sanpaku_backup | Phantom Diners

What is it about living in Boston? All we want is a lousy diner where I can get a tuna salad sandwich for 3 bucks or something. We had a choice of 2 nice places along these lines in Baltimore, though admittedly it took some time to find them. The Star Light diner on route 40 had some of the best tuna salad and potato salad around, and they had chocolate cokes. The Bel-Loc on Loch Raven Blvd. in Towson made good cheese sandwiches and people loved the original decor. This was still too few real places and they took a long time to get to, but they were nice.

Well, here is the list of Boston diners I can recall at the moment: 1) the "Big Dig" diner. This is in South Boston near the dry dock and the cruise terminal. It seems to be a culinary school and maybe is open on Fridays for lunch and that's it. 2) "Mel's Diner" on Broadway, also in South Boston. This has never been open when we've driven past, which admittedly hasn't been before 8 at night. 3) the "Out Back" diner off of Providence Highway right after you get off 128. We have never found it to be open at any time of the day, though the place looks like it must be open some time. Evidently they don't open on weekends or something.

Then there are the places near us in West Roxbury vicinity. These uniformly close earlier than 7 pm, too early for us to go to. They are not really diners but little joints that seem to mostly serve breakfast and lunch. We went to "Auntie B's" for breakfast once and the "Westbury Restaurant" for lunch. But what we need is a place for the weekend.

So we were really excited last week when we drove by this place in Watertown, the "Town Diner." Classic diner, looked perfect, not even that far from us in relative Boston terms (ie 20-25 minutes).

I knew there was a problem the minute we walked in and a guy got up to walk us to our table. Open the menu, and yep, the menu is one page long. It includes things like "Tofu Loaf" and grilled salmon with aoli and so on. (I should mention that years of being married to a vegetarian have instructed me that many vegetarians do not like food meant only for vegetarians. They want grilled cheese sandwiches.) Tonight's special was Beans & Franks for $8. Aha. We found a place like this near BU called an "Urban Diner" that had Mac & Cheese for $10. That kind of fucking RIPOFF "diner-esque" thing. Except this had even less choice. Why must people screw with a good basic concept? Why the pretentiousness and high prices when if we wanted that we would get expensive food?

We ended up getting some good french fries and then going to Indian in Cambridge. I was too embarrassed to leave without getting anything.

But god damn it, is there really no place in this city for a lousy normal diner? I don't blame the people at this place. I'm sure the guy saw it and said, "this is a beautiful diner and I'm going to lovingly restore it and make it good," and he bought it, and realized you can't make a profit on normal food, so he put all this highfalutin' crap on a very short menu because he has one cook in the back. So I don't blame them. But all there is in this town is Bickford's, just about the crappiest low-roll Denny's offspring you can get... Boston's version of Eat & Park, except it's awful and overpriced. ($7 for tuna sandwich with fries.) I hate Bickford's, and they are everywhere, and they are the reason there are no damn diners in this town.

Oh and we almost got killed 10 times while driving around last night. I remember being in driver ed and for some reason the teacher told us that if you worked in a metal stamping factory when you had to pull your hand away from the stamp in the nick of time, and had to do this for hours every day, it didn't matter how good you were: you would lose some fingers sooner or later. That is what driving here is like. The coup de grace was a guy who went through a red light while we had the green, we honked, we stopped, he kept going through and turned while we were honking for about 10 seconds. Just amazing.

What a godforsaken hell hole this is.