an ode to long island diners

open 24/7, they are always there for you

It is 3am and I want a hamburger. Not just any burger. I want a diner burger. Fat and juicy, side of pickles and coleslaw, fries and onion rings. Maybe a side of brown gravy for the fries. I could get out and go by myself, but going to the diner, to me, is not a lonely endeavor. A late night/early morning diner run is for company. You sit in the booth, eating fries and laughing, drinking a vanilla egg cream and conspiring to rule the world, nursing that cup of coffee so you don’t have to leave just yet. You are with your best friends or you are with your partner or you are with someone you just met at the club. It is 8am, 6pm, 3am. You’re at the diner because it’s there anytime you want it.

There is no lack of 24 hour diners where I live. There are three in my town alone, and I frequent each of them for different reasons. The Apollo has amazing pancakes. Grand Stage - formerly the Empress - does eggs benedict just right. And the best burgers are at Colony Diner. They’ve all been here forever, they’ve all been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Since 1955, the Empress Diner - now known as Grand Stage - on the corner of Newbridge Road and Hempstead Turnpike in East Meadow, served up breakfast, lunch and dinner to locals any time of day or night. Eggs for dinner, grilled cheese for breakfast, a full five course supper of chicken parmigiana, whatever you wanted to eat, whenever you wanted to eat, the Empress was happy to serve you.

For a long time it was the diner. Before the Colony, before the Apollo, if you said you were going to the diner, you could only mean the Empress. It was a local landmark, a meeting place, a fixture of life in our little corner of Long Island. The local Kiwanis met there every Tuesday. We had my sister’s baby shower there.

When I heard the news that the diner was closing in 2018 I felt a twinge of mourning. I wasn’t really mourning the diner, because I’d already considered it dead - the food and service had gone way downhill and I started going to the Colony more often - but rather the passage of time, the death of things I once loved. I put on some Springsteen and sang along — everything dies baby, that’s a fact — which just seemed the right tone for the moment. I did some mental gymnastics and managed to tie the death of the Empress into my own mortality and spent a day or two in sort of a grief state; for my youth, for my town, for everything. A few days later it was announced that the Empress was sold and another diner would pop up in its place. Everything that dies, someday comes back.

When Grand Stage opened, I was happy. That site could not be home to anything but a diner. It couldn’t be a Trader Joe’s or a car dealership or any of the establishments rumored to be coming before the diner sale was announced. While the new owners changed the decor and freshened up the place, it felt mostly the same. I was just so happy to see the menu was as heavy and voluminous as it used to be. Sure, there were new additions, but all the good diner stuff remained intact. Egg creams and pancakes, matzo ball soup and turkey club, hash browns, Greek salad, black and white cookies the size of your head. It was all there.

If I closed my eyes it was no different than the Empress. The constant clinking of glasses and dishes as the busboys rush around the diner, the swinging kitchen doors revealing sweaty chefs and harried waitstaff, the low bar where lonely people drank their coffee on spinning barstools.

my nephew, the diner pancake enjoyer (2016)

Suddenly it is 1983 and we’re sitting in a booth at the Empress at 2am after a night dancing to new wave music at Spit in Levittown. We are all slightly drunk or high. We order pancakes and French fries for the table and act like we own the place. We laugh a little too loud and some stiff upper lip couple on the other side of the room shush us. We dig into a bowl of pickle spears and laugh some more. 1987 and I’m there with coworkers from Record World and the personal jukebox in the booth is getting a workout from us. We laugh as we shove quarters into the machine and randomly press numbers. REO Speedwagon blares throughout the dining area. Other patrons stare at us like we should know better.1995 and I’m there with the two small children who are content to sit in the corner booth and do the mazes on the paper placemats while enjoying their chocolate milk and grilled cheese. It’s 2001 and we can’t sleep so we head out for burgers and a conversation about what’s going to happen to America now. 2017 and my then husband and I are here for our weekly burger. He orders a gin and tonic and I sigh. We’re quiet, pensive, uncomfortable. The diner is on its last legs and the management is yelling at the staff in full view of patrons.

The best thing about a 24 hour diner is how it is there for you, always. It’s there when you want to celebrate a big win, it’s there for old friends meeting up for the first time in years, it’s there for your book club, for your family after a funeral, for a cup of soup on a cold winter afternoon, for a burger at 4am. The diner is where you go when your group can’t decide where to eat. With such a varied and large menu, everyone will end up happy. Aunt Harriet can have her eggs Benedict, cousin James can have his spinach pie, you can have a four course chicken Francese dinner. The diner makes sure everyone is happy.

We have no shortage of 24/7 diners here on Long Island. They are everywhere. And while it feels like all of them are the same, there really are unique differences between them. We know which one goes overboard on the holiday decorating, which one does the best egg creams, which one updated their menu as well as the prices, which one has a line to get in. Sometimes you go to different diners for different things; my burgers are always from Grand Stage, but a Colony salad or Apollo pancakes are always a good bet.

If you’re ever on Long Island, be sure to visit a genuine Long Island diner. Preferably at 4am. Get the pancakes.