For 53 years, Zoto’s Diner has been a family affair. Now come the final goodbyes.

The soups of the day: tomato Florentine with rice and black bean with roasted corn. The chicken special: bourbon-glazed. The fish: broiled cod.

But at Zoto’s Diner, Wednesday’s lunch rush was more about hugs and goodbyes as it was about specials on the whiteboard in the lobby.

Customers embraced in the aisles, cards and gifts covered a nearby table, and the phone just would not stop ringing.

After thanking a customer, Nancy Vollmer picked up.

“Zoto’s! May I help you?”

It was another call from another well-wisher.

“Steve!”

Steve Zoto made his way across the dining room, shaking hands with customers as he passed each booth. Nearly 53 years after he and his brother Nick opened Zoto’s on what was then a far sleepier stretch of Bethlehem Pike, Sunday will be the last stack of pumpkin pancakes.

Steve, 79, and his wife of 55 years, JoAnne, 78, are retiring, closing a fixture along the Route 309 corridor where Montgomery and Bucks Counties meet.

Sheetz plans to open a convenience store and gas station on the four-acre property at 1100 Bethlehem Pike in Line Lexington. Plans presented to Hatfield Township commissioners in September call for demolishing the diner and building a 6,139-square-foot store with fuel pumps and a drive-through. Final approvals are still required.

The proposed Sheetz would join an already crowded convenience-store market: Royal Farms is across the road, there are Wawas just to the north and south, and a Sunoco station is nearby.

The Zotos were not actively looking for a buyer, JoAnne said. But a recent phone call with an unsolicited offer underscored a familiar reality of commercial real estate:

“The land is worth more than the business,” Steve said.

For Steve, turning 80 in February, the decision also means leaving behind the demands of a business that rarely allowed him to stop thinking about work.

He remembers learning that his mother had died and still having to go to the diner to process payroll. Even at his daughter Nikki’s wedding, he found himself worrying about what was happening at the restaurant.

“The business had to go on,” he said.

Over time, he learned to make some adjustments.

“There was a time that I let the restaurant work me,” he said. “But then I learned. Now I run the restaurant, and I make it work for us, as best we can.”

The family’s restaurant history stretches back to Steve’s father, Anesi “Ernie” Zoto, who emigrated from Albania in 1929 and found work at Horn & Hardart in Philadelphia with his brother. The family subsequently operated restaurants from Center City to Montgomery County.

Steve and Nick opened Zoto’s in 1973. The original diner was manufactured by the Fodero Dining Car Company in New Jersey and trucked to Pennsylvania in six sections.

Initially seating about 150, it expanded in the late 1980s with additional dining and banquet rooms, raising capacity to about 250. In the early 1990s, Zoto’s was among the area’s early restaurants to prohibit smoking.

The building looks little like the sleek stainless-steel diners of popular imagination. Its cream-colored exterior, red tile roof, brown awnings, and arched windows framed by alternating bands of brick give it a Mediterranean appearance.

Inside, brass-colored chandeliers hang over burgundy booths, laminate tables, and patterned carpeting. Groups of retirees, local businesspeople, and longtime friends have made the dining room a regular meeting place.

The menu has remained firmly in traditional diner territory: chicken croquettes, roasted turkey, scallops, and a creamy wedding soup that you can only get on Sundays.

Steve says his approach to the business has always been straightforward: “I just took care of people my whole life. I fed people, made sure they had a good meal.”

His daughter, Nikki Cassidy, remembers the family rule: Never serve anything you wouldn’t eat yourself.

Steve had another maxim: “You’re only as good as your last cup of coffee.”

In the early years, Zoto’s operated 24 hours a day. Steve recalls arriving at 6 a.m. and bringing dinner home so he and JoAnne could watch Johnny Carson together.

JoAnne initially stayed home raising their two children. When Nick retired about 25 years ago, she became more involved in running the diner. Nikki grew up there and later became general manager, although raising her own children made working full time increasingly difficult.

Their son, Jason, is a lawyer living in Hawaii. Neither child plans to take over the business.

One of Nikki’s earliest memories was sitting at a table eating with the family. “I started getting antsy, and my dad would call over the chef, Santos. He would come out and say, ‘Come on in the back,’ and he’d show me the big pot that we would boil soup in. He’d say, ‘You don’t want to go in that pot, do you?’”

Decades later, she joked that the same pot was used to prepare snapper soup.

JoAnne has watched generations of customers grow up. “It’s been enjoyable watching their kids, who were toddlers, come in with their kids now,” she said.

Customer Tom Cowgill of Perkasie remembers meeting his friend Monty every Saturday morning for the B2A special: two eggs, home fries, breakfast meat, toast, and coffee. Cowgill ordered his eggs over easy; Monty wanted his over easy but not runny.

Cowgill’s son Evan, now 30, has been coming since infancy. Many of the waitresses have worked there before he was born.

“Where else do you go where you know all the waitresses by name?” Tom Cowgill said. “They know you. They know what you want to drink when you sit down.” He said he may start making breakfast at home now.

That familiarity extended to the staff.

Vollmer, who started in June 2000, has been a waitress, cashier, hostess, cook — “everything, including plumbing,” she said.

Her daughter and granddaughter also work at Zoto’s. She credits the couple with arranging a flexible schedule for her daughter around caregiving responsibilities.

“It’s family,” Vollmer said. “We all fight like we’re siblings, and then we get along afterward like nothing happened.” She’s not sure of her next job.

The closing announcement brought a rush of customers that caught the owners by surprise.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I expect this outpouring of love from all these people,” Steve said.

Retirement will mean more time at the Shore, visiting their son and two granddaughters in Hawaii, and attending Nikki’s children’s games without worrying about getting back to the diner.

“The diner has been like a child that doesn’t leave you,” JoAnne said. “It never does.”