HAS ANY DECADE been so thoroughly flattened by pop-cultural memory as the 1950s? The '70s is history: Watergate, the oil crisis, the hostages. The '60s is ideology: the antiwar marches and the barricades and the happy idea that getting high and fucking are revolutionary acts. But the '50s is cars with tail fins and drive-in movies and waitresses on roller skates. The '50s is art direction. There are no retro '60s or '70s restaurants. But, my god, are there '50s restaurants, as if that was the only decade in American history during which people ate hamburgers.

My parents went to high school in Los Angeles in the 1950s. My mom was in a kind of gang called the Premieres – picture the name embroidered in cursive on a satin jacket – and my dad was on the cheerleading squad. When I was in L.A. as a teenager, my friends and I would wind up our nights at Ben Frank's, a low-slung ranch-style diner on Sunset Boulevard. My dad had eaten the same grilled cheese sandwiches in the same upholstered booths 30 years before, and I liked to think about that.

Ben Frank's was the place Denny's pretends to be, a kind of restaurant that seems ubiquitous until you try to count the currently existing ones. How many restaurants in San Francisco meet the following criteria: multipage laminated menu, independent ownership, no "closed" sign? I can think of exactly one offhand – the Lucky Penny, where the food gives off the subtle but pervasive odor of despair.

A few years ago I was back in L.A. and a couple of us were looking for a place to eat, and we settled on Ben Frank's. (Restaurants like this are great consensus choices, unless you're eating with people who insist on kale three meals a day.) When we arrived, we were shocked to find that, in a Baudrillardian substitution, the diner my dad used to patronize as an actual teenager in the actual 1950s had been replaced by a '50s-themed imitation from the San Francisco-based Mel's Drive-In chain. What economists call Gresham's law – phony coins will drive the genuine article out of circulation – apparently applies to restaurants too.

If tearing down the genuine article and replacing it with the simulacrum isn't postmodern enough for you, try this: the oversize movie stills on the walls of every branch of Mel's aren't from Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild One – they're from American Graffiti, which isn't a '50s movie but a '50s-retro movie from 1973.

Recursive-nostalgia issues aside, though, the menu is deep, and the food is fine. At the Mission Street Mel's today I got a patty melt – a combination of two diner staples, the hamburger and the grilled cheese. It was one of those agonizing forced choices you make when you're still weighing three options and the waitress comes by to take your order for the second time and you know that if you can't tell her now, you'll never see her again. But it must have been one of those split-second thinking-without-thinking insta-genius decisions Malcolm Gladwell just wrote a book about, because damn was that the right thing to order. The cheese was greasy and American, the meat was fresh, the grilled onions were sweet, and the bread was rye. On other occasions, I've found Mel's to be an effective go-to restaurant for a plate of meatloaf or turkey or anything else that goes with mashed potatoes. Not heroic, not gourmet – not even good enough to justify the bow ties and stupid paper hats on the waiters, if you're feeling grumpy – but satisfactory, and open late. You can even get Waiters on Wheels to deliver it to your house. It's too bad they're not on roller skates.

The ante on '50s diners has been upped, though, by the emergence of Taylor's Automatic Refresher as part of the Ferry Building overhaul. Modeled on a Napa Valley drive-in, Taylor's works the upmarket angle, with a rare ahi burger and a white pistachio shake alongside the standard-issue fare. The decor is snazzier than at Mel's: chrome tables and a huge neon sign over the grill saying "EAT," and all the signage uses really handsome retro fonts to spell things like "napkins." It's the kind of place people go to just for the typography.

I had the Wisconsin sourdough burger, which comes with bacon, cheddar, mushrooms, mayo, and barbecue sauce on sourdough toast. That sounds like kind of a laundry list, but in fact it's a very well-conceived sandwich: the mushrooms, bacon, and cheese are on one side of the patty, combining into a ripe, raunchy twang, while the mayo and barbecue sauce on the other provide a mollifying sweetness. The little things are right too: there's full two-ply bacon coverage, and the toast is sturdy enough to stand up to the weight of the ingredients while absorbing the condiments. On an unseasonably sunny day, walking the Embarcadero like a tourist, it was graspable and delicious.

The fries are another, sadder story. They look fantastic: uniformly thin and square-cut and golden, with the skin still on. The problem is with the crucial surface-to-center ratio: too much crispy outside, not enough pillowy inside. The result is dry and hard to eat in bulk. (There's no way to eat french fries besides in bulk.) Thin-cut fries allow almost no margin of error; they're perhaps the hardest commonly eaten American food to cook properly. (The fact that Ronald McDonald can do it a hundred billion times a day isn't a sign that it's easy but a triumph of capitalism.)

Almost every movie set in the '50s includes a scene in a diner, but sadly few movies include scenes in present-day '50s-themed diners. There's one in Ghost World, and there's the famous one in Pulp Fiction. Uma Thurman orders a $5 shake, and John Travolta is amused by the idea of a milk shake costing $5, and the two of them use it as a springboard for some flirtatious banter.

Taylor's Automatic Refresher doesn't even have the balls to put the price tag in the title; instead, it insults our intelligence by charging $4.99. Adding injury to insult, malt costs 75" extra; after tax, my chocolate malted came to $6.23, which is, frankly, ludicrous. It was a pretty good milk shake, but milk shakes are the opposite of french fries: it's not hard to make a great one. It was about half the size of a milk shake you'd get at Mel's, with no metal can to accommodate the spillover milk shake, and there wasn't even enough malt, which is kind of a joke, considering. I'd hate to see how Vincent Vega would respond to that.

Mel's Drive-In. 801 Mission (at Fourth St.), S.F. (415) 227-4477. Sun.-Thurs., 6-3 a.m.; Fri.-Sat., 6-4 a.m. Three other Bay Area locations. Taylor's Automatic Refresher. Ferry Building, 1 Mission (at Embarcadero), S.F. 1-866-328-3663. Daily, 10:30 a.m.-8 p.m.

Contact Gabriel Roth at gabrielroth@yahoo.com.