A Chain Reaction

“There’s still appeal there, there’s still value there, but it isn’t the new and exciting thing.”

A BOILERPLATE BUSINESS NEWS HEADline triggered my nostalgia trip: “Luby’s sheds more restaurants as sales decline in the third quarter,” the Houston Chronicle reported. The beloved cafeteria chain—my beloved cafeteria chain, Texas’ beloved cafeteria chain, the nation’s very first cafeteria chain—is beleaguered.

Restaurants are a hard business, or at least that’s the old industry wisdom bandied about by even the most casual diners like myself. And still, to hear of Luby’s suffering was a tough Jell-O cube to swallow. The Texas-based company was founded in 1947—well, actually, longer ago if you count the cafeterias of its progenitor, Harry Luby, but I’ll leave the arcane Texas history quibbles to the more obnoxiously knowledgeable of our readers. More than 70 years later, Luby’s remains an ever-present and comforting constant for many.

For me, it started young. I had a wonderful upbringing with two caring parents, but they both worked—a lot. Ours was a blue-collar household, and my mom usually cooked to save