If you’ve ever walked a tray along a rail — looking for green Jell-O salad, hot buttered rolls or mile-high strawberry shortcake — you know the assembly line that is a Southern cafeteria.
Words by Alana Dao | Illustration by Tatyana Alanis
June 12, 2024
uby’s Cafeteria holds a special place in the hearts of Texans, including my own. When I was a child in the 1990s, the cafeteria option was always open when my Chinese American family went out to eat. Everybody could choose what they wanted. Prices were reasonable. Wheeled high chairs enabled parents to roll their babies along the serving line.
Cafeterias – where workers put food on customers’ plates for them – took off in the United States soon after Henry Ford invented the assembly line. The two are kin, but instead of a car rolling past stationary workers, the diners slide their trays down the line to receive a slice of prime rib, chicken fried steak or even trout almondine. A diner can watch as somebody on the other side scoops up green beans or squash casserole at one station and another tongs cornbread muffins or yeast rolls onto your plate. It’s an assembly line at its finest, a monument to the idea of early-20th-century progress. The cafeteria made dining more efficient while maintaining the quality and variety of foods that paying customers expected.
In Sugar Land, Texas, Luby’s and “cafeteria” were synonymous. I’ve since learned that my friends from other parts of the South have their own Platonic ideals: Cleburne, Furr’s, Piccadilly, Golden Corral. When you share a childhood cafeteria with someone – and especially if you’re both passionate about the Jell-O squares or the yeast rolls – you bond. It is an immediate connection.
Luby’s was established in the late 1940s by Bob Luby, who grew it into one of the first cafeteria chains in the country. As jobs moved from farms to factories, workers no longer hurried home in the middle of the day for a hearty home-cooked meal. Restaurants offering something similar, such as a protein and three vegetable sides, aka the “meat ‘n’ three,” prospered. Customers had more options than at home, eating didn’t take long, and prices were affordable. Many of the country-style dishes on the menu were familiar to white Southerners, who had learned about hoppin’ john, okra, and similar foods from enslaved West Africans and their descendents.
At Luby’s, the bestseller is a scaled-down version of the meat ’n’ three. Called the LuAnn Platter, it is a combination plate that features a half portion of protein and two sides instead of three and is priced accordingly. As a child, I quickly learned the Luby’s code of conduct. Get a tray without banging it and slide it smoothly on the rails. Notice whether my mother grabbed a cloth-wrapped roll of silver for me or if I needed to get my own. Don’t rush or you’ll bump into the customers ahead of you, but keep it moving so you don’t hold up the line.
Cafeterias have a universal layout and ambience: bright lights, hard tiled floors, nonspecific food smells wafting toward you, employees in hair nets lined up to help. And the line snaking from the entry toward the dazzling array of foods. How long until we reach the tower of trays? How long will it take to reach the pies shining with glossy strawberries or wobbly with whipped cream? Slabs of golden cornbread and plush clover rolls glinting with butter glowing under the heat lamp. I even loved to look at the homely custard served in brown ceramic crocks, a tiny dash of nutmeg strewn across the top. But I almost always chose the Jell-O cubes piled high in plastic parfait dishes, a rainbow of colors straight out of a Technicolor dream.
Luby’s has been part of my life since before I was even born. When she was pregnant with me, my mother was worried about anemia. As a preventive measure, she ate liver and onions every week at a Luby’s in Houston, near where she worked. Luby’s was “the only place that makes it right,” she still insists.
The Luby’s line could also be loud and hectic, with bumping elbows and customers shouting over the sneeze guard to get their point across as the line kept moving. But when communication broke down, pointing and smiling did the trick. And there was almost always a smile in return. The service behind the line, while quick and efficient, was still warm and hospitable.
During one period in our lives, Luby’s was a necessity instead of a special treat. For about a year of my elementary school life, my father worked three hours away in Austin. My mother worked full time and after work had to drive 20 miles in notoriously hellish Houston traffic to pick us up from public school aftercare. Often, it was dark when she arrived. Luby’s saved all of us from hangry arguments or having to cook and clean up before tackling homework, laundry, and our bedtime rituals. Looking back, a disproportionate amount of our family life took place at the Luby’s in Sugar Land, which is long gone now.
