AS WE SAY every year on this date, welcome to the 10/4 MISCmedia, good buddy.
CLASSIC DINER FOOD (and I don't mean the gussied-up simulacrum known in the yupscale-restaurant biz as "comfort food") has been on a minor revival of interest lately.
The diner's become a symbol for urban-civility advocates, to whom it symbolizes a pre-suburban-sprawl era of social interaction and neighborhood unity.
(Of course, "neighborhood unity" back then often included overt racism. Indeed, one of the turning points in the civil-rights movement was a 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in the South that had refused to serve black customers.)
Denny's, trying to overcome its own reputation for racially-motivated preferences in service, is busily converting its old Cali-coffee-shop style restaurants into "Denny's Diners," with mostly the same menu but aluminum-sheet walls and other retro furnishings. It's intended to raise a whiff of nostalgia for the classic East Coast diners, indie eateries built from prefab metal buildings resembling the diner cars of old passenger trains.
Out here in the alleged God's Country, we never really had such diners. We had plenty of fine-'n'-unpretentious eatin' joints servin' up meat loaf, burgers, big pies, and malts (most famously, the former Mar T Cafe in North Bend, a.k.a. Twin Peaks' "RR Diner"). But not the diner-car diners.
Now, one such old diner-car diner building is operating, in the otherwise massively-upscaled sprawl-spot known as Bainbridge Island (where lawyers who think they're poets move to $2-million "cabins").
The Blue Water Diner, subject of simultaneous puff-pieces in the P-I and the Weekly last month, is the labor-O-love of one Al Packard, 50. It's adjacent to his slightly older business, Packard's Garage (a real quick-lube place, situated in a modern-construction imitation of an old-time grease palace).
A leisurely 10-minute walk from the ferry dock, the Blue Water Diner offers classic, decent (and decently priced) all-American meals and desserts, served up in a rigorously restored 1948 Fodero diner. They cheat a little bit, sticking the kitchen and restrooms in a new wood-frame addition. So it's not as space-thrifty as an old diner, but you still get the beauty of a classic American industrial-architecture form, now looking shinier and slicker than it ever did--and servicing a slightly different social aesthetic.
What had been a factory-produced, standardized unit, built to be trucked to turnpike stops and street corners where pretty much the same menu items would be served pretty much the same way, now stands as an independent, individualistic mark of defiance against both chain-restaurant sameness and cuisine-restaurant pretentiousness.
Meanwhile, back in the heart-O-the-city, Linda's, the five-year-old neoclassic tavern on East Pine, faced a dilemma. Despite the supposed decline of the "cocktail nation" fad, the beer-and-wine-only joint was losing young-adult customers to places with the harder stuff (including Linda's sister-concerns, the Capitol Club and the Cha Cha Lounge). This state slightly liberalized its lounge regulations several years back, but a joint offering the hard stuff still has to also offer meals.
Fortunately, the Linda's crew chose to match its down-home decor with down-home grub, a.k.a. diner food. I've had five entrees there in the three weeks since it opened its kitchen, and they were all damn good. Burgers, sammiches, steak, fish 'n' chips, mac 'n' cheese, hearty soups and chili (veggie if you insist), cheddar fries, onion rings, root-beer floats, and weekend breakfasts. All hale, hearty, and satisfying.
And no hummus in sight!
IN OTHER NEWS: It's the first gay bank! (I'll let you think up the "night depository" and "substantial penalty for early withdrawal" jokes for yourselves....)
TOMORROW: Stick a fork in the thrift-store lifestyle. It's done.
ELSEWHERE:
- Time's online contest to pick the century's biggest "Phonies and Frauds" has now been excised of all religious figures (except the fictional J.R. "Bob" Dobbs!)....
- NEC brings you an utterly-cute Japanese arcade-style game, Pogo Bleu, involving a Smurf-like critter who lives in a fridge and has to walk across various foodstuffs (eggs, kiwi-fruit Jell-O) without falling. Most of the instructions are in Japanese, but you can figure out how to play easily enough. Too cute to be allowed to live....
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