Retro diner a big hit in Oakley

OAKLEY, Summit County — A vintage diner here is drawing a heavy crowd made up largely of nonlocals.

Enough so, perhaps, that this unique eating establishment is becoming Utah's diner.

"We've had customers coming in from Provo to as far north as Logan and as far west as Tooele," said Keith Walker, owner of the Road Island Diner. "I had intended this to be Oakley's diner, but there are many coming from outside of (the) valley."

The Road Island Diner has served about 5,500 people since its soft opening two weeks ago, Walker said. It is the second restaurant and the only eatery open year-round that serves breakfast in Oakley.

What the owner thought was going to be a "weekend project" turned out to be an investment of more than $1 million and sweat equity of a year to turn the establishment from a rusty, oversize can to a "streamlined-style, art deco diner," Walker said.

No detail has been left unnoticed to bring back the look and feel of 1939, the year the green and yellow, metallic-looking diner rolled off the assembly line to be showcased at the New York World's Fair.

"(The diner's) parking lot has been jammed up, and cars park along the shoulder of the roads," said Alton Frazier, chairman of Oakley City Planning Commission. "I've seen a line of people waiting outside for a table."

"We've been waiting for an hour," said Holladay resident Laura Klein on Saturday at the official opening.

"We drove up here on a motorcycle in spite of the rain because we wanted to have a fun experience," said her husband, Russ Klein. "Going home might not be fun, but the diner is a brand new experience."

For people who were raised east of the Mississippi River, where diners are more common, the experience is nostalgic.

"I grew up with (diners) back in New York because my grandpa owned one," said Steve Roberts, an Arizona resident waiting for a heart transplant in Salt Lake City. "When I moved to the West I said, 'Where's a diner?"'

In Oakley, of course.

"I heard it on the news, and I had to come," Roberts said. "The layout (of the diner) is the same: The door is in the middle, you walk in and there's the counter. I felt like I was 12."

Bernard Harpole, a Salt Lake resident from Winterset, Iowa, recalled how he and his friends "hanged out, having fun at a diner around the jukebox," the boys wearing jeans with leg bottoms turned up twice and the girls wearing two-tone shoes.