Family stories were born there, like the time I lost a loose tooth while horsing around with my brother in the waiting area. We thought it had rolled under a bench and crawled around looking for it in vain. My mother was not pleased with the commotion. On subsequent visits we could not resist searching again, as though Luby’s never swept. Another time, my brother shook a bottle of ketchup so violently that the cap flew off and clattered on a nearby table. He was embarrassed, but the other customers joked about it, and we all laughed. To this day, I tighten bottle tops before shaking.
The broad menu also kept us coming back. My mother, who had grown up in the restaurant business, called the food “fresh and healthy enough.” When I was 5, my parents became vegetarians, and although the LuAnn Platter was not for them, they were happy with green beans, sweet potatoes, creamed corn, mac ’n’ cheese or a dozen other sides available daily. Luby’s is where I learned to eat meat, because my mother felt it important to introduce me to chicken fried steak and other meat-heavy items that were part of being a Texan.
I’ve lived in Maine for years now, but whenever I cross paths with a fellow Texan, the name Luby’s comes up. We squeal with shared glee, then lament that the food became so bland after the 1990s. My mother agreed, and Luby’s fell out of our family dining rotation years ago.
Exiled Texans and food writers find Luby’s irresistible. To a point. For many, the venerable cafeteria chain is a guilty pleasure, spawning personal essays – not so different from the one you’re reading – with names like In Defense of Just Eating Your Dang Thanksgiving Dinner at Luby’s or Why I Still Love Luby’s. They claim there is nothing fashionable about Luby’s, and many of us whose palates have grown up and moved on still love the place.
Dan Solomon, who wrote about Thanksgiving dinner at Luby’s – available every day of the year, if you need to know – remembers anticipating his first visit with a group of friends who were “super-hyped about Luby’s.” For him, the food was “perfectly edible. Not bad, soft and easy to eat and not spicy and tasted just like a kid or a grandparent could enjoy.” He was underwhelmed, but he could see his pals’ “sincere affection in their passion for it.”
Solomon told me that by the time he had his first Luby’s experience, the heyday of the Southern cafeteria was long over and the business model was dubious. Some experts put the profit margin for full-service restaurants at around 3 percent, and labor costs for cafeterias may be higher because they require so many smiling, friendly people to slice prime rib and dish up casseroles.
By 2019, Luby’s was closing locations and losing money. Going out of business and liquidating was on the horizon. Around this time, Chicago-based entrepreneur Calvin Gin heard about Luby’s from a trusted adviser in Houston. Just as he began researching Luby’s, which he’d never heard of, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down everything, and he decided to hold off.
In the summer of 2020, Gin took another look when the board of Luby’s decided to liquidate. He talked to the company’s COO, and “within a week of our call, I was down in Texas to tour the restaurants and meet the people,” he told me. His business partner, Laura Rose Barth, says, “People thought, ‘What were you doing?!’” More than 200 potential buyers had reportedly passed on the Luby’s deal. And in the era of P95 masks and hand sanitizer, the concept of standing in line, protected only by a sneeze guard, then eating in a large open room, seemed like a preposterous business model.
But Gin and Barth headed for Houston and picked up trays. Gin was impressed by the friendly service and Barth by the food. “I was surprised how clean and healthy the options could be,” she said. Other offerings reminded her of her Midwest childhood, and she fell in love with the pork chop.
As the chasm widens between fine dining and a good meal, I am less thrilled by trying a chef’s interpretation of whatever they learned during a two-week stay in a Tokyo kitchen and more drawn to choosing my own interpretation of what dining can be. I chase the feeling of walking into a brightly tiled Luby’s and gazing toward meats and sides basking in the ruby-red glow of heat lamps. I want to shuffle along the line, eavesdropping on other customers, bypassing the chilled bowls of green salad and the shredded carrot and raisins swimming in mayonnaise (my mother’s perennial favorite) to get to those glistening cubes of Jell-O.
