Night Shifts: Cleveland’s 24-hour Restaurant Scene Holds On

It's a rarity these days: the red neon “OPEN 24/7” lights, flashing bright, an oasis in this local dining desert. Menus of hot dogs, burgers, gyros. Mostly greasy comfort food.

Open the glass doors to Cleveland restaurant My Friends, and you’re greeted, always, with an array of cakes in a dessert case, while a few servers wearing ties weave through a grid of tables and booths — slinging plates of wings and burgers and omelettes at night. It’s not the finest dining, but these plates are prized at this time.

Tim Moff has run the joint for seven years — and he was around before that, too. In the ’90s, he’d help out his buddy, former owner George Voutsiotis, on late-night weekend kitchen shifts, when cooks were slammed from the bar rush. Then Moff opened Sheffield Village’s Sugarcreek Restaurant in 1991 — and when Voutsiotis retired about seven years ago, he offered to sell the now 40-year-old restaurant to Moff. “I said, ‘I need another headache, so let me do it,’” Moff says, laughing. “I stay up a little later, so it didn’t really bother me at the time.” 

The headache came later, in 2020. Facing pandemic aftereffects is a new challenge for these still-hardy restaurants. While some shuttered — Cleveland’s Big Egg and Rubin’s Family Restaurant, to name two — others opted to reduce hours to accommodate a changing dining landscape.

But a small few restaurants — My Friends among them — remain stubbornly open, all the time.

And when you’re open all the time, you’re open to all the crowds. Misfit, late-night clientele are common in the wee hours. These meals mark epilogues to debauchery, and with them, the unpredictable, occasional fight or high-volume customer interrupting the dead-of-night shift. It’s not easy.

At about 1 a.m. on New Year’s Day, a customer periodically toots a party horn in My Friends’ dining area. Servers hurriedly take orders, while a line of partygoers lengthens near the door. Many customers still wear shiny party hats and beads. No pause on this holiday as a line of visibly drunken demand builds.

That demand is ever-present, Moff says.

“You’ve got your benefits of staying open 24 hours," Moff says. “School events; after the games, kids will come. You get after-theater stuff, people come for dessert and coffee.”

Ed Salzgeber, co-owner of Steve’s Diner and Steve’s Doghouse — two restaurants that also serve through the night in Brooklyn and on a busy stretch of Pearl Road in Cleveland — puts it more simply: “It’s where Cleveland goes to sober up,” he says with a laugh. “That’s what we do. That is our place in the city.”

But that’s not the only mission for this small handful of true 24-hour diners. The ones that rarely, if ever, lock their front doors. The ones that clean their dining rooms and kitchens in calibrated shifts. The ones that cure hangovers and prep for an incoming breakfast rush, at the same time.

These restaurants are some of the only local institutions open for second- and third-shift workers, those leaving the hospitals and factories at odd hours — the roughly 10% of Americans who don’t work a standard daytime shift, according to a 2019 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

“During the late after-hours, you still get workers,” says Butch Love, manager of Best Steak and Gyro in East Cleveland, soon to open a second location in the heart of Downtown Cleveland near the Arcade. “You get some of the bar crowd between 1 and 3:30 [a.m.]. It’s a working crowd, too, because people work 24/7.”

RELATED: Best Steak and Gyro Opens in Downtown Cleveland

Old standbys. Greasy spoons. And though they’re few in numbers, they’re not extinct, thanks to the efforts of a few tenacious restaurateurs.

When most of the city sleeps at night, these restaurants are wide awake.

Cleveland Treasures

Inside Brooklyn spot Steve’s Diner, the specials appear in chalk around the ceiling and on dry erase boards. The coffee pots brew underneath. And no matter the time of day, Salzgeber is on call, phone ringer on, ready to respond to restaurant issues and emergencies.

He’s been in the food game since 2002, when he took over Steve’s Lunch, a former Ohio City shop started by its namesake Steve Spanakis in the 1950s. Two decades later, Salzgeber now knows what to expect, watching the hours pass in the form of his shifting customer base, now at Steve’s Diner.

He’s sitting near a sunny window at the front of the diner, while workers handle a short line of incoming customers. Around this time of day, he says, you get kids and moms. (It’s true. Behind him, a boy, fresh from school, bites a fry.)

Then, before dinner time, the retirees show up, followed by the families. Then, there’s a span of a few hours where staffers clean up this small restaurant space tucked in a strip mall (a former Chinese restaurant) and prepare for nights: the predictable stream of bargoers, service industry workers, dancers and musicians. And at the tail end, where night blurs to morning, the occasional “freak,” Salzgeber says.

