Prufrock measured his life in coffee spoons. I measure mine in greasy spoons. And diners and coffee shops. I love them. Always have, at least from the time I could choose where I wanted to eat.
Sam’s
My first taste of dining independence came when I was eleven or twelve. Beginning in sixth grade, students at the suburban Cincinnati school that I went to could eat where we wanted. Most kids ate in the cafeteria: some brought their lunches; others ate the liverwurst sandwiches or tuna noodle casserole and canned green beans that the cafeteria ladies dished up. Some kids walked home for lunch. But some of us crossed Harrison Ave. and walked a block down Compton Rd. to Mt. Healthy’s business district, where, along with a couple drug stores and a bowling alley that served lunch, there was my favorite at the time, the Mt. Healthy Coffee Shop—or Sam’s, as we knew it. There, from about 11:20 ‘til about 12:30 every school day, fifty 12-14 year olds jammed into the narrow space between the counter and the wall like bees swarming, waiting for one of the 21 seats. If there were maximum occupancy laws in Ohio in the late 1950s, nobody was enforcing them.
Mary worked the counter and got the drinks, an old man ran the grill and the deep fryer, and a second man ran the register by the door. Mary wore a pale blue waitress dress, sweat stains under the arms, old and new food stains dotting the front. She was probably somewhere between 20 and 65; I don’t know, I was 12. I knew her name was Mary, though, because everybody called her Mary. I knew the cook was an old man because he always looked unshaven. The cashier’s breath stank. All three of them had cigarettes in their mouths.
Every several seconds, the screen door slammed, either announcing a new group of arrivals or a couple open seats at the counter that were grabbed practically before the last kid got up. I was a drummer in the jr. high band and kind of liked those screen door slams: bam… bam… bam-bam… bam.
The standard order was hamburger, fries, and a Coke. The hamburgers were thin, greasy, and tough; the buns thin, greasy, and soft. In between were pickles, minced onions, and a glob of ketchup; they were greasy, too, either from absorbing the burger and bun grease or from just spending time in the restaurant. No one complained. The fries were limp and greasy and salty. No one cared. The Cokes came in those little Coke shaped glasses, full of ice and very fizzy, probably because the carbonated water was so much cheaper than the Coke syrup. In short, it was one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever had. And I had it almost five days a week for at least two years.
The floor had random stepped-on French fries, some with ketchup, that kids had dropped or thrown. The counter was uneven from the dried French fry or burger crumbs that no one had bothered to wipe off; it was sticky from the dried, spilled Coke puddles that no one had bothered to wipe off. The plates wobbled or stuck. Neither the customers nor the staff seemed to care.
When we were finished eating—usually about seven minutes after we’d arrived–some of us would wait patiently in line to pay. Others meant to wait but were less patient and eventually just drifted out without paying. And a few were chronic dine-and-dashers. Occasionally, the cashier looked up, seeing someone race out the door, and yelled, “Hey, you, come back here,” but the door always slammed shut before he got the sentence out, and he knew that if he ran after the kid, ten more would leave before he got back to the register. Maybe he was Sam; maybe Sam died 30 years earlier; maybe there was no Sam and we junior high kids were the only ones that called it that.
As an adult, I can only begin to imagine how filthy the place was, how many years of grease and smoke coated the griddle, the pop machine, the register, the counter, the walls.
But it was the good old days, the days when parents told their kids to “be home for dinner” but otherwise let them wander unsupervised, the days before schools had locked doors and metal detectors, the days before cholesterol and obesity, the days when 12- and 13-year old boys were starting to feel grown up, the days of burgers, fries, and Cokes.
Izzy’s
“Corned beef and swiss, please,” I said, first time I went to Izzy’s, sitting down at the counter after standing in a crush of business suits, coveralls, and work uniforms. “You can’t have swiss!” the cashier yelled at me from 20 feet away. “You never been in a kosher restaurant before?” Oh, I thought to myself: all those Jewish delis that I’ve been eating in all my life were kosher style; this place is the real thing.
