But after World War II, diners began to more closely resemble the family-friendly establishments we think of today - and they hit their stride. The mobile lunch wagons had ditched their wheels, setting up their counters and barstools permanently where most of their working-class clientele would find them. There were caveats, of course - Gutman notes there were few women eating in diners in their early days, and certainly these spaces would have been at least de facto segregated - but “there’s a tremendous history of everyone going there,” he says.īy the 1930s, the diner as we know it had physically taken shape. Fashionable gentlemen in dress suits order sardine sandwiches and chocolate with as much eagerness as the homeless itinerant calls for a dog with a slap of mustard.” Richard Gutman, author of a series of books on American diners, recounts a newspaper story from 1932 in which a reporter observed the crowd at a diner, everyone from milkmen to actors to debutantes to teamsters. In 1896, the Boston Morning Journal described a local lunch wagon as a place where “all classes of men rub elbows within. Like clockwork, writers began to romanticize the working-class lunch wagon. The “night lunch” wagon, in contrast, provided coffee, sandwiches, and pie at nearly all hours. sitting down to dine at a fine city hotel would be a little embarrassing.” Also, restaurants may not have been open during the late night or early morning hours when you really needed a bite. “Besides, with your clothes soiled from a day’s hard labor. For most working men, eating at a restaurant would be out of the question, as they could potentially afford only “a tankard of drink or small cut of buttered bread,” writes Michael Karl Witzel in The American Diner. And because they were not formal restaurants, men of lesser means were as welcome as anyone else. They first appeared in Rhode Island, near hubs of late-night activity, to feed revelers, laborers, and newspaper workers. The history of the diner begins in the 1870s with the lunch wagon, a slightly beefed-up version of a pushcart vendor. Can there ever really be a place where “everyone” is welcome? How much of the diner is a myth? But the survival of diners has long depended on their association with this down-home, ordinary imagery, where folks from different walks of life can put aside their differences and find common ground over sandwich platters. Restaurant owners - like Redding of Thai Diner, Samuel Yoo of NYC’s Chinatown-influenced Golden Diner, and Sofia Baltopoulos of the Tasty vegan diner in Philadelphia - are beginning to expand the definition of what a diner can be. Such that it doesn’t matter whether diners, in their current state, are actually those things. Kathy Hochul tweeted last year) “meet the most interesting people” over eggs and iced tea, this is what is being evoked. Diners have become synonymous with these other images - the working class, the small-town community center, a place for “real” Americans free of frills and ostentation, and most of all, a place for “everyone.” For politicians and celebrities, or anyone looking to (as New York Gov. At the prototypical American diner, the story goes, workers and students and the unemployed could all rub shoulders with one another, as long as they had a few cents for a meal. But the diner has been considered a model of culinary democratization in the American public consciousness since its earliest days as a horse-drawn food cart selling sandwiches and coffee. There is probably no such thing as a place for everyone.
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