The nights are where the stories are, especially for old Steve’s Lunch. Salzgeber remembers plenty of tales about Dooley, the shop’s old security guard (a few sandwiches now carry his namesake at the diner). Salzgeber remembers the Northeast blackout of 2003, when he kept Steve’s running with a generator for a few days, running off of gas shared by neighbors. He remembers the camaraderie, especially among city cops who became regulars at the establishment.

The iconic, grimy 60-year-old business won over Clevelanders, earning mythic qualities with some fans. “Legendary isn’t the word for a place like Steve’s Lunch,” reads a tribute-review from Yelp user Blue O. “The hot dogs were great, but anybody who has ever eaten there knows that this food damages your body in unspeakable ways. It was a part of the charm, a ‘take one for the team’ mentality.”

The Yelp review was written on March 17, 2015. St. Patrick’s Day. The same day the restaurant came to an end.

That day, Salzgeber stood across the street and watched the 1860s-era restaurant burn, a tower of smoke ballooning out of it: the result of a cook’s error with a fryer, leading to a grease fire, out of control. The building was uninsured.

“The fire was at 5 [p.m.]. By 10 o’clock, the bulldozers showed up. By 2 a.m., it was gone,” Salzgeber says quietly.

After the fire, he and business partner Donald Straw kept the tradition of Steve’s Lunch going, at Steve’s Diner, which had opened in 2010, and later at Steve’s Doghouse, formerly Sal’s, a Pearl Road outpost they took over from previous owners in 2016.

At these two establishments, they keep slinging hot dogs, maintaining the same heirloom chili sauce recipe Spanakis started with in the ’50s. “We cook 160 pounds of ground meat every week. Spices are in handfuls, so it’s 16 handfuls of this, 14 handfuls of that,” Salzgeber says. “It’s old school.”

The biggest tradition of all, one that’s hardened into the identity of these restaurants: 24-hour service.

Changing Times

The pandemic hasn’t made it easy on any restaurant, particularly for those that run around the clock. Since 2020, many beloved institutions have cut back their hours to more manageable chunks, citing inflation and trouble finding staff — stemming from COVID-19 — as key reasons why. Some hope to return to their all-nighter status.

Now, some former 24-hour restaurants only operate in the daytime, including Michael’s in Shaker Square and Diana Baker’s Diner in Clark-Fulton. “24 hours for 25 years,” says Nick Kraguljac, owner of Diana Baker’s Diner. “When the pandemic happened, we couldn’t do that.”

RELATED: Northeast Ohio's 24-Hour Restaurants

Kraguljac had to reduce hours, now operating from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., after the bars surrounding his restaurant permanently closed. He also cited inflation and staffing issues as reasons for the hours’ change — but says he hopes to soon expand hours on the weekends.

At My Friends, Moff says the pandemic hit his restaurant in some ways, and other changing tides also affect the business. “It’s worth being open, but I think in the last 10 years, it’s been going different,” he says. “The bars are not the same. People don’t drink like they used to."

Still, Moff’s always-open restaurant brings crowds. Football fans, bundled up before and after games; concert attendees, like the red-and-green crowd ahead of the December Mariah Carey show Downtown; couples on dates after a Playhouse Square production, ordering two slices of cake.

There’s an opportunity and demand in the city, despite the challenges present within the mess of a pandemic-shaken dining world.

Love is busy with his second Best Steak and Gyro location, spreading the brand stationed in East Cleveland a little further down Euclid and into Downtown Cleveland early this year, taking over the space formerly occupied by Yum-Yum’s Donut Shop. It’ll join just a handful of other late-night Downtown spots like Guy’s Pizza and Geraci’s, and only one other nearby 24-hour joint, Jake’s Deli.

“I believe there’s a demand for it, especially where we’re located,” Love says. “It’s most definitely needed Downtown. ... It’s a demand. I feel like the people need it, coming in. Those who are getting off work early, going to work early, leaving the clubs.”

But it’s an increasingly difficult business, for some.

Salzgeber hopes to stick things out, while admitting that things like skyrocketing food costs and staffing shortages have slammed Steve’s Diner and Steve’s Doghouse with brutal force. (“There’s only so much you can charge for breakfast,” he says.)

It’s made him start to doubt the 24-hour commitment — and has sowed a sort of skepticism in him, one directed at the entire dining industry.

“I truly think it’s a dying breed,” he says. “I just don’t see any restaurant making it, between the rising prices and labor costs. I don’t know what’s going to happen. The ones that are here now are a shadow of what we were before COVID.”

“Pretty soon there will be none,” Salzgeber adds. “It has always been our model to be the last restaurant standing.”

For now, his restaurant, and a few others, push forward — standing tall — into the night.  

Editor's note: Steve's Diner closed less than a month after this story published. Read Cleveland Scene dining editor Douglas Trattner's report.