- November 18, 2024
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Lloyd Bennett has worked with food and loved it since he began washing dishes in a restaurant when he was 14. But it took some encouragement from his son Kyle and his teenage friends for the idea of the Star-Light Retro Diner to take hold.
“When I was in high school, my friends used to come over to my house, to play video games, and Dad always cooked for us,” Kyle Bennett said. “And they were like, ‘This is so good! Why don’t you sell this food?’”
Now, the father and son duo own and run the diner, which opened in late May, in St. Joe’s Plaza on Palm Coast Parkway.
The last restaurant Lloyd Bennett ran was a pizza parlor in Rhode Island, but with the Star-Light, he wanted to branch out.
“When you open a pizza place, you’re stuck with one thing: pizza,” he said. “And there’s a pizza place on every corner in this town. But a diner — that’s something we needed.”
The Star-Light menu is heavy on the heavy stuff, offering nine burgers, including a bacon cheeseburger, a mushroom cheeseburger, a grilled onion cheeseburger and more.
Prices for the burgers, which the Bennetts make from fresh ground beef instead of frozen beef, start low: a regular hamburger is $4.25, and a grilled onion hamburger is $2.85.
“That’s a really good burger, that one,” Lloyd Bennett said of the onion burger. “We have regulars that come in for those. Sometimes they come in and order, six, eight at a time. They’re not eating them all themselves; they’re bringing them home to their families. It makes you feel good that someone has really gotten hooked on your food.”
Desserts include milk shakes made with real ice cream, hot fudge Sundays and root beer floats.
The diner’s sandwiches and salads are about $6-$7 each, and the priciest single item is a half-pound double cheeseburger, for $7.95.
“Rather than hit you up once for a pig chunk of money, we want you to come back,” Lloyd Bennett said. “I believe that being fair to people is what’s going to bring them back.”
So far, he said, it seems to be working. He keeps the hot sauce in a particular spot on the diner’s counter for the guy who comes in five days a week and always uses it. That customer calls in custom orders a day ahead, Bennettt said.
“Very rarely does he miss a day,” he said. “I make him whatever he wants. He’ll tell me the day before what he wants, and we’ll have it for him the next day.”
He’s recently added a new item to the menu, and it’s already gaining some traction, he said: deep-fried hotdogs.
“One guy, he ordered seven the first day, and seven the next,” Bennett said.
Another popular dish is the chicken salad, he said, which one customer has taken to ordering in plastic tubs so he can take it home to his family.
Lloyd is still experimenting with the menu, but he’s already looking at expanding his hours to offer breakfast — eggs, bacon and grilled buttered muffins and cinnamon rolls will be staples — and working on getting a liquor license.
He might create a special delivery menu, and he dreams of one day getting a real diner car — “the silver, all stainless steel on the inside … the new ones that look old.”
But for now, he said, “What we want to do is fine tune this one, make sure we’re doing it right. Good food, good prices consistently.”
That consistency will keep folks coming back, he said. So far, he said, they seem to be.
“I like to see when two or three regulars who’ve been here before come in at the same time, and there’s a camaraderie,” Bennett said. “That makes me feel good because people are becoming friends at my counter. And I like that.”
The Star-Light Retro Diner is located at 227 St. Joe Plaza Drive. Hours are Monday-Thursday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. The diner is closed on Sundays. For more information, call 225-4663.
