DENVER • Celebrities came around once, Socrates Apergis remembers. Rock stars and basketball stars and big Broncos linemen filling up on the best, cheapest steaks around, savored since 1961.

“Now they go to Del Frisco’s or Elway’s,” Socrates says, to name a couple of fancy options in stark contrast.

He shrugs. “People go there and say they’d rather come here and have a steak.”

They come here to the Columbine Steakhouse and Lounge, this tiny joint tucked between mechanics and other rickety mainstays of the neighborhood called Barnum, for tall tales of the circus master housing animals nearby. It’s a historic working-class neighborhood, long known as an immigrant hub.

Among immigrants seven decades ago was Anthony Apergis, from Greece. Now his son and daughter run the Columbine.

“It’s a hole in the wall,” says Irene, Socrates’ sister. “But it works.”

It works thanks to the meat Socrates cuts fresh every morning, to be grilled right behind the register upon order, cafeteria style, as always. It’s the same grill top Anthony Apergis had specially carved back in the ’60s — “so thick that you could pile like 25 steaks on it,” Socrates says.

A well-seasoned grill, you might say. And, indeed, still in high demand.

The cuts for steak sandwiches commonly sell out by the end of the afternoon, devoured by handy men and construction crews on lunch breaks. The meat melts between buttered-up Texas toast and onion and tomato.

Similarly popular is the T-bone. It’s served with the baked potato, salad and bread you’d expect at other steakhouses that might charge double.

Dinners at the Columbine start at $20. It’s cash only — another aspect here that has refused to change since 1961. The lounge with the rounding, wooden bar and jukebox appears frozen in time.

“Same tables. Second set of chairs,” Socrates says back in the dining room. “Same booths. Ceiling the same. Second set of lighting. The whole kitchen area, everything’s the same.”

The cook is the same, the old man wiping his sweaty brow behind the front counter. That’s Argirios Kamilatos, a Greek fellow who started here in 1976.

What’s kept him around? “I don’t know,” he says with a chuckle. “Old friends!”

Anthony Apergis was an old friend. Upon his death in 2000, he was remembered as a friend to many.

“The Greeks were like that,” Irene says. “Everybody was helped in some way, and my father helped a lot of people.”

A lot of people needed help on his island, Kefalonia, which was ravaged by World War II before a series of devastating earthquakes in 1953. Anthony would go to America and make money to send home, like his uncle before him.

Uncle Socrates established himself with Denver’s old Colorado Candy Co. and helped his nephew get on his feet while the 20-something worked long hours at the Denver Country Club and Brown Palace Hotel. With his uncle’s help, Anthony became his own boss with the Columbine. He posted a sign out front: $1.25 steaks.

At a time of racial division in the neighborhood, he became known as an employer for all. Workers embodied the everyman steakhouse he built.

One walked to his shifts. He told the boss he was saving up for a bicycle, Irene remembers. “Dad had one for him the next day,” she says.

She recalls another worker who was caught stealing. Like mischievous workers before her and after, Anthony resisted firing. He always sympathized.

Read a remembrance Socrates wrote upon his dad’s death: “Anthony was a very trusting person. At the restaurant he would lend money to people he barely knew and cash checks that eventually would come back bad.”

Anthony had his faults. He was a gambling man — a tendency that briefly landed him in jail, Socrates remembers, and had the cops label the beer-soaked lounge a “nuisance” for a time.

Trouble had a way of finding Anthony.

“There were numerous times that he was held up by gunpoint,” Socrates wrote in his remembrance. “You see, he had this one bad habit of carrying large amounts of money in his pocket.”

Anthony, too, embodied his everyman steakhouse. It would be a place of good and bad and all of humanity. A place for the occasional celebrity, yes, but more so a place for poor, fellow immigrants and honest, hardworking families trying to make it.

The Columbine has known hotshots from the city as well as drunks from the street. It has known riffraff. Fights with fists have sometimes turned into fights with knives and sometimes turned into fights with guns. No one has died here, Socrates says — thanks once to him in his teenage years rushing a wounded brawler to the hospital.

It’s better now, Socrates says. “I think it’s because we’ve been around so long, people respect that,” he says.

It’s respect he and his sister have fostered over their watch since their father’s death 23 years ago. They worked here long before that, bussing tables before they could hardly see over the counter.

Irene thought she’d be a school teacher. “With my father, I felt obligated” to the restaurant, she says. “And my brother really felt obligated.”

Socrates never chased other dreams. Like Irene, he describes the Columbine as a blessing and a curse.

“I hated it, because it kept me away from what I really wanted to do,” he says.

It’s kept him and Irene rising early and going home late. The hours aren’t as long anymore; in recent years, they’ve moved closing time to 9 p.m., up from 2 a.m. in their dad’s day.

“Now, it’s like I can get up and my bones and my body don’t hurt,” Irene says.

Still, it’s not the life she wants for her grown kids, who have helped out here and there. Irene and Socrates have talked about selling or closing. Their kids are living their own lives, carrying out different careers, just as their parents encouraged.

“The amount of history, I don’t know,” says Socrates’ youngest, Nikoletta. “You can’t just knock this place down.”

She’s working the register this afternoon, taking orders for the old, wise-cracking cook behind her who feels like family, like so many of the customers here.

“We get every single customer you can imagine, and they’re all treated the exact same,” Nikoletta says. “It’s always stayed that way.”

The steakhouse for all should stay, she thinks. It should stay the same. Mostly.

Nikoletta whispers now, as if to tell a secret or confess a sin: “I’ve kind of always wanted to expand.”

That makes her dad kind of frown. And he kind of smiles.

On the menu

The steak sandwich is a time-honored favorite at the Columbine Steakhouse and Lounge, formed by buttery Texas toast, onion and tomato. It comes with hand-cut fries for $11.75. The burger and chicken sandwich ($9-$10) are other lunch-time classics.

Steak dinners come with a baked potato, salad and piece of Texas toast and range between $15-$30. The T-bone is most popular. The porterhouse is for the hungriest. Also New York strip, filet mignon and pork chops.

The menu also includes fried shrimp and fish. Grilled cheese and corn dogs ($5.50) for the kids.