- Angel's Diner in Palatka, Florida, has been operating since 1932 and offers car service with attendants at customers' automobiles.
- The diner features unique menu items like the Pusalow drink and the Black Bottom sandwich, and it attracts daily local regulars and travelers alike.
It’s impossible to drive down Reid Street, one of Palatka’s main drags, without passing by Angel’s Diner, which bills itself as Florida’s oldest diner.
The pink and green awning over what looks like an elongated trailer is eye-catching, but so is the memorabilia scattered outside, including a statue of Elvis next to some picnic tables that provides diners the opportunity to take a selfie with the King.
Inside the diner is just as much fun, with old 45-RPM records hanging on the walls in front of the counter. In an ode to the days of old, a statue of a carhop, on roller skates, holding a tray in one hand, greets customers at one of the entrances.
The diner opened its doors in 1932, and it’s been serving a steady stream of customers ever since. And for those in the know, it’s a trip down memory lane, which, besides offering a hefty serving of nostalgia, dishes up some good food too.
It still offers car service with attendants who will take your order at your automobile door in the parking lot.
The restaurant menu provides a bit of history, paying tribute to Porter Angel, who founded the restaurant nearly 100 years ago. It describes the restaurant today as offering “a captivating step back into a bygone era.”
One of the longtime owners, John Browning, wasn’t there when we stopped by, but employee Skyler Colbrook took a few minutes between taking orders and managing the diner to talk with me.
Colbrook has been working there since she was 16, eight years ago, and has never left. She says she loves it and that the restaurant brings in a Palatka crowd as well as travelers.
“We have regulars, and they come here on a daily basis. At all hours of the day,” Colbrook said. “We do have a lot of travelers that come through, a lot of visitors, which is always amazing, so they get a little piece of it too. But our regulars, they’re like the heart of this place.”
Zeke Williams is something of a regular. He said he brought his wife, Darcie, here on their first date in the early 1990s.
“My son is 34, but we got married about a year and a half after our first date. We had a kid about a year later, and so it was over 35 years ago,” he said.
People come for the food as much as the ambiance. There’s “Lou’s famous fried chicken every Tuesday and Friday” as featured on the menu. (No, we don’t know who Lou is.)
On its Facebook page, Angel’s boasts of “breakfast and good old-fashioned burgers, fries, and hand-battered onion rings! Hand-spun milkshakes!!”
But Colbrook says there are a few more items on the menu that are unique to the diner: the Pusalow, Angel’s original drink and the Black Bottom, Angel’s favorite sandwich.
“The Pusalow is like a homemade Yahoo,” Colbrook said. “Chocolate syrup, vanilla syrup, ice, and milk. It’s like souped-up chocolate milk.”
And the Black Bottom?
“That’s an original from 1932. The original owner started it,” Colbrook said. “It’s hamburger meat, bacon, and eggs, all scrambled together into a patty and put onto a bun. It’s unique, that’s for sure. And they gave it a unique name to make people ask about it.”
Then Colbrook, who was on her own in the front, had to scoot to take care of some incoming customers. Meanwhile, in the parking lot, Williams and his buddies were still hanging around, checking out Elvis and the old cars.
Dave Dowling, another sometime regular from St. Augustine, took a few paper menus to mail to his daughter living in the Midwest as “proof” he had been to Angel’s.
