A new diner opened in our neighborhood today, so the Weird-North family went there for diner to check it out. I was disgusted by what we found.
Right off the bat, let me say that when I eat at a diner, I expect a diner, if you know what I mean. The tables should have coffee cups on them when you enter the restaurant. Booths should (but it’s not 100% mandatory) have individual stations where you can scan the tunes on the juke and play songs that nobody has heard since 1958. The waitress should be an older lady named “Maude” or “Gertie” or “Flo” who wears her hear in an impossibly coffered 'do and calls you “hon”, bonus points if she’s got an unfiltered Pall Mall smoldering in the corner of her mouth. The menu should be a laminated, printed front and back with menu items that are heavy on fried foods. Nothing should cost more than $8.95. Entree choices should be things like liver and onions, chicken fried anything, ham with biscuits and red eye gravy. Breakfast should be available 24/7, with all breakfast dishes including hash browns. These meals should be cooked by a fat guy called “Cookie”, and the food should taste like Jesus himself is expected any moment for dinner and they’ve given you his meal because he’s just a few minutes late and they want to make his food fresh. Desert should be an indecently large slab of pie, and as one staggers out of the place, stuffed to the gills, the waitress should call after you in a voice thickened by 50 years of cigarettes but friendly all the same “Y’all come back soon, hear?” In other words, a diner should be the Bel Loc, see the Barry Levinson movie of the same name for more details on this fantastic slice of Americana.
What, pray tell, did we get? Well the decor was right. It looked like a railroad car (albeit considerably larger than any real RR car ever made). The booths had stations for the juke, although ours was a glitzy thing with a computer touch screen that was just jarringly out of place for a “diner”. No coffee cups on the tables (nor were we offered any coffee at any time during our visit-scandalous!), but the waitress was friendly, if a lot younger than should be working in a diner. The trouble started when our menus arrived. Each one of them was about ten pages thick. Gone was the simplicity that diners stand for, and in it’s place stood a horrifying mish mash of cuisine from around the globe. One page touted Greek specialtys, another Italian. The Entrees section was broken up into Poultry (at a real diner “poultry” gets you: “That mean chicken, hon?”), Beef, Seafood (!) and believe it or not, Veal. Prices ranged from $12 to over $20. Anytime I look at a menu and see choices like “pan-seared salmon dusted with cumin and paprika” or “Pork tenderloin medallions, dried cherries, Marsala, pine nuts, braised cabbage, butternut squash puree”, I don’t think “diner food”. Desperate for something dinerish and affordable (Hey, I can afford entrees priced like that, but not, I repeat, NOT at a diner. Those prices are apropriate at Vinny’s or Amichies or any one of the dozens of fantastic “real” restaurants in town), we opted for sandwiches. Matthew’s grilled cheese was fine, as was Gingy’s deluxe grilled cheese (add bacon and tomatoes), but my Monte Cristo sucked ( How do you screw a Monte Cristo up, you ask? You try and get fancy, using focaccia bread and actual turkey breast slices that are drier than Arizona, that’s how. In addition, make sure it’s soggy, that really adds to the dining experience). Top it off with frozen cheesecake for desert (AND NO COFFEE!), and, hey, you’ve managed to negate everything that a “diner” is supposed to stand for!
WHY THE FUCK DO PEOPLE HAVE TO MESS WITH PROVEN CLASSICS THAT HAVE WORKED FOR 50 YEARS??? Want an upscale restaurant? Fine, open one, but don’t try and go half upscale by serving “fancy” dishes in what’s supposed to be a diner (FWIW, the dishes I saw wouldn’t have passed muster in a real restaurant. I couldn’t decide if they were poor-quality good meals or over-priced cheep ones) GAH! I HATE THIS TREND IN RESTAURANTS! Has anyone else noticed a similar move towards “upscale” diners, where the food is crap and the prices are high?
FUCK 'EM! I’m going back to the Bel Loc.