Lou-​Roc Award: Dolts deep-​six Deepwater Diner

Published on Friday, 03 February 2012 21:14

Written by Randy Garbin

Update: We just discovered that the Deepwater Diner has its own Facebook page. Click here and leave your opinion of what they’ve done to the place.

In what reality is a plain white stucco box more attractive than finely-​crafted, streamlined stainless steel?

Roadside first published more than twenty years ago. The Lou-​Roc award debuted about two years later. The grapevine revealed to me a few years after that the term transformed into a verb — as in, “I won’t lou-​roc my diner.”

The Deepwater Diner as it appeared in 1997.

All along the way, this publication and many others have spread the good word that diners offer both good food and a dynamic restaurant concept for entrepreneurs. People like diners. Actually, they love them. They feel good just to see them around.

So, when we walk into the freshly ruined Deepwater Diner in Carney’s Point, New Jersey and listen to an otherwise pleasant woman tell us that “no one stepped forward to help us”, it’s all I can do to keep my head from exploding. The great American diner holocaust continues unabated.

Diner or dime store Denny’s?

During the 1993 SCA diner symposium tour, the Deepwater looked a little tired, but still had all of its original features.

For those unfamiliar, the Deepwater is a 1958 Silk City diner built by Paterson Vehicle Company, and it has a still-​pristine sister diner in the Martindale Chief Diner along the Taconic Parkway in New York. Like the Chief, the Deepwater offered a more spacious, two-​sectioned Silk City design with vestibule. Also like the Chief, it’s degree of originality meant that a good scrubbing and some minor restoration work could have made the Deepwater factory-​fresh.

This is the interior of the Deepwater’s sister diner, the Martindale Chief in Martindale, New York.

No, if you tell nobody of the nefarious deed you are about to do, no one is going to step in and convince you to do otherwise either. I asked the kind lady if she had ever heard of Google and thought to search for “diner” or “diner restoration,” whereupon she’d likely discover dozens of interested parties (including this writer) who would at least save all of the original fixtures and furnishings that ended up in the dumpster.

“I love what we’ve done,” she said in one breath, and in another, she acknowledged that many customers asked her not to change anything. Some people can’t take a hint.

I walked away experiencing yet another example of our increasingly sub-​standard system of education, where we apparently spend NO time at all impressing upon young minds a sense of appreciation for great design, pride, and craftsmanship. All that apparently means nothing to the ilk who’s capable of doing this.

The Lou-​Roc award is named for the diner in Worcester, Massachusetts needlessly and thoughtlessly wrecked by its owners in 1990.