OPEN: 1952–1996
LOCATION: 8585 Sunset Boulevard West Hollywood, CA 90069
ORIGINAL PHONE: (213) 652-8808
CUISINE: Diner
DESIGN: Lane and Schlick
BUILDING STYLE: A-Frame Googie
CURRENTLY: Mel’s Drive-In
Ben Frank’s on Sunset Boulevard.
ARTHUR SIMMS LEARNED ABOUT THE RESTAURANT BUSINESS FROM HIS FATHER, WHO RAN SMALL HOTELS AND CAFÉS IN CHICAGO DURING THE 1920S AND ’30S. After serving in World War II, Simms moved to the Los Angeles area and ran the commissary at MGM Studios in Culver City.
In 1952, Simms partnered with Bob Ehrman and opened a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard named Ben Frank’s. Located in the heart of the West Hollywood club scene, Ben Frank’s drew many stars, from Andy Warhol, to the Rolling Stones, to the Go-Go’s. After the clubs closed for the night, music fans hung out at neighborhood establishments like Ben Frank’s that were open twenty-four hours.
In the early 1960s, Simms opened two more Ben Frank’s locations in the Los Angeles area and managed two other coffee shop chains, the Copper Penny and the Wooden Shoes. After Simms’s son, Thomas, graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1970, he decided to join his father’s coffee shop business, the SWH Corporation.
In the mid-1970s, the father-and-son team realized that there was a market for quality dinner-house food served in restaurants with a coffee shop ambience. In 1974, they brought in partners Brian Taylor and Paul Kurz and opened French Market, a sidewalk café in West Hollywood about two miles from the original Ben Frank’s—close enough for them to keep an eye on both locations. Two years later, they also acquired the Kettle, located three blocks from the pier in Manhattan Beach.
SWH used the success of French Market as a template to create a chain of restaurants, the first of which was placed in Anaheim, close to Disneyland. It opened in 1978 as the first Mimi’s Café, reportedly named after a girlfriend of the elder Simms. The restaurant was a success, so they opened another location in the neighboring Garden Grove. For the next several years, the company opened a new Mimi’s Café about every eight months. They continued to operate the other brands while expanding the Mimi’s Café locations, testing and marketing products and services at the French Market and the Kettle. By 2001, the company had forty-nine Mimi’s Café locations in five states.
After the death of his father in 2000, Thomas realized that it was unrealistic to manage such a large chain by himself. In the previous year alone, Thomas had opened four new locations in Texas. So he hired Russ Bendel to serve as president and CEO, while Thomas served as chairman of the board. In the first three years, Bendel took the company from fifty-three locations to eighty by moving into Midwestern markets.
In 2004, Bob Evans Farms bought SWH, and the company sold the original Ben Frank’s on Sunset Boulevard at the end of the year. The restaurant remained empty for a few months until it was transformed into the kitschy, 1950s-themed Mel’s Drive-In, which kept the original A-frame Googie building mostly intact. Today, the Ben Frank’s legacy lives on through the Mel’s menu, which offers the same type of fare: patty melts, fried chicken, and cream pies. Mel’s became famous when their “South of Market” location in San Francisco was used in the 1973 Oscar-nominated film American Graffiti. 
Ben Frank’s Googie-style exterior.
The inside structure of the restaurant remains mostly intact today at Mel’s Drive-In.