What About the Diners?

Let's start this party by addressing the elephant on the roadside.

Trolley Car Diner, Mount Airy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Photo by Joanne Davis

I took a break from diners when I put Roadside on ice in 2014. I wrote about this decision at the time on the website, and you can still find it there. 

With that chapter closed, I announced to anyone who asked, “I’m done with diners.” After twenty-plus years trying to build a publishing enterprise upon a foundation of that “uniquely American institution”, I felt it was time to move on. And I did. 

Leaving them behind took little effort. By the mid 2010s, the whole industry of building and operating them circled the drain. In 2015, I wrote a comprehensive round-up of Philadelphia’s diners for Hidden City Philadelphia, open, closed, and otherwise transitioned, and eight years later, I could write a shorter piece.

Across the landscape, some great ones shut their doors for good. Some of my favorite people left the scene taken either by death or recession. While moving diners into new locations seemed all the rage in the 1990s and some years after, diners today will more likely to end up in landfills than on the decks of low-boy semi-trailers destined for greener pastures. I’ve long lost count of all those that just ended up on blocks, to rot away.

The vestibule of the Ingleside Diner, formerly of Thorndale, Pennsylvania, in a remote lot somewhere in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. This shows it in 2009, in what was supposed to be temporary storage before shipping out to Missouri. It never made it, and its current condition is unknown, but I doubt it still exists.

I said from the get-go that short-order restaurants were always a tough slog. I could show you articles from the 1940s about operators complaining about the lack of good help, for instance. That never got better. Today, when I hear of someone taking over an old classic, like Adam Willoughby bravely taking the spatula at the Moran Square Diner in Fitchburg, I wish him the best, but to myself I think, “are you out of your mind?” I only echo a sentiment expressed by every diner owner I ever interviewed. 

It’s different now. It’s much worse. The forces arrayed against the small-time restaurant operator are legion. How anyone makes a buck in this business mystifies me more than ever. Last week on a weekday, I stopped at a diner for lunch, had a burger club, a bowl of soup, and a coffee, and it set me back almost thirty dollars with tip. Despite this, I knew because of my experience reporting on the industry that they maybe broke even that day, expecting to make up for it on the weekend breakfast rush. That’s the business model here. Imagine if Toyota sold only seven models of car and five of them always lost money.

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Once I rarely ate a weekend breakfast at home. Now I rarely eat it anywhere else. For my wife, my daughter, and myself, a breakfast at least as good as what we make ourselves sets us back nearly sixty dollars at area diners. Long-time fans of Roadside might remember me recounting the magazine’s genesis from my first breakfast experience at Henry’s Diner in Allston, Massachusetts where I feasted on a platter of pancakes, two eggs, bacon, home fries and coffee for about three bucks! Today, that affords a cup of coffee. 

I will always love the diner for how it once represented everything great about America, and for the experiences it provided me when I hit the road on a mission to eat in every one of them.

An early visit to the Highland Park in Rochester, New York.

We still have some great diners out there. I hear that the Highland Park Diner is still going strong, but I’ve lost touch with too many others. Of the other four of our top five diners (a list we never published), only the Capitol Diner in Lynn, Massachusetts and Charlie’s Diner, now in Spencer, Massachusetts remains, and I’m not 100% sure about the Capitol as I haven’t visited in 20 years. The Miss Adams? Gone. As is the Miss Albany and my dear friends Cliff and Jane Brown who made it so great. Today, it sits idle.

Here in the Philly area, demo permits have been filed on the Melrose! I think tossing the Liberty Bell into the Delaware would spark less local outrage. When Ken Weinstein shut down the Trolley Car Diner after a good twenty-year run, I could only shrug my shoulders, because I got it. The value of the land outstripped the value of the business, and at the end of the day, that’s the equation every retail enterprise must ultimately reconcile. 

We put up a good fight with many kindred spirits joining us on the barricades. We made Lou-Roc a verb! We used to send out subscription renewal cards showing a desolate streetscape with the tagline, “Imagine a world without Roadside.” I don’t want to overstate our cultural importance, but we’ve now had that for more than ten years, and I think the world needs us now more than ever. 

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We still have plenty of other local businesses hanging on and adapting to the various new realities. Remarkably, the lunch wagon has returned in the form of food trucks and often park outside another favorite restaurant type, the brewpub. Distilleries have also roared back into the local culinary scene. Barbecue joints, once a rarity in the Northeast, are everywhere. Bakeries are still a good sign of community health, and I now have maybe a dozen breweries within three miles of my house.

Bill’s Best Brewery in Glenside, Pennsylvania.

I look forward to getting back out there to reassess how we’re doing, because we can’t trust the media. From them, we have only a machine that generates and feeds on conflict. If you have had the good fortune as I did to sit at the counters and pubs around the country and talk and listen to locals, you will see the disturbing disconnect between what you read and what you actually experience.

Most people are inherently good. Most people want to help. I see examples of this all the time. Right here in my little town, when a resident spent nearly three months in a hospital ICU, the community rallied and made sure her family had hot meals to eat every day. Everyone reading this right now has a similar story.

I once made a rather lofty statement that Roadside was a “document of the American condition”. Writing that, I wondered if maybe I took a rhetorical step too far, but in retrospect, I did truly believe it even if I failed to adequately explain it.

The American main streets and back roads have served as a pulse point for our distinct brand of optimism and dynamism as expressed through architecture and commerce. I saw the diner as the premier example of all that — and as a place built and designed with such quality, that it made everyone from trash man to bank president feel like royalty. 

Can we recapture that? We can if we truly want it, but we have to ignore the vitriol spewed at us at every turn and dial back the outrage. We need to try. I know I will. Otherwise we lose everything. 

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And now, a little diner news!

I haven’t been actively involved in the scene for a while, but of course I still hear things. Please share any tips you might have for future postings.

Dan’s Diner, Spencertown, NY

Here’s to the crazy ones! Besides the Moran Square, the other diners to get new owners during the pandemic include the Lawrence Park Dinor in Lawrence Park, Pennsylvania, and Dan’s Diner in Spencertown, New York. I’ve never visited the Lawrence Park, and I’ve yet to have a meal at Dan’s. I did stop in shortly after Dan Rundell completed the restoration, and it took my breath away.

The 101 Diner in Worcester, Mass. is now the Unique Cafe. It began as an unfinished Worcester Lunch Car Co. frame that sat in a garage for forty years. Chris and Matt Blanchard eventually purchased and completed it in fine diner fashion. The 101 closed a few years ago, but it’s reopening as a Jamaican restaurant.

Diner for Sale: Actually, it’s free if you can move it. It may look like a Valentine “Little Chef” model and a sister diner to the King’s Chef in Colorado Springs, but according to Michael Engle it’s an Ablah diner, the company where Arthur Valentine worked before he went off on his own.

Got a tip? Send it along.