Robert Brincefield and Danny Dean,
former owners of Brint's Diner.

History

Brint's Diner in Wichita is a survivor, straight from another age in America, an eating place that's not fancy but offers comfortable seats where you can get good food fast.

It's a place where, if you come back often enough, you're considered a regular member of the family. But Brint's, like several other such establishments dotted across Kansas, is not just any old diner. It's a Valentine.

Valentine Diners began their nearly forty-year career in Wichita, Kansas--an idea born of the Great Depression. They were constructed as eight-to-ten-seat diners that one or two people could operate. If you were good at it--if you served good food at a fair price and kept your customers happy--you could make a successful business of a Valentine. In an industry where nearly all major diner manufacturers were on the East Coast, the Kansas creation managed to ship its little pre-fabs all across the country. Valentines could be found along major highways to attract travelers, in industrial areas to attract workers, and in small towns where they might be one of the only (if not the only) restaurants available.

So what is a diner? The term is said to derive from "dining car," and in concept it was meant to offer the type of service that came from the old restaurants on wheels. Today the word is loosely used to mean any small restaurant, but among purists a diner can mean only one thing: a manufactured building, with a long counter and a few booths, that is transported to its site of operation. The roots of the diner go back to 1872 when Walter Scott of Providence, Rhode Island, used a horse-drawn lunch wagon to serve meals to those who worked dusk to dawn. The lunch wagon gradually evolved from providing some shelter for customers to come in out of the elements to a structure placed on a foundation--but one that could be moved if necessary. Most of the best-known diner manufacturers on the East Coast, particularly in New York, New Jersey, and the New England states, produced the stainless steel structures that provide us with the image we have of the classic shiny silver 1940s and 1950s eateries. Because of the manufacturers' locations, diners didn't seem to be a Midwest phenomenon before the early twentieth century. But all of that was about to change.

Illinois-born Arthur Valentine came to Kansas in 1914. He was a natural salesman, hawking automobiles for a while in Great Bend but always hoping someday to be his own boss. Sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s Valentine and his wife, Ella, opened a restaurant in the small south-central Kansas town of Hazelton (view image of interior). They took a liking to the business, and others followed, including Wichita and Hutchinson (view image of the Shamrock Lunch), and eventually their "chain" of restaurants became known as the Valentine Lunch System.

On October 26, 1933, the Wichita Beacon announced that the Valentine Lunch System was about to open a new "$10,000 porcelain home" at the corner of Beacon Lane and Market Street in that city. The structure was built in sections by the Metal Building Company of Wichita and the Martin Perry Company of New York, who supplied the Wichita business. The cafe included a complete line of foods for its customers--short orders, regular dinners, lunches, and sandwiches--and, according to Arthur Valentine, curb service would be featured. more