We Need the All-American Diner

A few years ago, I was driving in the area surrounding my childhood home, an otherwise-nondescript suburb that has changed little since I was a kid. At the nearby strip mall, I was surprised to see that the Denny’s I grew up with had been replaced by yet another chain: Orangetheory Fitness, a mocking capstone of gentrification. I remember going there after school and relishing the opportunity to indulge in the sweet artifice of pink Minute Maid and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese off the kids’ menu—things my immigrant parents never let me have at home. Not good for you, they would say.

Later on, my high school friends and I discovered a ’50s-diner-themed restaurant near downtown that subsequently served as the setting of a number of memorable get-togethers. Waitresses with garish makeup and high-pile hair gracefully crossed the checkerboard tiles while balancing mountains of fries and greasy burgers, throwing red straws at patrons seated on chrome-backed stools. The DJ, behind a fake analog setup, queued up Elvis and Chuck Berry.

To us, humdrum children of quiet suburban life, of the muted neutrals of the California landscape, there was nowhere quite like it. And under the excessive neon lighting that cast a deep magenta glow upon our faces and the shiny suspended cars and Route 66 decor—nods to a continued but no-longer-quite-so-glamorous regional hallmark—we became enamored by the diner’s foreignness and what was then a hard-to-place familiarity.

Like many immigrant families, we surrounded ourselves with others like us, upholding a way of life that leaned heavily into the first half of our hyphenated identities. As a result, most of my early understandings of “Americanness” were gleaned not from actual experience but from being immersed in American visual culture. Official exercises in assimilation, like partaking in obligatory Fourth of July celebrations where the potluck dishes always tasted just slightly off, disinterested me.

I instead learned a form of qualified patriotism from the small screen, where I watched friendly waitstaff serve these “unhealthy” foods while beautiful all-American actors laughed together and divulged secrets from the safety of their regular booths. The diner represented all that this country was and is supposed to be: a place where anyone, regardless of their background, could find comfort outside their home for a reasonable price.

Though its heyday is now past, the diner maintains its populist appeal, even giving rise to a genre of political journalism where candidates, in order to appear more relatable, are often required by campaign strategists to hold meetings and take interviews in them. That the diner has retained such an enduring hold on our national consciousness is a direct product of its history.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, diners cropped up in manufacturing hubs like the Northeast as working-class establishments catering toward factory workers with long shifts and little time to eat. After World War II, factories—shortly followed by families—began their mass exodus to the suburbs, where land was plentiful and cheap. The diner was subsequently standardized and overhauled to accommodate its growing and more affluent clientele, which now consisted of the rest of the nuclear family, as well as workers’ burgeoning dependence on cars and the new interstate highway system to commute to the city. Historian Andrew Hurley writes that during the postwar period, diners functioned as “transitional institutions,” occupying a “geographical space between inner-city ethnic neighborhoods and mass produced suburbs” and straddling “worlds of blue-collar work and white-collar domesticity.” The modern diner, as an extension of the comforts of the American home, was thus born.

Excluded from white-collar employment opportunities, many first- and second-generation European immigrants capitalized on this boom and became early diner proprietors, a phenomenon that continued into the 2000s with newer waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America. The massive menu we see today, crammed with a hodgepodge of quintessentially American dishes and variegated reproductions of ethnic foods, is the collective legacy of enterprising American immigrants preserved in plastic lamination.

Toward the end of the century, the diner (and for similar reasons the neighborhood bar or coffee shop) emerged as a popular narrative device and visual motif in turn-of-the-century television shows like Seinfeld, Twin Peaks, and Sex and the City. Different characters would meet to catch each other up on their individual lives in a familiar setting, providing a grounding effect for—at times—ludicrous plotlines and personalities.

But perhaps the most famous on-screen immortalization of the diner belongs to the ’90s cult classic Pulp Fiction: Uma Thurman ordering a five-dollar “just milk and ice cream” shake (not adjusted for inflation) and doing the twist with John Travolta at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a kitschy-themed diner not unlike the one in my hometown, only infinitely cooler. Seated in a seafoam convertible-shaped booth, Thurman fittingly brings up the subject of comfort to Travolta, whom she’s just met: “Why do we feel like it’s necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?” Even beyond comfort, the scene emanates a certain unaffected ease that has inspired decades of Mrs. Mia Wallace worship. That the diner is an integral part of creating this effect is notable. The French have their cafés, and we Americans have our diners.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned more and more to appreciate places like the diner and public spaces like parks and libraries, where solitude is permitted to comfortably exist. In Nighthawks, American artist Edward Hopper, known for his portrayals of urban isolation that have regained popularity in pandemic times, depicts four people at a late-night diner, although it is clear that the primary figure has come alone. Curator Sarah Kelly Oeher suggests that the compositional decision to include multiple individuals rather than just the singular typical of the rest of his works reflects the diner “not as a place of disconnection but as a beacon of light and hope against the darkness, a moment of finding community when everything outside seemed grim and unbearable.”

