Iconic Eateries: Broadway Diner has been filling up truckers and locals alike since 1963

For James Nichols, the beauty of the diner is in seeing the immediate response a cook gets from his customers, whether it be the seasoning on a heaping pile of hash browns or the cayenne pepper in a clam chowder.

“You get that instant reaction, because the window’s right there,” Nichols, general manager of the Broadway Diner, said on a recent Friday as he kept one eye on a large pot of the soup of the day and gesturing to the dining counter a few feet away.

The Broadway Diner, through its many iterations, has been serving up hot food and coffee, 24 hours a day, since the early days of Interstate 90 bisecting Spokane and creating a throughway for freight and hungry drivers. Don Alsaker, along with partner Charles Williams, bought the truck stop in 1963 and opened the restaurant that year.

Nichols said the secret to drawing regulars back in is consistent quality.

“The food is simple, but you can mess up simple things,” said Nichols, who first picked up an apron at the age of 13 to make chicken cacciatore for his father. He’s held several jobs, including driving a forklift, but working in the kitchen made him happiest.

That’s apparent when Nichols is talking about one of the diner’s signature dishes, the Hash Stack. It’s a pot roast resting on a bed of hash browns, topped with potatoes, onions, green pepper and two eggs, then smothered in gravy and cheese. The flavors working together makes the mammoth meal memorable, he said.

“That thing blends like a symphony,” Nichols said.

One Friday earlier this month, the internet service had been down overnight, meaning patrons had to fork over cash as they’d done for the past six decades. Nichols was watching his pot of clam chowder while greeting servers and cooks and overseeing stocking of the truck stop’s fresh deli case.

Nichols was eager to show it off, filled with products easy to eat on the go and keep a driver going for hours. Calzones, which rival in size the big-as-a-hubcap sweet cream pancakes, and meatballs on a stick are there for the taking, made fresh each day and loaded for lunch at around 10:30 a.m. because, as Nichols notes, truckers like to get going early.

Pat Eslick, the general manager of the truck stop side of the business, noted that the cash registers were still in operation even with the internet down. The place even stays open when the power goes out, she said, though they have to get creative about allowing patrons inside.

“We can still sell stuff that’s on the shelves. They can just add the tax, make the change, write it all down, and then when the power comes back on, I put it all in,” Eslick said. She’s had to do that once during her time with the store, and she used flashlights to illuminate the shelves.

The Alsaker family has prided itself on keeping the lights on.

“If there’s a key to the front door, I don’t know where it is,” Dan Alsaker, Don’s son, told The Spokesman-Review in February 1988. “We never close.”

Eslick said there is, in fact, a key to the front door. But it’s in a closet with all the other keys for the cavernous building, which includes a garage, showers and a lounge for drivers, as well as overnight parking on the property.

She often takes calls from truckers on the road, asking about the offerings at Broadway, one of seven such locations the Alsaker family owns.

“They’ll say, ‘Do you have a restaurant?’ and I’ll say, ‘Yes,’ ” Eslick said. “It’s not a Denny’s. It’s a sit-down diner, where they make your food and bring it to you.

“And they say, ‘We’ll be there in 20 minutes.’ ”

Cheri Anderson, a bookkeeper for the store for 25 years, said Don Alsaker set the standard for the business.

“They bent over backwards for drivers,” Anderson said. “Don made sure that a driver could always come in and get a hot meal.”