O’Rourke’s Diner: Are diners bistros? – June 10, 2011

I had neglected, perhaps deliberately and ignorantly, the quintessential American dining institution: the Diners. I did not understand the raison d'être of diners, nor did I understand the fixation people had for diners. American food – raw or prepared – is, if euphemistically put, “unrefined,” and frankly, “bad” and truthfully, often “murderous” with all the additives and hormones. And yet, I confess that my favorite show for some time now, while on the elliptical in the gym, has been Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. The show provides me with a shot of self-righteousness to boost the ever-declining morale and takes my mind off the painful fact that I am laboring on a ridiculous exercise machine like some kind of a marmot. Despite being my favorite show on Food Channel, I had never seriously entertained the idea of ever dining in any of the featured diners, well, not until being hit in the head by Hightstown Diner.

Are diners bistros? Belatedly, I have begun now to wonder whether I had been looking in all the wrong places in the U.S. in search of good food. Given my penchant for bistro over restaurant, and trattoria over ristorante, I perhaps should have suspected that real food might be found in diners rather than fancy restaurants, which seem to be equally plastic and Botox-ed up as many of their patrons in Manhattan.

Therefore, I went to O’Rourke’s Diner with one burning suspicion, which needed confirmation: Are diners the bistros in the U.S. that I have been searching for?

Hightstown Diner - June 4, 2011

We all have our biases, preconceptions and assumptions; I certainly have more than my own shares of them. However, as long as we are aware of them, there is no problem, is there? It is like playing pool with a handicap, reversed. One of my longstanding, hardcore and absolute belief was that American food was inedible as a rule, and diners – a.k.a. greasy spoons – which serve them, could not be anything more than at most bearable and serviceable; even then, with the caveat of being equidistant from any other possible dining options.

On the other hand, I had often wondered and fantasized about the incredible and ingenuous food, which the ever-aggrandizing Wolfe had continuously wolfed down, prepared by Fritz and envisioned by Wolfe – i.e. blueberries-fed chicken – in the gastronomic world, as existed on West 35th Street (in Rex Stout’s mind, unfortunately). Was food better back then, before the mass production kicked in after World War II and sucked the United States into a gustatory Dark Age*?
*Of which I wonder if we are still in.

I had intentionally stopped by at Hightstown Diners to write it off as a joke, but now I am contently writing it up.