Buddy’s Diner, a Somerville landmark, has been dark for years. Now the city is rallying to reopen it.
SOMERVILLE — Through the windows of Buddy’s Diner, the old-school 1920s lunch car with the big, friendly red-and-blue sign, you can still catch a glimpse of better days for this local landmark.
Since a plumbing issue forced it to close three years ago, its 19 black vinyl stools have been empty. The flat-top grill, ice cold. The lunch specials, handwritten on paper plates and hung up with clothespins, are fading in the sunlight with no one here to order them.
As one of the region’s last authentic vintage lunch cars, Buddy’s was a time capsule, keeping the neighborhood well fed with hot platters of hand-cracked eggs and made-to-order bacon on the cheap.
Now it’s a mausoleum.
“It just makes me so sad and depressed and angry,” said owner Nicole Bairos. Before this past week, she hadn’t been there in person in months.
Fearing what could be lost forever, neighbors are trying to gin up enough public support, and funding, to keep the endangered landmark alive.
“Niki” to regulars, Bairos bought Buddy’s in 2006 when she was 22 years old, after learning her way around a kitchen at her parents’ Portuguese American fish market on Broadway.
She didn’t set out to get rich, she said. More than anything, she wanted to be her own boss.
“When my friends were in college partying, I was working double shifts seven days a week,” she said.
Buddy’s, built in 1929 and moved from Leominster to Somerville in 1951, was already a local institution by the time she took over.
She kept things mostly the same, down to the recipe for homemade hash served by its previous owners, while also peppering the menu with Portuguese dishes of her own, including garlicky bifana pork sandwiches, and alcatra beef stew. Regulars were pleased, and stuck around.
“I started going there maybe 30 years ago, probably three or four times a week,” said Wayne Uttaro, 63, whose office is up the street, and he remained a loyal customer until the day it shut down. “You don’t get a lot of places like that.”
The diner’s big troubles began in 2021, when the pipes leading from the restaurant to the street collapsed. Filthy water poured into the basement, nearly to its ceiling. Bairos would pump it out, only for the flooding to return again and again.
“It just got worse and worse,” she said. Buddy’s finally closed in 2023 and never reopened.
To fix the problem, she learned, she’d need around $45,000 she didn’t have.
The timing was bad. Buddy’s had lived through leaner times during COVID and the disruptions when the MBTA’s Green Line extension was being built close by. She hoped the opening of the new East Somerville T stop a short walk from the diner’s front door would be the start of a new era.
For a while, Bairos tried to reach a solution in court, suing a gas contractor she believes caused the collapse and the extensive damage that followed. When she couldn’t afford a lawyer, she represented herself, but said she was in over her head. The case was dismissed last year.
Over the 17 years she was at its helm, Bairos did things at Buddy’s her own way. When friends or relatives needed work, she found employment for them at the diner. When customers couldn’t pay, they didn’t have to.
“She used to give away plates of food for free,” said Natalia Pires, 65, a family friend who occasionally worked at the diner, as did her two daughters. “In that place, everybody was family. Everybody who sat down, nobody was going out of there hungry.”
There was plenty to learn, with a $200,000 mortgage, insurance, utilities, and the constant churn of pains in the neck: the leaky ceilings, equipment on the fritz, the licensing issues, bookkeeping troubles (Buddy’s in 2012 was briefly seized by the state over unpaid taxes, but reopened when Bairos agreed to pay it all back.)
“You need to sell a lot of bacon and eggs to make money,” she said. “Every time you think you’re in the clear, something else happens.”
But year after year, Bairos built a life behind the vintage bar top, supporting a son as a single mom, and nurturing a community that showed up as much to shoot the breeze with Buddy’s chatty proprietor as for the breakfast specials.
With the doors shuttered and bills mounting, Bairos considered throwing in the dish towel. She put the diner up for sale, only to get offers so low they turned her stomach.
“At that point, I’d rather see it rot to the ground than take a low-ball offer. It’s the only thing I have,” she said. She took the “for sale” sign out of the window.
Luckily, many of the diner’s aboveground details, including its barrel ceiling, are still intact. For people concerned about the fate of historic Americana, that has made Buddy’s a prime candidate for some outside help.
So just when Bairos was at her lowest, she said, help began to arrive.
A local business group, East Somerville Main Streets, helped her apply for a $74,000 Community Preservation Act grant, which two city councilors endorsed. If approved by the full City Council, it would cover the pipe repairs and a historic conditions assessment.
“It’s a beautiful diner, and a cornerstone of the community,” said Taya Holmes, the group’s small business liaison. “It was affordable. It was local. It was a place people really loved.”
It won’t be enough money to get back to omelet-flipping. In all, Bairos figures she will need close to $200,000. If all goes well, there are plans to seek out other grants soon. Bairos also started a GoFundMe campaign, which has so far only yielded about $2,000.
Cobbled together, it could be enough. It‘s possibly wishful thinking, she acknowledged, but Bairos keeps telling herself Buddy’s will reopen in October.
In the meantime, her plight has been getting some new attention. Preservation Massachusetts last year added Buddy’s to its list of the state’s “Most Endangered Historic Resources.”
And on Valentine’s Day, popular Instagrammer Matthew Dickey, who goes by “Streetscape Curator” on social media, hosted a meetup at a local bar where people were invited to write love letters to the diner. More than 20 people showed up. Their messages — written on paper plates, of course — now hang in its windows.
“Hang in there Buddy’s!” reads one of them.
“Best thing since sliced bread,” says another.
In this extended down period, Bairos has been doing some dreaming about how Buddy’s might come back better than before. She wants to sell espresso, get a beer and wine license, winnow down the menu, stay open late and serve cachorro-quente, hot dogs with matchstick potato chips, and tosta mista, grilled ham and cheeses, to the post-nightlife crowd.
After all, she said, “Dreaming is free. It’s about the only thing I can afford these days.”
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