HOLLYWOOD — Margie Dunlap ran a diner that was never trying to be anything but a diner. It had a counter, a dozen stools, a grill she scraped herself, and a policy, unwritten and absolute, that no one who was actually hungry left because they were short a dollar.

Mrs. Dunlap, who kept a small lunch counter off Hollywood Boulevard open through the night for four decades, died Nov. 2 at a hospital in Los Feliz after a short illness. She was 86. Her daughter said she had worked a Saturday breakfast shift within the past year, mostly to argue with the cook.

She opened the place in the early 1980s, when the surrounding blocks were rougher than they are now, and she built her business on the hours nobody else wanted. The diner did its best trade after midnight, feeding taxi drivers coming off shift, patrol officers, nurses, bar staff, and the steady parade of young people who had come to Hollywood to be discovered and were, for the moment, mostly hungry.

“She fed the whole night shift of this neighborhood, and she remembered every order,” said Curtis Ballantine, 71, who drove a cab for years and ate at her counter most nights. “You sat down, she was already cracking your eggs. If you looked like you’d had a bad night, there was extra on the plate and no charge for it. She never made a thing of it.”

Marguerite Dunlap was born in 1939 in Bakersfield and came to Los Angeles at nineteen with the idea of acting, an idea she abandoned quickly and without regret. She waited tables around town for two decades before she saved enough to take over the lease on the counter that became hers. She often said the restaurant business had given her the one thing acting never would have, which was a room full of people who came back.

She refused to modernize. There was no printed menu, because the regulars knew it and she was happy to recite it for anyone who didn’t. She resisted taking cards longer than her accountant liked. She kept prices low enough that other owners occasionally asked her, half joking, to stop.

“People think that stretch of town has no memory,” said Yolanda Prieto, a longtime waitress who worked alongside her. “Margie was its memory. She knew who’d gotten sober, who’d made it, who’d left and come back with nothing. She kept all of it and told none of it.”

She sold the diner about ten years ago to a younger couple, on the condition that they keep the counter and the overnight hours. They did. It is still there, still open late, still without a printed menu.

Mrs. Dunlap is survived by a daughter, Renata, of Glendale, and two grandchildren. Her family asked that anyone wishing to honor her leave a generous tip for someone working an overnight shift, which was, her daughter said, the only kind of memorial her mother would have sat still for.