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More Retro Diner

by Randy Garbin & Teri Dunn

We now enjoy a twenty year, ongoing renewed love affair with the American diner and the trend towards serving home-cooked meals by real people in real places. Despite this, stories continue to appear in everything from the New York Times to the East Podunk Bugle heralding in some fashion the decline and disappearance of the Great American Diner. These reports of the diner's demise have proven greatly exaggerated. As followers of this trend and industry for the past fifteen years, we see the diner continuing to serve and satisfy a growing share of the American public. Granted, the heyday has come and gone, and we will probably never again see the landscape quite as populated with these gleaming ladies of the roadside, but someone somewhere will always seek to restore a tired old vintage diner, or they will build a brand new version, updated for the demands of modern society.

The story of the diner's origins have finally seeped deeply enough into our cultural consciousness that we can safely say that at any given moment, you will likely find someone in your local diner who can tell you about Walter Scott of Providence, Rhode Island, and how he got the industry cooking with his diminutive, horse-drawn carriage converted into a no-frills lunch wagon seven years after the end of the Civil War. Some may overstate Scott's role in this genesis somewhat, since the idea of food on wheels hardly started with him. We do know with some certainty, however, that the lineage of what became a thriving industry of constructing high-quality, stylish, turn-key restaurants traces back to this humble start. We've since estimated that the diner has served more than 22 billion meals in the 133 years since Walter Scott first started offering "chewed" sandwiches, slices of pie, and hot coffee to his late-night customers.

The story of the diner business largely follows much of the same arc of progress and decline that attaches itself to most industries born in the industrial revolution. The innovations that came after Scotty retired produced one of the most distinct hallmarks of American ingenuity, quality, and style. In some sense, these qualities made rediscovery of this special architectural form inevitable.

Around the world, the diner is universally recognized as the quintessential American restaurant. In this country, when people see a diner, they instinctively recognize it as a place to eat. Though some still regard the old diner as a greasy-spoon truck stop, more likely people will see it as a bastion of good comfort food served in a solidly constructed building that someone fashioned in a factory, probably in New Jersey. The diner world now has a small library of books describing everything from its history to the culture it fosters to the food it serves. It has an eponymous movie thanks to Barry Levinson. It has a magazine, several websites, and an ongoing historical exhibit at the Johnson & Wales University Culinary Archives in Providence.

Indeed, having immersed ourselves in this culture for the past fifteen years, we see no end in sight for the influence of the diner in the worlds of design and cuisine. This trend looks even more remarkable in light of its informal and largely blue-collar origins. Schools of architecture did not hold classes in diner design. Innovations in the industry generally came from dozens of unsung heroes who worked in obscurity at drafting tables applying subtle and not-so-subtle ideas picked up from reading magazines and talking to other craftsmen. Though today we can identify a few individuals responsible for some of the more iconic aspects of the diner, most changes came through seat-of-the-pants inspiration, evolution and outright copy-catting.

Once a diner became operational, its menu usually took its cues from the local community. Diners in French-Canadian neighborhoods likely served meat pie. In Italian enclaves, eggs came with Italian sausage. In Jewish neighborhoods, you'd find matzoh ball soup. Recipes came from family traditions passed down and refined through generations and then scaled up for commercial food service.

Diners on the highway tended to standardize around the basics, putting a greater emphasis on consistency and service. Popular with the trucking trade, these operations benefitted from word of mouth that potentially spread around the entire region or beyond. For better or for worse, the diner as truck stop pretty much ended with the development of the interstate highway system. Truckers today concern themselves more with parking and portions than with the subtleties of how the cook seasons the soup. Though the myth persists, the idea that you can judge a restaurant by the number of trucks parked outside ended with the Eisenhower administration.

Unfortunately, that insatiable American desire for constant innovation had the regrettable side effect of casting aside and destroying much of that beautiful flamboyance. The diner building industry trudged on into the sixties and shed many of its practitioners and what we like to call the "transportation metaphor." Since Scott's days right up until the early 1960s, diners either moved or looked like they moved, with diners looking like space ports as this era ended.

Yet despite our race to put a man on the moon, America's domestic styling preferences turned inward and sought more familiar comforts. With design cues coming from colonial and early-American influenced, boomerangs and starbursts succumbed to wagon wheels and chippendales. The diner fell victim to this as well, and with that, the romance began to cool. In what seemed to be the final step in its evolution, the busy neighborhood diner became just another family restaurant, laden with all the traditional trappings that concept imposed. Though the counter remained, the grill had long-since disappeared deep into the kitchen. The banter between the grillman and the customers ended. The personal touch offered by waitress service remained, but the larger operations of these restaurants did not allow for the same kind of impromptu theater more commonly found in the smaller neighborhood diners.

Menus expanded as well, usually to several pages in length. Suddenly, it seemed that these new diners specialized in every dish ever made! Somehow, their kitchens offered a range of everything, from a grilled cheese sandwich to rigatoni a la vodka. You could still get pancakes at four in the afternoon, but your friend could get broiled chicken Florentine.

Today, we appreciate the diner for many reasons, not the least of which is the food. We go to restaurants primarily to eat, but we go the diner for something more than just nutrition. Those of us lucky enough to live in a community with a neighborhood diner can tell stories of the people we've met there as much as we talk about the meals eaten. As we nosh with our coffees, our experience sweetens with a wry comment from our world-weary waitress; from the joy of watching the grillman effortlessly orchestrate the preparation of a dozen meals simultaneously; or from the hearty handshake and smile we receive when we meet the owner. On those occasions, which come with increasing rarity in the fast-paced modern world, we feel restored. All seems right with the world.

That said, our favorite diners are still the ones that serve the most amazing meals -- and not "Nobu" amazing or "Wolfgang Puck" amazing, but amazing because every bite of that meat loaf completely satisfies a craving that started a couple of hours before. It amazes because we may have had that meal loaf a hundred times before, but every time we order it, we thank our memory for not embellishing the experience. This is how it always tastes and how it always will taste. With our lives contending with so many changes, we find catharsis in the consistency of that meat loaf.

People often pigeonhole diner cuisine into a rather simple formula of meat and mashed potatoes, eggs, bacon, and pancakes; hot coffee, Cokes and club sandwiches. The best diners break with traditions and will experiment. They will serve up the better examples of regional specialties, and will adjust to the changes in the public taste. Some of our favorites today serve tasty Tex-Mex along with some fresh vegetarian selections. Our favorites take on old classics and give them new spins. The diner owner that tells us, "We serve your typical diner food, but we use fresh ingredients," makes us huge fans for life.

We have compiled here for you a sampling of some our favorite diner meals. Some of these recipes actually come from operating diners and the generosity of their owners. Keep in mind that we've made every effort to properly reduce some recipes that had originally called for serving dozens down to a more manageable number typical for a family dining.

This book, then, is another bit of proof that the diner remains and will continue to remain an important part of our heritage. The industry continues to evolve, with new people and new recipes keeping it fresh and vibrant well into this new century. As long as we continue to value quality meals and the personal touch, there will always be a seat waiting for us at the local diner.