Dolores Restaurant
11407 Santa Monica Blvd.
$10
(Out Of 5)
Dolores wasn’t joking when she made the motto of her diner “The best of yesterday brought to you today.”
Everything ““ the kitschy orange booths, the food, the pink lipstick on the water glass, all enveloped by the sound of Frank Sinatra crooning in the background ““ gives everyone who walks into Dolores Restaurant a sense of 1940s nostalgia, even if they weren’t alive for it the first time around.
Similar in principle to Canter’s Deli, Dolores Restaurant offers mediocre food at fairly steep prices, and around-the-clock service that is equally lackluster at any hour.
Though we were initially lured in by the prospect of $3.95 breakfast (which, by the way, is only offered Monday through Friday from 4 a.m. to 11 a.m., and not Saturday at 1 p.m. when we showed up), once we entered the restaurant to the orange-y coffee shop glow and sunlight streaming through the stained glass horse windows, we knew we had to stay.
Our waitress, a slightly withered woman in white high heels, expressed little shock at the sight of the pink lipstick smeared around the lip of my friend’s water glass. This happened to be at around the same time when I decided that telling her my cup of coffee tasted like very slightly warmed pond water was probably futile.
After perusing the menu for a while, I settled on the thing that sounded the most entertaining ““ the pancake sandwich for $6.95, despite the faces made by my friends, who went for more standard fare such as the $9.75 original omelet and the sausage and eggs for $8.95.
Though we all stayed on the breakfast side of things, the menu offers everything from Italian to chili dishes to seafood to broiled hamburger patty. You can even order beer or wine.
Needless to say, I was surprised when a hamburger arrived in front of me at the same time as my friends’ egg dishes. Our waitress seemed equally surprised at my insistence that though the burger looked lovely, I really did have my heart set on the pancake sandwich, whatever it may be.
The wait for what I actually ordered went by quickly, however, due in large part to the entertainment value of the gargantuan cinnamon roll that came with my friend’s eggs and sausage.
Though she had been given a choice between such items as fried potatoes, a blueberry muffin or bran, she had settled on a cinnamon roll that was easily as large as the average head. Perched atop a gurgly puddle of frosting, the cinnamon roll came adorned with a side of three pats of butter, reminding us again that this was the ’40s we had stepped into, and that phrases such as “fat” and “morbid obesity” had yet to work their way into everyday vernacular.
When my pancake sandwich finally did come, it wasn’t immediately obvious that it was a sandwich until I looked between the two pancakes and saw the perfectly rounded conglomeration of egg and square ham chunks. Though it was predictably bland, I was still impressed by the number of food groups that had been neatly arranged in such a small space.
After paying our bill at the counter, which also sold long licorice ropes and other more mainstream candy, it was almost a shock to step out of the restaurant and back onto the street, where people walked past on cell phones or thundered by in Hummers.
But if you ever need a break from all that, Frank Sinatra and the 1940s await you just behind the stained glass horse windows.
““ Lauren Evans
E-mail Evans at levans@media.ucla.edu.