This place was Izzy’s on Elm between 8th and 9th Streets. I’d heard about it for years but hadn’t been there until that summer in the mid-60s between my sophomore and junior years in college when I worked as a stock boy a couple blocks away at Shillito’s, one of Cincinnati’s three remaining big department stores. The restaurant looked like it’d been there forever; in fact, it had only recently moved there, its third location since Izzy’s father started the deli in 1901. That summer, I was a regular.
“How much is the sandwich?” I asked the waitress that first day. There were no prices on the menu board above the counter.
“He’ll tell you when you pay,” she said, cocking her head toward the cashier.
The cashier was Izzy Kadetz himself. The waitress, the only waitress, was his wife Rose. The first time I ate there, I was afraid I’d walked in on the dissolution of their marriage, they were yelling at each other so much. “What do you mean you forgot her birthday,” Rose yelled across the restaurant as she threw a handful of potato chips onto a plate. “I mean I forgot her birthday that’s what I mean are you deaf?” Izzy yelled back as he rung up a customer. But that was Izzy and Rose. For as long as anyone could remember, he’d run the register, she’d run the counter, and they’d constantly bickered.
If Rose liked you, she’d put an extra pickle or two on your plate. She seemed to be a lovely person so long as you weren’t her husband.
That first sandwich and all the ones that followed that summer were perfect, warm, extra lean corned beef with brown mustard on soft, almost gooey Rubel’s rye bread.
Afterwards, I stood in line to pay. In front of me were two men, one in a three-piece suit, the other in coveralls.
“What’d you have?” Izzy asks the first one. “Corned beef and a Coke.” “$2.50,” Izzy says.
“What’d you have?” he asks the second man. “Corned beef and a Coke.” “$1.75,” Izzy says.
“What’d you have?” he asks me. “Corned beef sandwich and a Coke,” I say, reaching into my pocket to pay. He looks me over, looks at my khakis, my polo shirt, and my age and says, “two bucks.” As I pocket my change, the man behind me in a blazer and grey slacks forks over $2.50 for his corned beef sandwich and Coke.
“Hurry back,” Izzy yelled after me as the door is about to slam shut, “we got rent to pay.”
Hinkle’s
We used to take the kids to Hinkle’s for breakfast, occasionally. It meant getting them up and moving a little earlier, but they were always excited to go, to sit at the counter, to spin on the stools, so it wasn’t a problem. My wife and I would drive both cars from our house in Hanover, Indiana down the hill to Madison so that after breakfast, she could continue down Main St. and across the Ohio River bridge to Carroll County Middle School, where she taught English, and I could drive the kids back up the hill to Southwestern Elementary with time to grade a few papers before I taught my 10:00 speech class at the college.
Hinkle’s didn’t have fancy neon outlining or signs; it didn’t have stainless steel. It didn’t have framed pictures of James Dean and ’56 Chevys. It didn’t have a jukebox. It just had a 16-seat counter and a radio playing WORX-AM; usually we got there just in time to hear the hog futures report, something I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now. The smell of old coffee and old grease was embedded in the walls and the stools’ torn vinyl upholstery. It was the real deal, Hinkles. I don’t remember the waitress, except that she was one of those middle-aged women that had probably been waitressing since high school.
I do, though, remember Tuffy.
Tuffy was the cook.
He stood at the griddle facing the window almost all the time, rarely looking back at the customers or the waitress. If the front window weren’t so greasy and fogged over, you could have seen him better from outside than inside. He had a beer belly and old Navy tattoos on his biceps and a cigarette with a long ash stuck to his lip. His greying crewcut was short enough that you could see the folds of skin on the back of his trapezoidal head. Even though he wore a different tee shirt every day—he seemed to have an endless supply that people had given him to promote various local high school, college, and municipal events—it and his baggy jeans were always sweaty and dirty and stained. He looked like a caricature of a short order cook.
Tuffy didn’t talk much and seemed to concentrate intensely on his job. His job, most of the time when I was there, was frying and scrambling eggs, cooking bacon, sausage, and ham, flipping pancakes, and occasionally turning the big pile of home fries at the back of the griddle.
