R.O.M.E.Os (Retired Old Men Eating Out) dine at Hymie’s before it opens

Hymie’s Deli officially opens at 8 a.m., but the R.O.M.E.O. breakfast club starts at 6:30.

Every Monday for the last ten years, Brad Sinoff, 74, has arrived at the Main Line deli before the sun comes up. The waiters are not yet there; the dining room is empty. He heads to the kitchen, where he tells the cook he’ll have his regular: eggs over well (break the center), home fries, sausage, skip the toast. It costs $8.75.

He serves himself coffee before joining two fellow club members, John Makransky, 74 (single pancake with a side of bacon), and Larry Finkelstein, 72 (sunny-side up eggs with home fries, bacon, and a plain bagel) at the same booth near the back. The owner of Hymie’s, Louis Barson, usually arrives around a quarter to seven and gets his own mug of coffee before sliding in to eat.

These are the Retired Old Men Eating Out. Sinoff even made T-shirts.

Usually the rattle of porcelain alerts them that their food is ready; they pick up the plates themselves in the back.

Sometimes another customer will wander in before the place really opens; Sinoff will serve that person coffee, too. The staff is busy preparing dozens of catering trays before the morning rush.

“They’re part of the store,” Rodney Richardson, the executive chef who has worked at Hymie’s for 22 years, said. “It’s like part of setting up.”

R.O.M.E.O club is casual, though in the midst of a loneliness epidemic among older Americans, this weekly breakfast is also something of a prophylactic. The psychiatrist Richard Schwartz, coauthor of the book The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century, said once that he “cured” a 70-year-old patient by simply encouraging him to join a group of men who ate together at the local Panera.

The group meets so early because Sinoff, who makes decorative apparel and is not actually retired, doesn’t sleep much. Finkelstein, a retired business lawyer, and Makransky, a semiretired financial adviser, get up early anyway to walk their dogs.

At breakfast, they tease each other, catch up on mutual friends, and discuss what they’re each doing for the rest of the day.

“When you sit with guys for years and years and years ... it’s literally like the old prison joke,” Barson said on a recent Wednesday morning.

“[Someone says] ‘number 62′ and everybody starts laughing. And then they say ‘number 24′ and everybody cracks up,” Barson began.

“And the new guy —” Makransky interrupted.

“Can I tell the joke or are you going to tell the joke?” Barson asked. “The new guy’s in there, he says to the cellmate next to him, he says, ‘What’s this?’”

“No, no, no, no,” Makransky said.

After a bit of bickering, Barson laid out the basics: The prisoners had shared the same jokes for so long that they no longer told them in full, instead referring to each by number. That night, someone yelled 24 and everyone laughed. Someone yelled 47 and everyone cracked up. So the new prisoner yelled 43! Crickets.

I don’t get it, he said. Is there no joke 43?

The cellmate shook his head. Some people just don’t know how to tell a joke, he said.

The other men at Hymie’s, who had heard the joke for years, did not laugh.

Sinoff met Barson 30 years ago playing golf. Sinoff eats breakfast at Hymie’s every day, seven days a week. (Barson gets a copy of the Wall Street Journal delivered every morning to the deli for him.) Makransky and Sinoff attended Haverford High School together, hadn’t seen each other in 40 years, and then ran into each other at the Lower Merion Acme. Finkelstein and Sinoff were at the same funeral, and then recognized each other in line at Hymie’s.

Now they’re a crew. There have been other R.O.M.E.O.s, but as Sinoff explained, “They get old, they die, they move to Florida.”

For seven weeks this year, Hymie’s was closed because of flooding and R.O.M.E.O club was postponed.

They’re glad to be together again. By a few minutes after seven, their plates are cleared — but of course, they’ll be back next week.

“I like the place,” Sinoff explained.

“And the company,” Finkelstein said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” Sinoff said. “That too.”