After more than 50 years of 24-hour service, Silver Crest Donut Shop on Bayshore Boulevard near Oakdale has been boarded up while its longtime owner recovers from a stint in the hospital. It’s unclear whether the closure will be permanent.
Neighboring businesses were informed late last week that the retro diner, whose tagline is famously “we never close,” would be, at least temporarily, closed starting Tuesday. They watched wooden boards go up over its doors and windows late Monday afternoon. Around the same time, someone who answered Mission Local’s repeated calls to the business said that she was busy with customers, and to call again on Tuesday, before quickly hanging up.
The number has since been disconnected. By Tuesday morning, the boards were already covered with graffiti.
Three local business owners said that one of the diner’s owners, George Giavris, had been in the hospital. Giavris was 84 as of last December, the Los Angeles Times reported in a column about the restaurant. His wife and co-owner, Nina Giavris, is around the same age. The business owners also said that, prior to Tuesday’s shutdown, the 24-hour eatery actually had started closing at night.
Vanessa Herrera, an owner of JR Seafood, next door to Silver Crest at 310 Bayshore Blvd., is in contact with Giavris’ niece, Pamela Reka. Herrera said that the family will decide whether or not to open the diner again after Giavris’ recovery. In the meantime, Herrera has offered to keep an eye on their business.
Reka declined to return a message from Mission Local passed through Herrera.
Giavris owns several other buildings occupied by businesses on the block, including JR Seafood, Domino’s, and an antique shop that was also closed on Tuesday, employees at the first two businesses said. Vamsikvisha Bommineni, the manager of Domino’s, said he thinks the diner will be open again in a couple of days.
Stepping into Silver Crest has always felt like time traveling to the 1960s, Herrera said. The furniture is archaic, and the parking lot is replete with rusty, dented cars. But business got “really really bad” after the pandemic, she added. Though she hasn’t said any formal goodbyes to George and Nina Giavris yet, the news of even a temporary closure still left Herrera feeling both sad and scared.
“I know them, and I know they are a nice, beautiful couple — a hard-working couple,” Herrera said. Without their constant presence, she’s worried about the area being left without supervision.
Homeless people frequent the diner’s parking lot, and there are often encampments on the hill behind their businesses, Hererra said. Sometimes she has to sweep glass and trash off the sidewalk when she gets to work.
Hererra is also worried about the future of her own business, which has supplied fish to local restaurants since 2004. Miguel Angel, the owner of Bayshore Market, a deli next door, echoed the same fear, especially after the recent closure of what he estimated to be over 40 other businesses in the neighborhood.
Angel is used to watching regulars of Silver Crest come and go at all hours of the day. When a cook told him the iconic diner would close last Friday, he was initially shocked, as were several locals who first heard the news when approached by a Mission Local reporter. But a local business becoming a “ghost” is nothing new, Angel added.
“After working here for 24 years, I feel like everything is slowly fading away, everything is ending,” he said in Spanish. “The streets are no longer the same.”
First the Lucky Penny and now Silver Crest? Sad day indeed.
Having eaten at both, this is not a great loss.