Silver Diner

So they say you can’t go home again. The more and more I think about it, it’s true. Tonight, Christine, Morgaine, and I stopped at the Silver Diner in Rockville, and it was different. Man, the Silver Diner used to be a great place to go for greasy spoon fare. To be honest, the food was just ok, but it was hot, plentiful, and the service was fast. It was, a great place to gather with friends after a late movie, annoy the staff by playing the banana boat song on the juke box, and argue about the meaning of life.  In short, it was a diner.  That was however, back in 1994.

Today, it’s more a diner themed restaurant, than actual diner. Don’t get me wrong the food has taken a step up in quality.  Our dinner was excellent, if overpriced. The thing is, it was too fancy for diner food. While they still had chicken fingers, burgers, and pancakes on their menu, the majority of their menu  were upscale items like the Lamb Merguez burger (which was very good), it’s no longer greasy spoon fare.  Furthermore,  while the service was still fast, it was designed to get you in, get you your food, and get you out, bang boom done. Hanging out was definitely not encouraged.

 Finally, and I know that this is an odd regret, the patrons were not diner people.  Don’t get me wrong, they seemed to be from what I saw perfectly lovely upper middle class families, but they were not diner people.  While diner people include members of the upper middle class, it’s made up of people from all over who have nowhere else to go in that particular point in their lives. For diner people you had disaffected 20 somethings like myself. There were also groups of people there comforting a friend with milkshakes, and then the drunk sobering up after a bender, telling everyone who would listen that  his wife left him because she found a bra in his car. Those are diner people, because life happens in diners. The Silver Diner is now just a sterile place to get a quick, if expensive, bite to eat.

These memories are from a host of different places such as the Silver and Tastee diners.  These places seem to be disappearing, only to be replaced by safe, wholesome, pre-packaged sameness. A gentrification of taste as it were.  Or perhaps more comforting, or troubling depending on how you look at it,  is that I am no longer a diner person.  That these places still exist, it’s just I have somewhere else to be. 

Oh well, enough being maudlin for tonight.