Despite its seeming like he’d been standing there cooking eggs much of his life, he wasn’t very good at it. My standard order was bacon and eggs—over medium—and home fries. The bacon and home fries weren’t a problem, but the eggs, another story entirely. The plate always looked great: a couple slices of bacon, a pile of potatoes, and two perfectly cooked over-medium fried eggs. Sometimes, though, there was a third egg, overcooked or whose yolk had broken. That less than perfect egg was always under the other two. Sometimes there were four eggs, two perfectly cooked, over medium, on top of two that were overcooked or broken. Once, my plate had five eggs on it. It reminded me of a child who thinks that if he puts a magazine over the pieces of the broken vase, no one will notice. Often, when he messed up my eggs, Tuffy would add an extra slice or two of bacon to my plate, as well.
We’d finish our breakfast. Sometimes I’d leave the extra eggs and bacon, knowing—even then—that more of that kind of cooking really wasn’t good for me. Sometimes I’d take it home for later. And too often, I’d eat it all, knowing I’d have a grease-induced stomach ache for the next couple hours. My wife would kiss the kids and me and drive across the bridge to her day of Kentucky middle schoolers. The kids and I would drive back up the hill to their school and to mine. Tuffy never looked up from his griddle, concentrating as hard as he could on cooking the next egg right.
The New Wyman Park Restaurant
The New Wyman Park Restaurant is at the corner of 25th and Howard, across from a gas station and a car dealer’s service department and a couple doors down from the local American Transit Union office. It’s been there since the 1940s, as have some of the customers, by the look of them. The clientele represents a cross-section of Baltimore if you don’t count people with money, people who dress well, artists, and women. In fact, the regulars are mostly African American men with a respectable smattering of white men thrown in. In that sense, I guess it does reflect Baltimore’s racial proportions. Based on the way they’re dressed, they’re blue collar workers, laborers, white collar workers that have jobs in the neighborhood, and retirees, plus the occasional copse of cops. I seemed to be the rare customer from another part of town, stopping in maybe once a month or so on my way to the University of Baltimore, where I was a teacher and administrator.
The New Wyman Park opened at six in the morning and closed at 3:00, so they did lunch, too: grilled cheese, ham and Swiss, egg salad, tuna salad, fried fish, veal parm, BLT, meatloaf, burgers. It was all right there on the brown menu board over the grill. And they had fried chicken and pork chop platters, and even liver and onions. But I only went there for breakfast.
I saw several of the same people every time I went; I assume that they didn’t coincidentally just show up when I was there but that they were regulars. The waitresses called them Mr. James, Mr. John, Mr. Lonnie, Mr. Cletus, and the ubiquitous “hon.” “How ya doin’ today, Mr. Lonnie,” Karen would say, plopping a big ceramic mug of coffee in front of him as the elderly Black man carefully laid his cane along the foot rail and sat down at the counter. “Well,” he’d answer back slowly, “I’m just blessed to be here with you.” “You just blessed to be anywhere outside the cemetery,” the man next to him said, and three or four of them nodded their heads and laughed. When one of the regulars walked in, Peggy or Karen would say, “Mornin,’ hon; you want the usual?”
It wasn’t like the Dutch Valley in Sarasota, where a few days a week, my Uncle Jimmy would sit down and say to the waitress, “the usual,” knowing very well that she’d only worked there since 2:00 the day before and had no idea who he was. Peggy and Karen have been at the New Wyman Park as long as or longer than a lot of the regulars, Peggy for 23 years and Karen for 14.
Sometimes Peggy and Karen didn’t even have to take the order, much less write it down. Sometimes the cook would glance over when the bell over the door rang, see who it was, and pour some batter onto the waffle iron or crack a couple more eggs onto the griddle.
