Diners Were the Cradle of American Identity. Not Anymore.

When I was in college in Baltimore, a few decades back, there was this little takeout place called C&C Carryout. It was on a corner, just barely off campus, and every once in a while I’d pop in for a double cheeseburger. God, that thing was good: greasy, salty, meaty, melty. And cheap. It couldn’t have been more than $5. It was a work of genius.

My wife, Jean, who was also there for college (but who I wouldn’t meet until a couple of years later), remembers C&C for a different dish: the bulgogi. Cooked on a flattop almost like a cheesesteak, it was served in a styrofoam takeout container with rice and a side of kimchi, or sometimes bean sprouts. “It was my Asian fix,” Jean told me about 30 seconds before I wrote this line.

Baltimore is a city defined by its diners, and while C&C, which is now closed, was not technically a diner—there were only a few tables, after all—it wasn’t far off. It was a short-order haven where you could get eggs, a burger, a cup of coffee, and whatever Korean- or Japanese-inflected dish the Korean owners felt like putting on the menu and could prepare speedily with the tools at hand: a deep fryer and a flattop. One Yelp review mentions a sukiyaki sub, which sounds delicious.

C&C was hardly a standout, either. A couple of blocks up St. Paul Street lay Tamber’s Nifty Fifties, a retro diner where you could get potato skins, meatloaf, samosas, and tandoori chicken while playing oldies on the jukebox. As with C&C, this didn’t feel like a “concept.” It felt normal: Immigrants had bought or opened traditional diner-type restaurants, and added their own dishes to already expansive menus. These weren’t attempts at fusion; you wouldn’t go to them for rare delicacies from Jeju or Punjab. They were fine and satisfying and let the owners make use of their spaces and equipment in ways many of us hadn’t seen before but which we accepted without question.

In this way, they can hardly have been different from earlier generations of diner owners, who little by little constructed menus that have come to seem iconic but which—and here I’m speculating a bit—were probably revolutionary and strange at the time. Just think of what you can normally expect at a diner: eggs and biscuits, lots of burgers, corned beef and cabbage, a BLT, hot pastrami, some kind of red-sauce pasta or even lasagne, moussaka, stuffed grape leaves. It’s easy to label this all as “white food,” but the menu represents a melding of Irish, Jewish, Italian, and Greek culinary traditions. Throw in chicken and waffles and you’re talking Black soul food as well. And yet none of this seems strange—it’s almost boring how middle-of-the-road, how American it all is. How equally American every dish on those menus is.

I think that may have been a good thing. There is value to having a common culture—a common food culture in which we agree on a standard set of dishes and have one type of place to get them all, quickly, cheaply, comfortably, without having to stress about quality or “authenticity.” With short-order cooking, those loftier concerns do not apply. You cook, you plate, you move on to the next ticket.

And the problem is that somewhere along the way, the diner stopped evolving. I don’t know why. Maybe diners lost their sheen. Maybe it became too much of a Greek thing to own diners, so newer immigrant groups didn’t have the same opportunity to get into the business. Maybe the wave of immigrants who arrived starting in the 1960s had higher goals than diner ownership, and by the late 1970s and 1980s, when immigration was even broader, it was too late. If I were an academic, I could probably spend the rest of my life researching this topic. (For me to undertake that project, I would need a whole lot more paid subscribers.) But whatever the cause, the idea of American food—diner food—was frozen in time. For decades, it had accommodated new recipes, new influences, but, with the exception of the burritos and huevos rancheros you see on occasion now, no longer.

And with that, the diner, which had once been a unifier of people, became polarizing. For my wife, who is Taiwanese, and even my kids, going to a diner outside of New York City can be nerve-racking. These are very white places, in terms of both the food—which isn’t such a problem, because who doesn’t like a burger?—and the clientele. My family feels watched, out of place. Every time we’re on a road trip, and I think we can just pop off the highway and into a diner for a quick lunch, I have to remind myself that they will not be as comfortable as me.

That’s disappointing because diners are built for comfort, whether you’re grabbing a stool at the counter for 15 minutes of coffee and pie or lingering with your friends and a plate of fries in a back booth at 2:30 in the morning. The idea of the diner is welcoming, and for a long time the menu was, too. Until it wasn’t.

I like to imagine an America where C&C and Nifty Fifties were not just quirky Baltimore outliers but the national norm, inspiring copycats from Charleston to Lawrence to Cheyenne to Phoenix. I’d like to see fufu as common as mashed potatoes, pad kee mao and bột chiên for the post-party set, momos alongside pierogis, pancakes competing with pajeon. I want Vietnamese iced coffee to keep truckers going after midnight, and I want cops to pop in for fan tuan in the morning. I want those voluminous laminated menus to encompass a whole world of short-order, deep-fried cooking. I want diners to become again a comfortable place for every one of us to eat the absolute most unexceptional versions of the foods we’ve brought over from every corner of the globe, and to think nothing at all of it¹.

Would this change anything? Hard to say. I want to embrace the Bourdainian ideal that eating one another’s foods helps us understand one another’s lives—that we really can come together over a meal. It may be hard to believe that now, at a moment when a shameless fascist oligarchy is busy raping the institutions that once made this country actually great, and aims to return it to a time when no one but white evangelical Protestants was comfortable, at diners or anywhere else. Still, could it make anything worse? At the very least, it might give these enemies of cosmopolitanism a reminder of what they stand to lose, and what kind of America they’ll be left with: one built on dry toast, runny eggs, sour coffee, cracked vinyl, stale music, and grumpy waitresses. No bulgogi for them—they deserve nothing but the styrofoam. 🪨🪨🪨

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It’s Good and I Like It: Beth Gibbons

There is no band I like more than Portishead, the mid-1990s trip-hop pioneers out of Bristol, England. Their sound—a mix of electric guitars, looped vinyl, casually forceful beats, and lyrics that oscillate between loneliness, longing, and the romance of despair—speaks to me like no other. In large part that’s due to their singer, Beth Gibbons, whose voice can sway from fragility to malice to resignation in a single tune. Portishead isn’t really together any longer, but Gibbons is solo now, and going on tour. (I’m going to see her April 1 in NYC!) If you’ve never given her a listen, now’s the time.

Notes

1. While there are loads of fancified diners, in New York and elsewhere, this isn’t what I’m looking for. True diners need to be workaday, downscale even.

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