Sentiment, with a side of bacon

We love diners for what they once meant. But history doesn't pay the utility bills.

by Jane Hodges

Drive past the Rosebud Diner, in Somerville, and you might see Daniel Zilka repairing the 60-year-old building's black porcelain enamel siding, or its roof, or its decaying framework. Zilka is a professional diner restorer, and his work on the Rosebud -- which is still open for business -- will go on at least until April. By the time he finishes, the old Worcester Lunch Car Company Semi-Streamliner will be eligible for a listing on the National Registry of Historic Places.

Inside, owners Bill and Helen Nichols are planning the launch of the thoroughly modern Rosebud Ale House and Grill, a 2000-square-foot restaurant slated to open behind the diner when the restoration is done. The Ale House's separate dinner menu and microbrew bar will help the Nicholses offset the roughly $200,000 they've invested to keep the Rosebud -- one of seven Semi-Streamliners still around -- in spanking-new condition.

The Rosebud, with its arched roof, tile floors, and shiny counters, has had a roller-coaster history. Charles Peveloris installed the diner in 1941 and named it after the sled in Citizen Kane, which was released the same year. Like many diner owners, however, he eventually found he couldn't make ends meet by serving a bargain menu to only six booths' and 14 stools' worth of customers.

So he sold the place in 1958 to Evangelos "Galley" Nichols, who ran it as a bar for the next six years, serving drinks on the counter where patrons once ate eggs and bacon. He reopened the kitchen in 1964 and eventually built a club behind the diner, the Surrey Room, where lounge jazz and, later, disco dancing were popular. But Galley's business, though more profitable than Peveloris's, eventually ran into trouble when he leased his operation to three Somerville natives, who turned the Rosebud into a Mexican joint called the Cuckoo's Nest. Fights broke out among the hard-drinking clientele.

"Those people turned it into a drug haven," says Galley's son Bill, who now manages the restaurant along with his wife, Helen. In 1991, Evangelos, who had retained the mortgage, took back control of the diner and the adjoining club space. After four years of work -- including some interior restoration handled by his daughter-in-law's relatives -- the diner reopened in April 1995.

These days, as the Rosebud celebrates its 57th birthday, it seems the diner has come into its own. The community has embraced it, and the Rosebud-as-retro-diner may turn out to be successful in a way that the original version never was.

On a Saturday, for instance, local families and students from nearby Tufts and Harvard crowd booths at brunch. In the evening, old family friend Ted Oldak takes the door as host. The Nicholses and the wait staff pick on each other: Bill tells waitress Peggy that if she puts another birthday bouquet behind the counter the place will look like a wake. Before the saucy (and tenured) waitress can reply, he's out the door with a handful of quarters, ready to rescue customers' cars from a cop checking meters in Davis Square.

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New England is blessed with dozens of original diners. And for each of them, the risk is the same: can it survive without a restoration steeped in self-consciousness? In trying to re-create a local landmark, do you end up with something more touristy than local? Next time you eat at the Rosebud -- or at Victoria Dining, in the South End, or the South Street Diner, downtown -- consider Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use."

The story goes something like this: a poor country mother has two daughters, one of whom leaves for the big city while the other stays home. One day the city daughter appears with her flashy beau in a flashy car and asks her mother if she can take an old family quilt back to town and use it as a wall hanging. The mother says no. But the city daughter persists: if she can't take the quilt it will fall apart, because her country sister will wear it out with "everyday use." Again, the mother says no: she would rather keep the quilt as a living element in her family than let it become a decorative accessory.

It's not hard to see how an old diner is like Walker's quilt: it can try to live on, unpolished, in its day-to-day role (a neighborhood source of good cheap grub from cheeky wait staff), or it can buff up its antique exterior, tweak the menu, and take on an aura of other-era untouchability. It can become a museum that serves food.

The question of just what a diner means now is a timely one. A group of independent volunteers, donors, and diner enthusiasts, backed by the Rhode Island Historical Society and led by Zilka, are preparing to launch the American Diner Museum two years from now. The diner museum will join at least 10 other local-interest museums in Providence's $35 million Heritage Harbor cooperative; displays will feature old menus, appliances, and replicas of different dining-car models. The museum will organize field trips to local diners and may even operate a full-service restored diner on-site, using one of five donated restaurants.

The diner-restoration movement is as much a New England phenomenon as are diners themselves. Providence is considered the birthplace of the diner, the town where a man named Walter Scott first rode around town in a horse-drawn cart selling sandwiches and coffee in 1872. Worcester was the site of one of the three oldest dining-car companies, the now-defunct Worcester Lunch Car Company, which produced many of the 1930s diners still in existence, including the Rosebud. Worcester is also home to the diner-enthusiast magazine Roadside.

And Providence today is where Daniel Zilka lives. A mild-mannered 41-year-old Ohio native who juggles diner restoration projects with his museum-launch plans and informal restaurant-consulting gigs, he has handled more than two dozen diner restorations and has helped track down historic dining cars for sale. He also maintains a 3000-square-foot warehouse in Fall River that's filled with antique restaurant paraphernalia and 1950s appliances, many of which he loaned to the set of the 1996 movie The Spitfire Grill.

