2 months ago
8
December 10, 2025 — 5:00am
My deep love of diners started well before stepping onto American soil. I put it down to a youth spent watching too much TV. How could I forget those Happy Days of seeing Fonzie, Richie, Potsie and Ralph Malph hanging out at their local greasy spoon Arnold’s (where Leather Tuscadero, played by Suzi Quatro, also once busted out Devil Gate Drive)? Laverne and Shirley tried running a diner for an episode, with shambolic results. The Sex and the City gals frequented NYC’s Moondance Diner while, in the movie Grease, the kids from Rydell High plotted and gossiped at the Frosty Palace.
I was hooked. With rose-coloured glasses firmly in place, I ventured to real-life diners around the United States. Traditionally, diners were factory-built and transported to their location – such as the 1948 New Jersey-made Kullman diner that became Philadelphia’s Birmingham Grille but is now the meticulously restored Jax at the Tracks in Truckee, California. I’m far more liberal with my diner definition, not caring so much about the building and its history but the experience that awaits – namely budget-friendly comfort food plopped onto Formica while I sink into the upholstered vinyl. The biggest shock is that diner food is usually terrible and the coffee even worse.
Mostly, I’m in diners for breakfast (and a side-serve of nostalgia) and the eats are stock standard. A typical diner breakfast menu includes pancakes (with a squirt of canned whipped cream topped with a sliced strawberry), bacon (cut differently to what we’re used to in Australia and fried to such a crisp it shatters into shards), hash browns and eggs. I thought I’d heard every egg order possible in America – over easy, scrambled, poached, boiled, sunny side up – until one day a fellow diner surprised me by ordering his eggs “over hard”. If you’re in a Southern diner, perhaps grits (similar to polenta) and chicken-fried (crumbed) steak with biscuits (scones) and gravy will be among brekky options.
Coffee is usually of the drip variety. The brew, which tastes just as bitter as the country’s politics, stews in its pot on a counter for god knows how long. Free refills (if you need further punishment) are par for the course. Seeing a waitress swing around her tables with coffee pot in hand, doling out the jitter juice, feels (at least to this Australian) like you’ve wandered onto the set of one of those sitcoms of yesteryear.
Waitresses are busy people so don’t expect much in the way of chit-chat. They’re also working for tips so most are friendly enough (you might even earn a “honey” or “sweetheart”).
My rudest experience was at Twede’s Cafe at North Bend in rural Washington State. As Twin Peaks aficionados know, this was transformed into the Double R diner where Detective Dale Cooper would pop in to order a slice of cherry pie and “a damn fine cup of coffee”. Perhaps my waitress had heard the cliched order one too many times, but she practically rolled her eyes at me.
Like Twede’s, Memphis’s Arcade Restaurant is of the bricks-and-mortar variety (it’s estimated there are only about 2000 of those traditional, transportable diners left in the US, down from a peak of 6000 in the 1950s). Even so, the Arcade holds a special place in the hearts of Elvis fans. They flock to slide into one particular booth, the one at the back that’s a mini-shrine to the King of Rock and Roll. Elvis was a regular, so this is the spot to order a fried peanut butter ’n banana sandwich, wash it down with a milkshake and tell the waitress “thankyaverymuch” – if you dare.
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