Shoo be Doo or Shoo Be Don’t
Restaurant review for The Stranger by Clark Humphrey
7-30-97
Despite the demise of Johnny Rockets’ Broadway branch last winter and of Wallingford’s Beeliner Diner a few months before that, the faux-’50s pseudo-diner remains a concept whose time-that-never-was refuses to go away, even as the real diner becomes an endangered species. Even the Mar T Cafe in North Bend, beloved worldwide as the RR Diner in Twin Peaks, is succumbing. (Mar T owner Pat Cokewell retired and sold the place to a longtime associate, who announced plans to gussy up the joint with lotsa chrome and old-car paintings.)
In the Northeast, a diner is a specific type of restaurant building, often made prefab then towed to the site of business. In these parts, it’s a generic name for a good unpretentious place serving good unpretentious American food to good unpretentious Americans. Problem is, that kind of proposition doesn’t leave room for some of the elements of modern-day restaurateuring, such as cutesy decor and higher-profit-margin menu items.
So instead we get the diner-nostalgia theme restaurant. The latest Seattle example’s called Shoo Be Doo. It’s right by Seattle Center but easy to miss, in a low-foot-traffic area at 11 Roy Street, across from the again-slated-for-demolition restaurant graveyard site known as the Blob. Shoo Be Doo’s the first mainland outpost of a Hawaii-based operation, which might explain the almost numbing brightness of the place, painted in shades of pink and blue one might find on bathroom tile. Almost religious-kitsch-like iconography of Elvis and Marilyn are everywhere, including several imagined scenes implying that the two had actually met.
The food, as you might expect, is upscaled versions of regular diner food. Gourmet burgers, sandwiches, daily diner-food specials like meat loaf, salads, fries, chili. Some ice-cream-parlor stuff: huge sundaes, egg creams (those fizzy East Coast beverages involving no eggs and no cream), and $3.75 milk shakes. The ice-cream stuff and the desserts are quite good; the food’s certainly passable (if not spectacular), and portions are consistently large enough to get you looking like the later Elvis in no time.
On one of the days I was there, there were even modern-day bobbysoxers of sorts, in the form of Pacific Northwest Ballet School students, all with their hair done up in buns and dyed the same shade of brown. They gathered around the reproduction Wurlitzer juke box, sucking their Jones Sodas with straws and gossipping. While neither they nor their parents might have been around in the period being fetishized here, it’s a place for folks like them. A real diner, with its often melancholy moods and chaotic appearance, just doesn’t cut it for the family or tourist trades. Shoo Be Doo, with its carefully-arranged clutter of old movie-star photos and its clean lines of neon, is both a relatively-affordable treat and a trip to an imaginary realm where everything’s clean and mildly rebellious.
