Diner Food

A personal Recollection

I grew up in southern New Jersey and still have a very strong attachment to diners. The gleaming aluminum exteriors and gaudy neon DINER signs lure me like a Pied Piper over the cliffs of caloric insanity. As a child, a diner was a familiar, but somehow still exotic, place where you could get breakfast 24 hours a day. There, you could always have your eggs cooked just the way you liked them, but it was years before I stopped mimicking the behavior of my parents and actually learned the difference between "sunny side up" and "over easy." Of course, diners were the only place I actually had a choice as to what kind of eggs I could have, as my brother and I weren't taken to non-fast food places very often. I could also order foods that I would rarely – or never – get at home. Strange things like scrapple, creamed chipped beef, and porkroll always seemed liked the height of daring experimentation to my childish palate. But mostly, diners were about more. More pages to the menu, more types of cake in the revolving cases with more layers and icing than you ever thought possible, more food on your plate, more, more, more. And the choices were never exactly foreign; they were, really, like home-cooked food – just bigger and better. The diner is a world of über comfort food: inch-thick pieces of french toast topped with fruit and whipped cream, ham slices the size of dinner plates, and untold cups of coffee – the bottom of which was never allowed to see the light of day.

 

Of course, food quality various greatly from one diner to the next. I've had some really great meals and some really God-awful ones; most have fallen somewhere in the middle. It's been my experience that the larger the diner, the better the meal; eat at a small one (particularly one that's never been extended or renovated) and you're likely to spend a few hours digesting a gut bomb. Regardless of the quality of the meal, all diner food shares an unpretentiousness that was (and still is) a big part of the diners' charm. Much of what we think of as comfort food (mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, meatloaf, pancakes, etc.) are mainstays on most diner menus. So diners really are a bit like eating at home – except that you don't have to clean up after yourself when you're done. And let's not forget about the cool tabletop jukebox.