Diner Dilemma

It was during a recent outing to the Book Thing with my friend, Sanjit, that I was asked something that made me question some of my very deepest beliefs about food. "What's so great about diners?" he asked. "I don't get it." Rummaging elbow-deep in a bucket of books, I stopped cold.

"Whaddyou mean 'what's so great about diners'? It's a diner." He stared at me blankly. "I don't think we can be friends anymore," I said, and went back to rummaging.

He was still standing there, though, waiting for me to defend myself. I sighed. How do I quantify this? I've spent countless hours at many diners throughout my years, and thinking about those diners immediately recalls the countless stories that took place within them just like a certain song reminds you of an old love. Naturally, there are bad diners out there, ones with cold coffee in cracked cups and crusty yolk stuck to the sides of the sugar dispensers. And slimy pie. In those diners the short order cook blows his nose with a pancake off of your short stack. But those are not my diners.

"What makes them so great? Uh...nostalgia," I said. "And eggs." I don't think either of us were satisfied with this answer.

I was about seven years old when I slid into the pleather booth of my first diner. My dad would often load my brother and I into our beat-up Toyota and drive from Allentown, PA out to Harrisburg to get gooey grilled cheese sandwiches at the Tom Sawyer Diner. My brother, then just two years old, would inevitably throw a fit and sling his food at the ceiling. Tight-lipped, my father would carry his screaming progeny out to the car as I watched through the diner window, chewing a french fry.

Late nights during high school found me in my acid-washed jean jacket, trying to look nonchalant enough to catch the eye of one of the busboys at the Hamilton Family Restaurant (Ham Fam). I sat in a booth while my friends smoked limp cigarettes pilfered from older siblings. At a nearby table, an old woman in a house dress and slippers read dog-eared romance novels and gummed a slice of lemon pie. Looking back, my self-consciousness must have been as pronounced as the scent of frying bacon.

In college, the State Diner in Ithaca, NY was the backdrop to many late night conversations held over heaping sides of buttery, crisp-edged homefries redolent of green peppers and onions. The future was so big and nebulous then. My friend Andrew and I would stay up all night, chainsmoking and eating squat blueberry muffins, talking about theory, and form, and writing. Once, the the entire cast and crew of the Rocky Horror Picture Show showed up in costume for breakfast at 4am. Unruffled, the waitress poured everyone coffee and went back to the lunch counter to read the funnies.

Since moving to Baltimore, Pete's Grille, with its unparalleled tuna melts and joyful, homely plates of eggs, has become my occasional weekend solace. On those weekends, the whole meaning of happiness fits in the space between C's hand and mine as we walk, tousle-haired and t-shirt-clad, into Pete's for grits and an over-easy. We laugh at our goofy rooster hair, and I sop up the rich orange yolk on my plate with a slice of toasted rye and he presses his knee against mine. Nothing's better than that. Diners are great like that. They're always pleasantly familiar in one way or another, and that has the power to comfort. You can walk into any diner anywhere in America and know that there's a hot plate of breakfast awaiting you, that the waitstaff will treat you like family (which means, my friend Sarah says, that they'll most likely ignore you for periods of time), and that the meal won't take very long...unless you want it to. And if, by some twist of fate, a slice of pie gets mixed up in there somewhere, well, all the better.

So, I'm officially sticking to my previous answer. Nostalgia and eggs.

Still hungry? Learn more about diners here.