The French have their cafés, and we Americans have our diners.

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Last year, I moved from California to New York City, historical stronghold of national diner mythology. In an effort to make an unfamiliar place feel more like home, I began my quest to find the city’s best. Among them: Remedy Diner in the Lower East Side, which taught me the valuable lesson that one should never order diner pasta. 7th Avenue Donuts in Park Slope, a 24-hour spot whose intrigue eventually forced me to overcome my fear of biking in the city. Tom’s in Prospect Heights, a spot so beloved that they co-named the intersection after longtime-owner Gus when he died.

These were the lucky ones that survived. Unfortunately, I found that many longstanding establishments had shuttered their doors. Others became less accessible, cutting back hours or raising prices so drastically that it no longer made economical sense to eat there.

Of course, this isn’t just happening here in New York. All across the country, skyrocketing costs of commercial real estate, pandemic closures, and related labor shortages are driving the diner as we know it toward the brink of extinction. In addition to such unfavorable material and economic conditions, the culture that previously enabled diners to thrive in actuality—not just in media depictions—has drastically waned over the last several decades, save for a few small-scale revivals. Consequently, a lot of people who grew up in the States no longer share their aging parents’ nostalgia for the jukeboxes and milkshakes of their youths.

Finally, the maraschino cherry on top: The diner’s entire ethos is fundamentally incompatible with the present era, in which conspicuous consumption now includes not only what but also where you eat and drink, in which the rapid availability of information has contributed to ever-briefer trend cycles and a perpetual bias toward the novel. Food scholar Mitchell Davis notes of New York City, long regarded as the country’s cultural and culinary capital: “In the same way that they talk about theater and opera and art, New Yorkers talk about restaurants, whether or not they have eaten in them.” He continues, “New York’s obsession with the newest, the latest, and the trendiest restaurant, food, and other cultural products is about staying ahead of everyone else, about believing that as a New Yorker you know what is to come. In short, it is about consuming modernity.”

Today, certain restaurateurs are attempting to capitalize on the ongoing wave of cultural nostalgia and salvage the diner by upcycling a couple of its trademark qualities: the colorful retro design as antithesis to corporate minimalism and the “Americanness.” If this catches on in what I like to call the “New American” restaurant industrial complex, the last thing I want is to see some expensive Instagrammable place that goes against everything the diner has stood for: somewhere I, or anyone for that matter, can enjoy rich strawberry milkshakes that will trigger my dairy allergy on smooth formica tabletops and drink mugs of that inexplicably delicious coffee late into the night. Is that really too much to ask for?

In some sense, this is a call to action to support local diners for the greater good. Diners can provide night-shift workers, students, or just those coming back from a night out with decent, off-hours dining options outside of fast food, especially in food deserts. They can also serve as community meeting points and can offer a nighttime social alternative that doesn’t require a lot of money or involve drinking.

Diners can provide night-shift workers, students, or just those coming back from a night out with decent, off-hours dining options outside of fast food, especially in food deserts.

But beyond these practical reasons lies a deeply personal, indubitably selfish one. The diner is one of the few remaining American institutions with which I still have unequivocally positive associations. Walking into one, even if I’ve never been there before, instantly conjures a feeling of safety, like being wrapped in a warm blanket of nostalgia. In today’s day and age, a dark cloud constantly looms over the future; hardly a day goes by where we aren’t reminded of the economic precarity, social fragmentation, and failing infrastructure in nearly every corner of the country. The diner, as a paragon of postwar prosperity and optimism, feels anachronistic as a result, like a myth—an artifact of America before it became a culture in decline.

Under these conditions, where a life of comfort appears increasingly out of reach for the average person, to elude existential paralysis and continue to labor often requires a concentrated suspension of belief. Whenever things get to be too much, our natural reaction is to seek out the past and pretend things are going to be okay, a temporary escape: Return to your childhood home, reboot and remake familiar stories, go to the diner.

On Halloween, another of my favorite time-honored American traditions, a couple friends and I went to Sunset Diner, located just under the highway in an otherwise-quiet neighborhood of Brooklyn. The rain began to drizzle in the late hours of the night. When we arrived, out of breath, what seemed like half of the city was already there. Tired, sweaty New Yorkers coming from a night out in all sorts of ridiculous getups, myself included (and likely a Mia Wallace somewhere among the mix), crowded every booth and table, looking for somewhere to eat and stay and talk with their friends. It was likely the most business the place had seen in months, if not the whole year.

It was one of those beautiful moments that seem to come straight out of a movie, one that your parents came to this country for, with all its half-realized promises, so that years later you could move to the city and see it for yourself in the flesh.

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