I go to restaurants to eat, just like most everyone at Black Bear. You can get a pretty fine feed for under $15 and everything on the menu comes with a calorie count - though I don’t go to restaurants to discover the fish-and-chips have 1,840 calories. The menu rambles from omelets and scrambles, to sandwiches and salads (most of the salads are meat-based), to “Classic Comfort Food” that is a nostalgic thrill ride of meatloaf and pot roast, fish-and-chips and spaghetti and meatballs, tri-tip and pork ribs. (I went with the coleslaw, which was a real hit.) There are sundry burger variations like a California Burger (avocado and jack cheese), a bacon and cheddar burger, a Tex-Mex turkey burger (pepper jack, diced green chilies) and a Chicago Burger topped with mustard and mayo, relish and pickles, onions and jalapenos. The burgers come with a choice of fries, potato salad, coleslaw, green salad or the soup of the day. The pickle slices were good, but the lettuce was kind of soggy I guess you can’t win ’em all. The meat looks as if it were freshly ground by an actual person it has the fragmented quality of beef that isn’t held together with filler. Order Bob’s Big Bear Burger (“Named after our co-founder, Papa Bear Manley”) and you get two-thirds of a pound of ground beef topped with grilled onion, tomato slices, pickles, lettuce, mayo and Thousand Island dressing, plus, should you want, thick-cut smoked bacon and cheese. I didn’t hear “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” but it might be there somewhere.Īnd then, there’s the food: breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes that are defined by their familiarity and their heft. There’s a jukebox that plays oldies like ABBA, the Beatles and some Motown. There’s a small shop near the entrance that sells merchandise: T-shirts, teddy bears, bear lotion and such. The place is filled with bear stuff like signs that read “There’s no place like cave” and “Wipe your paws,” along with bear curtains and bears outside the windows. She told me to finish my food - and I did.) (My server was a snappy young lady named Diane, who had her diners wrapped around her fingers. And don’t miss the cheer and wit of the servers. Watch the managers (they’re the ones in the gray shirts) direct the servers (in their black shirts, with bear paw suspenders) to bring the dishes to the diners with balletic precision. Just watch the expediter (the fellow in the blue shirt) directing the kitchen staff like an orchestral conductor, pushing the cooks to prepare every dish that comes out of the printer with crazy speed. The counter is a fun place to sit, especially since there’s a lively show going on behind it (an object lesson in how to run a high-volume restaurant). Late morning on a Sunday, there’s a sizable crowd of mostly large family groups, but the obligatory counter has a handful of seats available for those who straggle in as ones and twos. There’s one in Signal Hill, one in Buena Park and a South Bay outpost in Torrance where Hawthorne Boulevard meets Pacific Coast Highway. There are numerous branches of the Black Bear in Northern California, Oregon and Washington state, but here in SoCal, they’re about as rare as their namesake. It’s a snappy concept (even if they don’t call a glass of water “Dog Soup”). It’s packed with locals, happy to find they can feed the whole family a real meal for not a lot of bucks. It’s a place to go for chicken-fried steak with country gravy, chicken pot pie and pork cutlets with cinnamon apples. The Black Bear Diner is a fun experience, built around solid American cooking. And nobody’s yelling out colorful bits of diner lingo (“Adam & Eve on a Raft and Wreck ’Em” for two scrambled eggs on toast “Bossy in a Bowl” for beef stew). Honestly, the food is a little fancy for diner chow. They go back to the venerable lunch wagons of a century ago and to the sterling Airstreams that appeared on country roads back in the 1930s.īy those terms, the Black Bear Diner isn’t really a diner. The traditional diner was a prefab building - sometimes an old railroad car - that served down-home American cooking in a casual setting always with a counter, always with booths.
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