In the restaurant business, success is measured in months, not years.

So when a single restaurant occupies the same busy intersection for nearly 50 years, it transcends success and starts to become a legacy.

Dino's Italian Food, at Kipling Street and Colfax Avenue, has been dressing salads and slinging pasta on their red and white checkerboard tablecloths since 1961 and in the process has become a touchstone for generations of diners.

Judy DiPaolo Duren, the owner of Dino's and daughter of its namesake founder, says that success comes, in part, from the fact that the family business isn't a chain.

"The chains have just taken over," she said. "We're just saturated here on Colfax, and with Colorado Mills and Belmar, people have really changed their habits. People used to drive an extra five or 10 minutes for a good meal. Not anymore."

What keeps the restaurant doing steady business is a loyal base of returning customers from Lakewood and many who travel from all over the metro area and beyond to get a slice of nostalgia. Nostalgia and, of course, pizza.

Dino's pasta maker, Rafael Luna, cranks 100 pounds of pasta per day, including the trademark thick homemade noodles, out of the restaurant's Italian imported pasta maker, to go along with gallons of red marinara sauce, signature dressing and ice cream made daily on site.

The decor hasn't changed much either, and that's just the way the customers like it. The same paintings have hung on the walls since the restaurant opened, only moving around after an expansion in 1996. Judy said even a dozen years after the expansion, most of the customers refer to the expansion as "the new side."

One of the oil still life paintings in the dining room bears a gash from a young customer's pocket knife that is some 25 years old. Judy said a diner who worked in art restoration offered to fix the tear a few years back.

"I said, 'No way. My customers would die if that were taken out. I've got people fighting for that painting if we ever close because of that tear,'" she said.

That isn't to say that they are looking to close. A developer almost bought out the entire corner of Kipling and Colfax, including Dino's and the Ramon's building, a former Mexican restaurant owned by the DiPaolos next door in 2003, but city regulations and other financial reasons kept the deal from going through.

"I think that hurt us in a lot of ways. We still get people coming in from around town saying, 'I thought you closed. We would have come back more often if we knew you were open,'" she said.

For all the devotion and dedication to the restaurant, the success is in the simplicity, Judy says.

"We're nothing fancy, we just try to be consistent."