Zilka's work on recent projects, such as the Rosebud and the Peekskill Diner, in Peekskill, New York, displays a sensitive touch. In Peekskill, a sleepy Manhattan commuter town set on a picturesque hill overlooking the Hudson River, he removed stucco and linoleum from the diner's walls to reveal their original mahogany, shined the 11 time-tarnished seats lining the black marble lunch counter, and discovered the diner's real name -- the Center Diner -- beneath the layers of its oft-modernized exterior.

At the Rosebud, he's helping to correct the structural damage typical of most World War II-era Worcester models and repairing the landmark restaurant's black exterior, which is decorated with large red roses. The restoration was slated to be complete by last month, but Zilka and the Nicholses now find themselves waiting out the winter for shipments of black porcelain enamel from Texas. The worn patches of the Rosebud's original surface will have to be replaced in the spring.

Wherever Zilka goes, it seems, he leaves good feelings in his wake. At the Peekskill Diner, the president of the town's architectural review board could be seen chatting up the diner restorer as he refinished the mahogany wood stripping. At the Rosebud, the Nicholses plan to celebrate the finished restoration with a spring party -- and, of course, an application to the National Registry of Historic Places.

Asked why he does what he does, Zilka will talk about Zen, about walking the earth lightly and leaving something useful behind. But to the owners of the old dining cars, restoration is a matter of economics. It's not just about keeping a diner cute; it's about keeping a business running in the black, and if you need to change the menu and make the place more of a tourist lure, so be it.

West Roxbury native and diner historian Richard Gutman admits that some diners he's seen restored have quadrupled and quintupled food sales after the overhaul, but he's not always sure whether that's because restoration increases the number of customers or because it gives diner owners occasion to upgrade menus and prices. The Rosebud, for instance, now serves blue-cheese burgers and swordfish in addition to its morning steak and eggs.

"It's 1998," says Zilka. "Because of the small size of most diners, owners have to create their own niche to stay in operation. The Rosebud's menu is a little different, but I'd just say they serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a twist."

Of course, adapting has always been a part of diner history, part of the story of an institution that has evolved from a restaurant of necessity for night-shift factory workers to a restaurant of serendipity, an accidental food stop that's much more delightful than a visit to a fast-food joint.

Gutman's American Diner Then and Now (HarperPerennial) provides a good sketch of diner history, beginning with a nod to Walter Scott's horse-drawn sandwich wagons. Not long after Scott's contraption appeared, a variety of dining-car companies (among them Worcester Lunch Car) began mass-manufacturing transport-ready, trainlike lunch cars that eventually became known as diners. Most featured a prominent dining counter with a good view of the griddle.

Diners often operated near factories and, later, near America's emerging highways. They weathered the Depression while other restaurants failed; they also fit neatly into the temperance movement, whose leaders encouraged them to move into hooch-drinking cities. They maintained a family-friendly status, especially during World War II, when they began employing more women.

By the 1950s, diners peppered America's roadsides. In the 1960s, when McDonald's began proliferating, they began appearing in larger, Colonial-style guises designed to reassure suburban families.

And somewhere along the way, the old-style diner "came back," though plenty of the original lunch-car company diners had never gone away. Diner historians like Gutman, Zilka, Medford photographer Larry Cultrera, and Tennessee realist painter John Baeder are variously credited with writing, brokering, restoring, photographing, and painting diners into the American consciousness. And today, thanks to their retro appeal, diners seem more popular than ever. Just last year Albany, New York, hosted "Dinerama," a weekend-long convention for current diner owners and enthusiasts scheduled to happen again in Newark, New Jersey, in 1999.

Kullman Industries, one of the major dining-car companies still making transportable restaurants, this year began offering blueprints for its first new diner model in almost a decade: the "Blue Comet" (whose first unit is slated to open in a Washington, D.C., suburb later this year). And the food is back, too: the Old Farmer's Almanac forecasts a continued backlash against health food, which bodes well for diner cooks everywhere.

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The irony is that old-fashioned diner cooking, with the grease and the bacon and the burnt coffee, is sometimes a casualty of renovation. The Rosebud, for instance, has a handsome bar set up behind the counter, and its new Ale House, in back, will be serving local microbrews and increasingly elaborate dishes.

Yet that modern back room may be what preserves the diner in front of it. "I'd say 60 percent of the customers who come here to eat will leave if they see all the booths taken," Bill Nichols says. "But now they can go to the back room."

It is a restaurant for connoisseurs of buildings -- and of local history. As Davis Square changes around it, the Rosebud keeps its trove of Somerville lore: Robert Mitchum drank a quart of Jack Daniel's here during a Boston film shoot in 1973; comedian Steven Wright wears his gloves when he eats Rosebud hamburgers; Tip O'Neill used to live a block away. Somerville mayor Michael Capuano brings people here to eat, and Somerville native Lynne Lenoir says her artist grandfather, Albert Lenoir, may have painted the roses on the diner's exterior.

As Zilka and a handful of other professional diner restorers work to repair time's damages to the old dining cars, those hidden details become part of their newfangled appeal. And the history folds back on itself: the onetime dive becomes a shrine; the once-modern dining car becomes an icon of years -- and a way of life -- gone by. Not everyone is so analytical, though. Nichols, for instance, is a man with a business to run.

"The resurgence of the diner?" he says. "I don't really understand it."

Jane Hodges is an editor at Small Business Computing and lives in New York City. A former Advertising Age reporter, she has also written for Yankee, Newsday, and Hudson Valley Magazine.