As life slips by, we cling to the memories of Sacramento’s Jim-Denny’s Diner
You have to be inside Jim-Denny’s Diner to appreciate why people love it so much. It has 10 stools and a counter overlooking an old-time grill and you simply cannot be shy or claustrophobic to sit on one of those stools and eat the food made before your eyes.
You can’t be sensitive to noise or hung up on niceties to eat here. You can’t cling to a “Farm-to-Fork” ethos that is now the norm in Sacramento. You go here to eat a subset of traditional American fare that was long ago discredited by nutritionists and restaurant geeks.
This is fried food: Ground beef. Bacon. Fried eggs.
It has this dish called “The Hub Cap,” which is an enormous pancake topped with slices of bacon in the pattern of spokes of a wheel. A big clump of scrambled eggs is then perched right smack in the middle of pancake and, voila! It looks like a hub cap. It’s so big that if you take a Hub Cap to go, as one must, the whole thing is packaged in a pizza box.
Do you see now why people are beating a path to Jim-Denny’s? The restaurant is on 12th Street between H and I, the same spot since 1945. This business is so old that it goes back even further. It operated at a different spot before, and has been around for 85 years.
The City of Sacramento was incorporated in 1850, 170 years ago. So do the math: Jim-Denny’s Diner has been around for half the life of Sacramento. I’ve lived here for 30 years and driven by this place hundreds of times, never once stopped and entered and never considered how much of Sacramento this place has seen, endured, outlasted.
And now it’s closing. Jim-Denny’s closed before – in 1988 and 2005 – but always re-opened in fairly short order. For now, the owners say they’ll open the eatery seven days a week until Feb. 2.
This time? Who knows?
Sacramento’s restaurant closings
Sacramento is experiencing a spate of restaurant closings – 10 in 11 days as 2019 became 2020. Other restaurant owners got tired and chose retirement. Some are pointing fingers at fellow investors for their demise, but Jim-Denny’s owners say they are closing for two reasons:
The rent was about to double. And its customers have dropped off because of the renovation of the Convention Center.
The first week of January used to bring a crush of customers attending an annual anime convention. But with convention business farmed out to the Cal Expo fairgrounds as the convention center gets a makeover, business dried up.
“We’ve lost about 70 percent of our business,” said Danielle McCune, who has co-owned Jim-Denny’s with her husband for a decade. By her count, they are the fifth owners. Without the convention, their daily take of up $1,700 in business has dropped to $500, or sometimes even less. She said in February, her rent would jump from $2,000 to $4,500 per month.
Ironically, when word got out that Jim-Denny’s was closing, customers came back. Business was booming on Thursday, as the 10 stools remained packed until well past 2 p.m. and many people leaned against a wall behind them, waiting for a spot to open up. By nearly 2:30 p.m., they were turning people away.
Bob Barich, an American Airlines pilot from Charlotte, ate at Jim-Denny’s Thursday morning before heading home. “It’s worth the wait,” he said.
Jim Denny’s nostalgia
McCune said that for a while, much of her business was out-of-town folks visiting and stopping after being intrigued by Jim-Denny’s mid-20th-century white stucco building adorned with the red neon sign.
She said for years, Sacramento people have told her that they thought Jim-Denny’s was closed. So locals stopped coming. They told her they would be intrigued as they drove by the distinctive building, but that feeling would pass quickly as they headed toward the heart of the city. The street is not conducive to stopping and looking. You drive through in a hurry.
When McCune spoke of locals forgetting about her place, I felt a huge twinge of guilt. It never occurred to me to go in before.
The Sacramento restaurant that had survived half the life span of this city will cease to exist because enough of us didn’t stop long enough to go inside.
“It’s sad,” said Victor Dillon, who grew up on Jim-Denny’s in the 1960s before moving away. He lives in Soquel now, was in Sacramento on Thursday and brought his wife Carmen so she could experience a taste of his childhood. The place was near where his grandmother used to live. He used to take a bus from North Sacramento to see her, eat at Jim-Denny’s, and go to the Crest Theatre.
Jim Van Nort, the original owner, was alive back then. Dillon said the old gentleman was a hoot, as were a collection of charismatic waitresses who are immortalized – along with Jim – in a huge black-and-white photo nailed to the back wall. As an homage to them, a statue of waitress is carved into a dead tree that presses hard against the back of Jim-Denny’s.
McCune said she would like to keep the business going, but the numbers don’t add up. City Councilman Steve Hansen ate at Jim-Denny’s on Wednesday, said he loves the place and would like to help. But who knows?
Nothing lasts in this world, or in this city. The generational torch is being passed on many fronts in Sacramento, and rightly so. You have to be a certain age to drive down a busy street and remember what used to be. You have to be a certain age to feel that loss and remember, as Dillon and others do, of being young and happy and attaching those feelings to a place and time.
Sacramento won’t be the same without Jim-Denny’s if that is indeed the outcome here. While we drive past, life slips by.
This story was originally published January 10, 2020 at 5:30 AM.
