He is still there at 3:30 a.m., when Tommy J. Dillon, a cabdriver with Ambassador Brattle, comes in. "When the night's over, I come in here, and I have a cheeseburger and a coffee and milk, and then I go home," he says.

He stirs his coffee. "The people that work here are good people," he says.

At 4:00 a.m., the last customer leaves. Two cheeseburgers sit by the fryolator, and Drapeau and Michael Smith sit and smoke at the back counter.

"The business has grown so much we don't have as much time to interact with the customers," says Drapeau. "I used to have a great time here...I still do."

"The cooking is a miniscule part of it," he says. "People want entertainment, not food. I'd rather hire a guy with personality."

"If we were interested in cooks," he says, nodding at Michael Smith, "the first thing we would have done was fire ourselves."

Drapeau says some workers feel demeaned by working in a "hot dog shop." One employee, he says, used to play opera on the stereo.

"He wanted to show that he was serving hot dogs, but he was an intellectual," says Drapeau, chuckling. "His way of doing it was playing opera."

Being unpretentious is the Tasty's primary asset, says Drapeau. "In here we have a good time. We won't let [the customers] read books--we tell them we have a deepseated fear of being thought of as a coffeehouse."

Political analyses and musings on the state of the nation are also taboo, he says. "That's Au Bon Pain talk. This is a hot dog shop."

Drapeau calls his job "fascinating...because kids at this age are very optimistic. They haven't fallen on their asses yet. You're at Harvard, you have the whole world ahead of you. Well eventually most of you are going to fall. But it's great to see that spirit."