Family affair Sonny Miller of Bangor’s Miller’s Restaurant celebrates landmark establishment’s 50th year

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Sonny Miller’s friends don’t invite him over for dinner.

The Bangor restaurateur’s engaging and easygoing personality can’t be to blame. Nor can his treasure trove of stories about local politicos and the early days of his family’s restaurant, which this year marks its 50th year in business in the city.

But there is a reason.

“They think I’m fussy,” said the suspenders-clad Miller, 74, while sitting at a corner table in the popular Main Street restaurant.

He thinks they’re wrong.

“I just like good, plain food. I’m not a judge,” he said.

But to many in his native Bangor, Miller’s palate is a thing of legend and his family’s restaurant is as much a part of the city as the Paul Bunyan statue or the Thomas Hill Standpipe.

Although he may not readily admit it, Miller is more than a little particular about certain things – not only food, but the restaurant’s reputation – and has been since the first day the family opened Miller’s Luncheonette on Washington Street in 1951.

“It was a family affair and that’s what it took,” said Miller, who opened the restaurant with his parents and brother. “It took people that were dedicated, and we had everything invested.”

The investment began with a third mortgage on the family’s home, a $4,000 GI loan and a $500 loan from a relative, according to Miller, who credited the restaurant’s staying power in part to a willingness to change while recognizing what works.

For the Millers, what has worked is hard work – and the early days of the restaurant were long days, indeed.

Open 24 hours, the luncheonette across from the old Union Station was a busy place with its 25-cent hamburgers, said Miller.

Even before Miller’s officially opened, the family was no stranger to the food service business, with Miller’s grandfather Max selling hot dogs in front of the old Merrill Trust building on State Street in downtown Bangor.

Miller still loves to tell the story of how his grandfather in the early 1900s declined to loan a passer-by money, pointing to the nearby bank and saying, “[We] have a deal. They don’t sell hot dogs, and I don’t lend money.”

Miller’s father, Meyer, followed in the family footsteps, opening a restaurant in the logging town of Baileyville after several years of selling newspapers, sandwiches and soft drinks to train passengers in Bangor.

Meyer Miller’s Washington County restaurant didn’t last, and he returned to Bangor to help start up the family’s Washington Street luncheonette.

Needing some elbow room, the increasingly popular eatery moved in 1955 to lower Main Street across from the Bangor Auditorium, which for years has filled the restaurant’s seats with high school basketball fans.

After fire destroyed the business in 1962, Miller moved his operation to its current Main Street location, once home to the well-known Aunt Molly’s restaurant.

And the evolution didn’t stop there. Seven years later Miller opened the Red Lion, an English Tudor style pub and chop house that was “a little ahead of its time,” Miller said.

Since then, Miller’s vast salad bar buffet has helped turn the restaurant into local legend, drawing people from all over the state, said Miller, who credited his success over the years chiefly to his customers and his family.

The restaurant has seen its share of incarnations in the past 50 years, but it was in the small Washington Street building that Arthur Brountas, now one of Miller’s best friends, first became close to the young restaurateur.

“He used to run around a lot and see what was going on,” Brountas said of Miller’s energetic presence in the restaurant even long before sunrise. “His eyes were everywhere.”

Both men, too, remember well shining shoes on Exchange Street as boys, and – years later – early morning drives around the city smoking King Edward cigars while talking about their hopes for the future. One discussion in particular stands out – whether the price of a hamburger would ever reach $1.

“I couldn’t imagine it, but Sonny was right again,” said Brountas, whose family also owned a nearby restaurant and, later, the Greyhound bus station. “I guess we didn’t do too bad for a couple of shoe shine boys.”

Sonny’s real name, Sanford, fell by the wayside early on and was all but replaced by the variation of his Hebrew name used by his many Jewish neighbors on Bangor’s east side. The new nickname stuck – except for a hitch in the U.S. Navy when his shipmates called him Snafu after a popular comic strip character at the time.

But to John Miller, who has run the family business since 1987, his father will always be “Mr. Miller.”

“You had to prove yourself to my father, and for the kids that meant working twice as hard as everybody else,” said John Miller, 37, who began working at the restaurant when he was “knee-high,” and like the restaurant’s other employees called his father Mr. Miller. “He is a genius in this business and I am very proud of what he has accomplished.”

Knowing the grueling work schedule and the strain it can place on the home front, Sonny Miller won’t say he’s happy that his son has followed in his footsteps.

Both father and son acknowledge that they’re cut from the same cloth in terms of putting in long hours at the restaurant – a time commitment both maintain is vital to keep pace in the highly competitive food service industry.

“Dad will tell me to do things that he would never do, like take some time off,” John Miller said amid fielding questions from a few of his 100 or so employees. “If there’s one thing he taught me, and there are many, it’s never to be complacent because somebody will go right by you.”

Sonny Miller is technically retired, but still eats lunch at the restaurant almost every day and takes the occasional trip to New York or Philadelphia to look for new ideas.

“Food is his life,” said John Miller said.

His dad wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but would add family and friends to that recipe for success.

“There’s been a lot of water over the dam,” said Sonny Miller as he waved to a longtime customer just entering the restaurant. “And it hasn’t been all bad.”