The cook’s a tall, slim but solid Black guy; he looks to be in his 60s. He’s bald, but you wouldn’t know it because he’s always wearing an Orioles cap except occasionally when he lifts it up to wipe his head with the handkerchief from his back pocket. The New Wyman Park is clearly his place; by that, I don’t mean that he’s the owner—although he may be, I have no idea—but he’s the person in charge, not only cooking, but telling the busboy he needs more plates or another loaf of white sandwich bread, telling the assistant cook to butter that toast that just popped up, making sure that Karen knows that Cletus needs more coffee, and all the while, his back to the counter, flipping eggs and pancakes at just the right second and keeping up a steady stream of banter with the regulars: “How ‘bout them O’s last night,” “Tell me about it,” “They just gotta admit Flacco’s gettin’ old and come up with a new plan,” “You can say that again, brother,” “That Donald Trump’s gonna be the death of all of us!” The cook looks like Cal Ripken in the 2001 All-Star game, snagging the bacon, throwing it onto the griddle to heat it up, and then lobbing it onto the plate with some pancakes or eggs, sometimes setting Peggy or Karen up to deliver it, sometimes spinning and sliding the plate down the counter, unassisted, to Mr. Keith or Mr. Cletus or me.
The assistant cook doesn’t wear a cap, never makes eye contact, never says anything.
Occasionally, I’m there on Bacon-Cooking Day. Bacon Cooking Day is the day that the assistant cook stands at the secondary griddle cooking bacon. And cooking bacon. And cooking bacon. Slabs and slabs and slabs of bacon. A couple days a week, it turns out, they pre-cook three days’ worth of bacon, refrigerate it, and then use it to refill one of those rectangular stainless steel bins as the cook’s supply gets low.
I said earlier that I stop by the New Wyman Park about once a month. I used to. That was back when I ate bacon and sausage and real eggs pretty regularly, back before my triple bypass. I still eat eggs but much less often. And I can’t remember the last time I ate bacon, although occasionally, I’ll get turkey sausage with my Egg Beaters. I mention this only because the Wyman Park doesn’t do turkey sausage. They don’t do Egg Beaters. I ordered egg whites once, and Peggy gave me a “where do you think you are, the Ritz Carlton?” look. When I asked if they had any “um non-dairy, you know, non-actual-butter stuff to um put on my toast,” the cook turned around and gave me The Eye, as if to say, “This is the New Wyman Park Restaurant. We ain’t no gourmet restaurant or health food store, but we still got our pride, and we sure as hell don’t got no margarine.” I still go every few months and get a couple eggs over medium and grits and wheat toast—dry—and coffee. The food’s always great, but without the bacon and the home fries and the butter and the grease, it never feels like the real thing anymore.
The Big Generic Greek Diner
There was a time when I’d stop at Pete’s Grille on my way to work or on Saturdays on the way home from the Waverly Farmer’s Market, but once Michael Phelps started winning Olympic medals and people found out he ate breakfast at Pete’s after practice, it got more and more crowded with celebrity seekers. Phelps not only ate there a lot; he ate a lot there. His standard breakfast was a few egg sandwiches, a three-to-five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast, and three chocolate chip pancakes. The food and the service at Pete’s were great, but not good enough to make up for the increasingly long waits for one of their 28 stools.
There was also a period when I went to the Double-T Diner on Rte. 40 between Baltimore and Ellicott City, usually on Sunday mornings. We’d drop the kids at Sunday School and then hang out, eating, reading the Sunday Times, and grading papers ‘til it was time to pick them up. The Double-T was one of these big Mid-Atlantic diners that causes culture shock if you’re from the Ohio Valley. The host always has a strong Greek accent, as do the cashier, most of the waitresses—they’re virtually always waitresses and not waiters—and often the busboys. The reason for that, I guess, is that at least in Baltimore, these diners all seem to be owned by Greeks: the Kourtsounises own the Towson Diner; the Korologos family, the Double-T; the Vasiliades family, the Sip’n’Bite in Canton; Marc Tsakiris owns the Boulevard Diner in Dundalk; George Kavourakis, the Broadway Diner in Middle River; Jimmy Filipidis, the eponymous Jimmy’s in Fell’s Point; and Ted Efstathiou owns the Nautilus Diner in Timonium.
