RESTAURANT REVIEW : Big Jim’s Serves Up Hefty Portions and Satisfying Breakfasts 24 Hours a Day

There are times in life when nothing but a 24-hour coffee shop will do. I remember having to work the late shift at one job I had: I left at 2 or 3 in the morning, too wound up to go to sleep. Only breakfast would help. After all, nothing lulls the brain to slumber like a pound of glutinous biscuits and gravy.

In my younger days, I’d drink and dance with friends until club closing time; then, knowing that a big plate of steak and eggs is excellent hangover prevention, we’d head out to an all-night truck stop or diner.

And there were times driving across country when we’d get on a roll and wouldn’t want to stop, when we kept driving through the wee hours, when we had to stop to tank up on gas, coffee and maybe a sweet roll. In such circumstances, nothing, nothing, but a 24-hour place will do.

I haven’t worked until morning, danced until closing or driven all night lately, but I do know exactly which 24-hour place to run to: Big Jim’s Family Style Restaurant in Sun Valley.

Big Jim’s isn’t all that conceptually different from Denny’s or Bob’s. There’s a salad bar, and breakfast served any time you want it. But this is one man’s-- Big Jim’s --version of a chain restaurant, and thus, one of a kind.

The colors throughout the restaurant are those of a deep Western sunset: deep yellow, pearly orange, a haunting lavender and sky blue, the same colors that appear in the Western paintings of frontiersmen that hang on Big Jim’s walls. Overhead, in a long trough in the ceiling, Monument Valley is airbrushed. (Looking up into that trough of mesas and heady blue sky is dizzying.) There are wagon-wheel chandeliers, etched glass and a long, fully stocked aquarium separating the booths. (Every now and then, an algae-eating vacuum-mouthed plecostomus would come by and suck on the glass inches from my face.)

From my very first visit, I realized that this restaurant is not called Big Jim’s for nothing. We went for breakfast. My friend ordered steak and eggs, which came with three eggs, a big T-bone and great, freshly made hash browns: The food literally hung off the sides of the plate. The T-bone was decent, too, grilled over mesquite. My Belgian waffles were perfect, light and crunchy. I ordered melon and was given an entire half of a honeydew, and not a diminutive honeydew, either, but a honeydew larger than my head. “Were all the melons this large?” I asked the waitress.

“No, I picked through and found that one for you.”

As it happened, this waitress was the kind of waitress songs are written about. She took care of us and brought us food, water, coffee. She emptied cooled cups of coffee and returned them steaming. She checked in on us, looked us in the eye, anticipated our needs.

There is no staunching the amount of food that comes out of the kitchen to the table at Big Jim’s. An English muffin is really a muffin and a half. A fresh spinach omelet could provide minimum daily requirement of protein and iron to three grown men. A club sandwich is so large it becomes an eating problem: How and where does one get this stratigraphic mass of turkey, bacon, bread, cheese, lettuce and tomato into the mouth?

Such abundance is, in ways, psychologically satisfying; it’s getting more, more, more than I ever wanted. After a particularly stressful morning, a late breakfast at Big Jim’s is full of customers who clearly clean their plates on a regular basis--big customers.

Compared with breakfast and lunch, dinner at Big Jim’s is a disappointment. If this is, as the menu proclaims, “good ol’ Western homemade cookin,’ ” it doesn’t speak well of Western homes. Rather, I’d call it no-nonsense truck-stop-style food. Pork chops were small and cooked until leathery; meat loaf, though spicy, was a textural washout. The so-called fresh vegetables were no doubt fresh once, but the ones I got had grown watery and faded from their extended life on the steam table. Dinner comes with baskets of neon orange garlic bread, and a trip to the salad bar.

I don’t make a practice of eating at salad bars; quite the opposite, in fact. But one mouthful of a Big Jim’s salad, eaten under that 3-D mural of blue sky and red rock formations, somehow gave me a series of ricocheting memories. It brought back all the times I’ve eaten in a coffee shop while trying to diet, of the various waitress jobs I held in four different states, of cross-country drives during which, crazed for something fresh and green, I’d devour just such a salad. I wouldn’t make a habit of Big Jim’s salad bar, but one night, I liked it.

In general, Big Jim’s food is utterly generic and familiar, which to many people brings its own form of pleasure. And where else can you have a trough full of Monument Valley over your head, a plecostomus kissing the glass by your face, and one of the world’s sweetest waitresses filling your coffee cup?

Big Jim’s Family Restaurant

8950 Laurel Canyon Blvd., Sun Valley; (818) 768-0213.

Open 24 hours daily. Beer and wine. Parking in lot. Banquet facilities. MasterCard, Visa (for purchases of more than $10). Meal for two, food only, $6 to $25.

Suggested dishes: T-bone steak and eggs, $9.39; Belgian waffles, $2.59; most breakfast items, $2.29-$9.39.