Lawrence’s Ladybird rewrites the rules for a great diner — starting with the pie

There aren’t many diners left, but I know a good one when I see it. It should be clean but not antiseptic. (Some of the grimiest urban diners I’ve seen have also offered up the lightest flapjacks and the crispiest bacon. There is no judging a diner by the duct tape holding together its vinyl seating.) It should serve three meals a day (ideally, around the clock) but offer breakfast at any hour. It must have comfortable booths and a counter, and offer fast and efficient service at either. Obviously, the place must be cheap.

One more thing: What a classic diner needs in the 21st century, I have recently come to think, is a Meg Heriford.

Heriford owns the two-month-old Ladybird Diner, in downtown Lawrence. She’s a veteran waitress, married to a musician, so she knows what it’s like to wander around a strange city looking for a place to eat after 1 a.m. She knows, too, how such a place should operate once she finds it. And though her own diner doesn’t stay open that late, she has the rest of the diner tenets down.

“It has to have a great burger, a great pancake, and easy accessibility to everyone that walks through the door,” she says. “And service has to be fast.”

She could have been describing one of my favorite old diners, the 24-hour Heriford’s Grill, which was at 4613 Independence Avenue until it burned down about a decade ago. Meg Heriford isn’t related to the founders of Heriford’s Grill, but they could share a diner coat of arms, illustrated with a steaming mug of strong coffee, a gravy boat and a juicy pie.

Ladybird Diner offers all that and then some. The breakfast platters are hefty (this is a college town, after all) and include the “machaca”: a terrific egg concoction of spicy shredded beef, scrambled with three eggs, onion, bell pepper, jalapeño, ancho-chili sauce and cotija cheese. Yes, you can have a basic cheese omelet, too, and it’s damn good here, fluffy and divinely cheddary (or, if you prefer, Swiss-y).

I’d call the omelet a vegetarian dish, but it’s not purely so — both meat and meatless dishes here are prepared on the same grill, except for a delicious sweet-potato-and-black-bean hash that’s sautéed in a separate pan.

The difference between that machaca-centered huevos platter and the omelet is a remnant of this diner’s early days. Heriford admits that there has been a learning curve since she opened in September, you see. “Our first menu was gigantic,” she says. So it was. The first time I visited Ladybird, during its opening weekend, I didn’t figure her odds were great, precisely because there were too many dishes available, just waiting to slow down the kitchen or disappoint a diner.

“When we opened,” she adds, “we couldn’t offer all the blue-plate specials every day. The kitchen couldn’t handle it. But now that we’re up and running, we’ll have several specials every day, including fish tacos, chicken-fried steak and meatloaf.”

That scaling back, which comes without a significant loss to Heriford’s ambitions, is working. Her place now looks like a winner.

Take that meatloaf, for instance. It’s moist, meaty and sublimely herbed (with lots of marjoram, sage, onion and garlic). It’s a hell of a plate — in fact, I think it’s the only truly sumptuous meatloaf in the KC-Lawrence area right now.

The cheeseburger is great, too. It’s a thick, juicy patty that comes slathered with grilled onions. And the salads are far fresher than you’ll find in a typical greasy spoon; the dressings are all house-made, though the balsamic vinaigrette needs help. When I sampled it, the dressing had the consistency of chocolate pudding and a sweetness to match.

She could use the bottled stuff and knock another few degrees off that learning curve. As she tells me, “The toughest thing about running a diner — besides the hard work — is having a low price point on an all-scratch menu.” Yup.

Me, I’d happily pay more than four bucks for a piece of her mind-blowingly good pie. The selection at Ladybird includes both fruit and cream pies (and yes, there is lard in the crusts but not all of them), and both kinds run out so fast that I’ve learned to reserve a slab before I order my meal. The coconut-cream pie, a beautiful blend of textures (the supple filling, the chewy toasted coconut, the flaky crust), was the highlight of each of my visits, but two of the featured fruit pies — a blueberry basil and an ancho-cherry creation — were also magnificent, with a delicate hint of basil in the former and just the right level of peppery heat in the latter. “The ancho-cherry pie is my homage to Twin Peaks,” Heriford says. “Every diner has to have a cherry pie.”

That’s definitely another diner rule worth observing. But any coffee shop would do even better to have a Meg Heriford in the kitchen. She not only understands the basic criteria of a diner but also knows just how to expand on them. If the diners of my childhood had offered a dish like her Coffee Cake Platter (sweet, moist and crumbly coffeecake with eggs and a choice of bacon, ham or sausage), I’d have stopped eating at home altogether and never looked back.