The fluorescent sign hissed twice, popped on, and stayed on. That was the first Tuesday in March, 1993. Tomas “Doc” Halverson — twenty-two years out of the Navy, eight years of graveyard shifts in galleys from Guam to Gitmo — and his wife Marisol walked out of their rented townhouse on Mansfield Avenue, drove a borrowed Buick three blocks down to the northwest corner of Ponce and Bonaventure, and unlocked a door that had spent forty-seven years as, in order: a drugstore, a barbershop, a notary, and (for one strange spring in 1978) a disco. They served Doc’s mother’s meatloaf recipe. They poured milkshakes Marisol had been practicing on a borrowed Hamilton Beach until the metal cracked. They put a sign in the window that said open.
They never took the sign down.
Thirty-one years later, the corner at 1178 Ponce de Leon Ave NE is the only 24-hour full-menu diner on Ponce, the eighth winner in a row of Creative Loafing’s Best of Atlanta readers’ poll, and a 2.1-million-guests-a-year habit for a city that does not, as a rule, keep habits. The team is sixty-eight people. The longest-tenured line cook, Jose Ruiz, started in 1997 and still hits the same Tuesday-through-Saturday swing he picked up that first autumn. The booth under the chrome “G” in the northeast corner has been reupholstered four times. The sign still hisses when it rains.
This page is the longer version of why.
