before spreading to 130 locations across the South.
Bob Luby, a former World War II intelligence officer, and his cousin, Charles Johnston, opened their first 180-seat cafeteria in San Antonio in 1947, then steadily took over the state.
And there were one-of-a-kind cafeterias, like Clifton's Brookdale in Los Angeles, which took its inspiration from the Brookdale Lodge in the Santa Cruz Mountains, setting the scene with a replicated stone lodge complete with stream running through it, hand-carved wooden bear, and a 25-foot-high hand-painted mural of a redwood forest scene by muralist Einar Petersen.
Or the Cleburne Cafeteria in Houston, which was taken over by a Greek immigrant in 1941 and still serves fresh Texas-grown okra and homemade mayonnaise and salad dressings.
Or the iconic Wall Drug Café cafeteria in South Dakota, where you can still get a buffalo burger, a cup of coffee for a nickel, and a glass of ice water for free.
They all offered consistency of product, hospitality of the most genuine kind, amazingly good prices, and even regional foods, which might include Italian lasagna, Greek salads, Mexican platters, Hungarian goulash, Swedish meatballs, Canadian bacon, and London broil the whole melting pot of culinaria Americana.
The yellow, red, and green Jell-O molds, the icing-topped mile-high cakes, the sizzling fried chicken, the big slices of apple/cherry/pecan/icebox pies, and the German chocolate cake were always available and always unstintingly fresh for the simple reason that the high turnover guaranteed the cooks back in the kitchen were turning out the food on a minute-to-minute basis.
These days at Luby's you can find blackened tilapia, even sole "almondine." And they have a nutritional consultant who recommends that you remove the skin from your chicken, ask for gravy on the side of your mashed potatoes, and eat broccoli without the cheese sauce if you want healthier options advice that defeats the whole purpose of going to a place where a little excess is part of the whole deal: It's like buying a 1967 Mustang fastback and keeping it under 40 mph.
Now we all know darn well what put so many cafeterias out of business: fast food, which wasn't better, just cheaper and nowhere near as healthy. But there's more to it than that.
Corbis
Cafeterias had long been associated with stay-at-home American families who rewarded themselves with a nice meal out they were a place to go after church while still dressed up. Cafeterias were antiseptic for all the right reasons, downright corny by design, and part of an American prewar ethos that quickly became dated in the 1950s, when wagon-wheel décor and gingham-dressed waitresses gave way to a teen culture of blue jeans, ducktails, and chrome-rich cars that looked out of place in a parking lot filled with Oldsmobiles and Packards.
No rock-and-roll movie ever had a cafeteria as a setting; Luby's parking lots weren't regular hangouts for motorcycle gangs; and well into the 1950s, black families were not allowed to eat in white-segregated cafeterias even if black cooks prepared all the food and black waiters cleared all the tables.
Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon would not be found pushing a tray along the line at a place called Piccadilly. Instead, they'd be at Norms near Long Beach or Googies on Sunset Boulevard or any of the other California luncheonettes and drive-ins with their soaring, cantilevered space-age designs.
American Graffiti revolved around a diner in Petaluma, and the All American Burger in Brentwood was the setting for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. "Aloha, Mr. Hand!"
Luby's Inc.
These days, though, the cafeterias of the West retain a nostalgic charm, even if the décor is now closer to Denny's than Clifton's Brookdale.
I have to admit, it's been a long time since my wife and I picked up a plastic tray at a cafeteria, moving slowly along the stainless steel tubes, delirious with the options before us, and coming to the end to be greeted by a smiling cashier who throws in a "Y'all have a good day now!" with the modest check.
I think I've got to make the time before they all go away.
• CLEBURNE CAFETERIA 3606 Bissonnet, Houston, 713-667-2386, www.cleburnecafeteria.com
• CLIFTON'S BROOKDALE 648 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, 213-627-1673, www.cliftonscafeteria.com
• FURR'S FAMILY DINING 1401 N. Turner St., Hobbs, New Mexico, 575-397-3211, www.furrs.net
• LUBY'S 911 N. Main Ave., San Antonio, 210-223-1911, www.lubys.com
• PICCADILLY The original location closed in 1975. The oldest surviving cafeteria is at 5174 Plank Road, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 225-355-4387, www.piccadilly.com.
• WALL DRUG CAFETERIA 510 Main St., Wall, South Dakota, 605-279-2175, www.walldrug.com
Issue: June 2009
