It was about seven-thirty on a Wednesday morning when I first really paid attention to Lou Bonham. I’d been coming to Lulu’s Diner on South Market Street off and on for years, mostly grabbing a quick breakfast before heading across town, but that morning I was early and the place was quiet enough that I could actually watch him work. He was moving between the flat-top and the coffee station with this unhurried efficiency that only comes from doing the same thing for a very long time — cracking eggs without looking, calling out orders to the counter waitress without raising his voice.
Lou has owned Lulu’s since 1994. He bought it from the original owner, a woman named Louise — yes, that’s where the name comes from — after working there as a short-order cook for about five years. He told me he never really planned to own the place. “She was going to sell it to someone who was going to turn it into a smoothie bar,” he said, wiping down the pass-through with a rag that looked like it had been in service longer than some of the regulars. “I couldn’t let that happen.”
What you get at Lulu’s is breakfast and lunch, nothing complicated. The menu is a single laminated sheet and it hasn’t changed much in decades, which is exactly the point. I always order the corned beef hash — real corned beef, not the stuff from a can, with diced peppers and onions and two eggs any style on top. It runs about eleven dollars. The biscuits are made from scratch each morning and are gone by nine-thirty on most days, so plan accordingly. The coffee is strong and comes in a heavy ceramic mug and they will refill it without being asked, which is the only way to run a diner.
The room itself is small — maybe ten tables plus the counter — and the walls hold a mix of old Redding photographs and sports memorabilia that accumulated gradually rather than being installed as atmosphere. There’s a picture of the old Market Street from the 1950s above the register that Lou says was there when he started. The stools at the counter are original and wobble in the way that old stools do, and nobody has fixed them because fixing them would ruin it.
Lou is in his sixties now and his daughter Maya works the counter on weekends. She went to Shasta College and then stayed in Redding, which surprises some people but not Lou. “Good place to live,” he said, in the way that someone says a thing they don’t feel they need to argue for. He’s not a talker by nature, but if you sit at the counter long enough and the rush has passed, he’ll come out from behind the flat-top and lean against the counter and tell you things about this part of Redding that you won’t find anywhere else.
Lunch runs until two. The burger is worth noting — a hand-pressed patty on a toasted bun, nothing architecturally ambitious, just a really good burger for around nine dollars. They do a daily soup that Lou makes himself and writes on the whiteboard by the door.
Lulu’s doesn’t have a website or Instagram. It doesn’t need them. It has thirty years of regulars and a guy who shows up at five in the morning because that’s what you do when the place is yours and you mean it.