Someday, perhaps, culinary historians will see Southern cafeterias like Luby’s as the forebears of the fast casual restaurants that dominate today’s foodscape. Without them, Chipotle and vegetarian-oriented bowl restaurants might never have come to pass. But sweetgreen’s got nothing on them.
For now, fast casual places like Chipotle or sweetgreen lack the intimacy I long for. They feel cold – like school cafeterias for adults. Establishments like Luby’s, on the other hand, invite you to trust your own taste and choose your own adventure. Prime rib or pork chop? Gravy or no? The toughest dinner dilemma of my early years was, brown or white gravy over my potatoes? Square fish or poached chicken?
In Texas and other Southern states, plenty of people are still dining at Luby’s and similar cafeteria chains. And despite their resemblance to Ford’s assembly line, there are regional differences that make each location special. In some parts of the state, the majority of the population speak a language other than English, such as in the Rio Grande Valley, where over 90 percent of the population is Hispanic. “It is a sight to behold to watch the line at a Luby’s,” Gin says. “We let the general managers customize menu options and specials based on the demographics of the customer that they know.” And so while people don’t flock to Luby’s for a certain ethnic food, this specificity is a nod to the power of the people and their relationship to place.
In the fall of 2023, Barth launched a project she called Celebration Table in honor of Luby’s 75th anniversary. These large round tables inside the dining rooms of various Luby’s locations held vintage cookware and photos of diners from the past 75 years. “Behind the concept for the Celebration Table is a longing to come back to a sense of belonging – to a family, to a friend circle, to a blended society representing all walks of life and coexisting peacefully,” she says. In some locations, she’s seen customers add their own ephemera to the table.
Cafeteria-style restaurants were some of the first to become racially integrated following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the chain’s new owners hope that these displays will remind people that the cafeteria line can be an equalizer. Where everyone stands in line together to get what they want, and dines under the same roof.
When Barth took over Luby’s social media accounts in 2021, she was touched by the goodwill and the personal stories that people shared online with her. Employees who have worked there for decades knew almost exactly what time which families would stop in; some diners prided themselves on eating twice a day at Luby’s, while others remembered wedding showers and wakes held there, marking milestones both happy and sad.
For many of us, restaurants are places of healing. When chef Matty Matheson accepted an Emmy for “The Bear,” he stole the show with his acceptance speech. “I just want to thank restaurants as a whole, hospitality as a whole,” he said. “I just love restaurants so much – the good, the bad. It’s rough. We’re all broken inside, and every single day we’ve got to show up and cook and make people feel good by eating something and sitting at a table, and it’s really beautiful.”
Luby’s new owners don’t want to lose this beauty, and they are approaching change slowly. They are updating the uniforms to look less like those of ’60s flight attendants and more like streamlined black cafe uniforms, but they’re also trying to preserve the classic cafeteria experience while offering online ordering, drive-thru, and pop-ups at various offices and universities. And much of the menu looks like it did when I was a child.
Gin tells me that he and Barth recently changed their main food purveyor to Labatt, a family-owned company based in San Antonio. He was surprised to learn that Labatt had been one of Luby’s original food suppliers and that the executive he was talking with had known Bob Luby personally. Coming full circle makes me hopeful about the future of Luby’s. Mine won’t be the last harried mother to feed her children there on a busy weeknight.
The cafeteria, the meat ’n’ three, Luby’s, all have stood the test of time. There is a certain comfort to this. While I hate the idea of “comfort food” as it usually conjures images of grilled cheese and tomato soup or the corniness of Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving, there is value to being invited to eat together. And perhaps some of our brokenness heals when we come round the table. ◊
Alana Dao is a mother, writer, and restaurant professional. Her writing often explores race, contemporary culture, and food. Her previous writing has been featured in The Kitchn, VICE, and the Huffington Post, among other publications.
Tatyana Alanis is an illustrator and designer from Anaheim, California, now residing in Fort Worth, Texas. Under the name French 75 Studios she creates illustrations inspired by a mix of nostalgia and present day; she depicts timeless illustrations of her interpretation of everyday life.