Lately, I’m spending more of my diner breakfast time at the Nautilus. Timonium’s a nice middle class Baltimore suburb, too Republican and vanilla for my taste, but the Nautilus is convenient, efficient, and a good place to go when you have a bunch of people and need to scoot tables together—like when my son and his wife are in town, and they and my daughter and her husband and kids and we all meet for breakfast. There’s always a respectable number of people at the Nautilus, but except for Sunday mornings, it’s never so crowded that you can’t linger, whether to continue a business meeting, visit longer with the family, or in my case, now that I’m retired, spend a little longer reading the paper or that library book that’s almost due. And it’s relatively quiet, unlike so many restaurants, where even with my hearing aids, I can’t follow the conversation. At some point, those kinds of considerations became just as important to me as the funkiness of counter diners.
And then there’s the food. One of the reasons people spend more time at the Nautilus than at the smaller diners, I think, especially if they’re new to the place, is to read the menu, 11 pages spiral-bound. The breakfast section alone is four pages. Categories include Pancakes and French Toast, Waffles, Farm Fresh Eggs, Around the Clock Omelettes, Cereals, Bunnery, Breakfast Wraps, Breakfast Sandwiches, Other Breakfast Items (where else, after all, would you put creamed chipped beef, sausage gravy and biscuits, and cheese blintzes?), Side Orders, and Beverages. The waffles section offers—among other things—malted waffle with ham, bacon, sausage, or scrapple; Canadian bacon; strawberry, blueberry, or cherry preserves; two scoops of ice cream; fresh strawberries; or apple-cinnamon-raisin compote. And for people more fully awake, there’s the Soups and Appetizers section, the Sandwiches section, the Salads and Diet Delights section, the Saute and Pasta Specialties section, the Entrees section, the Desserts section, the Senior Citizen menu, the Children’s menu, and the Beer, Wine, and Spirits list. At the Nautilus, there’s always somebody there to refill your coffee cup or water glass. The floors are always clean, the tables always wiped, the bowl of complementary individually-wrapped mints at the cashier’s station always full.
Truth be told, it’s healthier, too. The other reason I go there more these days is that I can order Egg Beaters or egg whites. I can order Egg Beater omelets. I can order veggie Egg Beater omelets with low-fat cheese. I can order my eggs poached and my potatoes with no extra salt. I can get tomatoes instead of potatoes. I can order multigrain toast. And I can order any or all of those things without feeling like I just stepped off the bus from Why-the-hell-did-you-bother-to-come-to-a-diner-ville.
That, unfortunately, is the new, old, post-heart-surgery me. I’m thinking more about what my doctor will say about my blood pressure. I’m reading more and more about the “obesity epidemic” in America and am aware that I can’t shovel it away like I used to and not put on even more weight. Some days, I think I’d rather be eating greasy spoon bacon and eggs and home fries for breakfast every day and cheeseburgers and fries for lunch, just like the good old days, and resent the egg whites and tomatoes on my breakfast plate, the turkey burger and side salad for lunch, when people all around me are wolfing down 12-oz burgers with bleu cheese and bacon, duck fat fries, and a large Coke. I find that most of the time now, when I “break over,” as my Weight Watcher friends used to say, and order what I really want, my food just tastes greasy and heavy, and afterwards, I don’t feel so well.
There are, though, those rare occasions when I just throw caution, arteries, and waistline to the wind and order the Hercules Omelette (three eggs with beef and lamb gyro meat and feta) or just my usual—two eggs over medium, bacon, and home fries, all swimming in grease, white toast dripping with butter, and coffee—and think, “Ah, life doesn’t get any better than this.”
Jon Shorr has written for the Discovery Channel, JMore, Tricycle, Today’s Education, Social Education, and more. His fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in Passager, Defenestration, Stories That Need to Be Told, Joe, Welter, Bluntly, Psychopoetica, The Baltimore Sun, and elsewhere. He’s a Professor Emeritus of English and Communications at the University of Baltimore
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