Greek Diners: An American Staple

Pictured above: The exterior of my local Greek Diner, Athenian Diner III. Milford, CT.

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Diners- Diners are the backbone of America. Take a treacherous, blind, three-lane traversing turn off any interstate highway exit ramp and you’ll soon arrive at a three-star dining establishment with a traditional Greek name like, “Parthenon”, “Mycenaean”, or “Temple of Chest Hair and Tax Fraud”. Step inside of these underwhelming modern reimaginings of UNESCO heritage sites and you’ll immediately be greeted by a bundle of feta and receding comb-over curls named Mikelos whose body fused to the check-in counter many years ago. You wonder if he has ever managed to pry himself free from the wood-panel desk with its cloudy glass window illuminating a sad spread of dust-collecting Lifesavers, 3 Musketeers, and Orange Tic-Tacs. Maybe he has a catheter. Mikelos looks at some indeterminate point in the distance as the register continually prints out a never-ending ribbon of crinkly paper. His voice, a gruff, low rumble, asks, “How many?”. You respond, “Just one”. He asks, “Booth or table?”. You tell him “If I ever ask for a table, you have permission to put ricin in my spanakopita”. He nods. You sense you have gained a little bit of his respect.

Mikelos waives over a decidedly non-Greek waiter with a nametag reading “Stefanos Papadopoulos”. He looks more like an Alejandro Rincon. You wonder if this is something Mikelos forces upon his staff. Papadopoulos—short, tan, and with ancient Mayan features—guides you past a tubular desert case with baklava, cream pies, and individual slices of carrot cake topped with piped-icing baby carrots. You spot walnuts and raisins in the cake and make a mental note to reserve it a spot in the guest room in your stomach, right next to the intestinal swirly slide (currently being used by Citgo Quik Mart black coffee). You reach your booth in the corner of the restaurant, right next to the full-wall mirror draped with red and green Christmas streamers and mistletoe in the middle of June. Papadopoulos places a napkin with silverware, a laminated menu (which lands with a thud), and a paper placemat on the table. The placemat is crammed with little rectangular advertisements for local businesses: Lyle’s auto-repair, Kyle’s auto-repair, Miles’ auto-repair (“Why go to Lyle and Kyle, when you can go the extra Mile? Miles’ auto-repair, gear-shifting past Lyle and Kyle since ’83”). On the far end of the table near the windowsill is a plastic tower with Smuckers’ jellies, stevia packets, salt & pepper shakers, and a bottle of ketchup from a brand not named Heinz (“Devin Crockett’s Pioneer-Style Catsup”, Devin, your famous frontiersman great-grandfather didn’t traverse the wild west to have his likeness posthumously exploited in the hopes of selling ketchup. Just let Heinz do their thing—sincerely, everyone), which is never a good sign.

You flip open the menu to the first of fifteen pages. The last time you encountered a menu this extensive was at the Cheesecake Factory, where a gentleman at the table next to you had a stroke whilst eating chicken alfredo. The possibilities are endless. There are so many ways to tackle a diner order. Savory or sweet, breakfast or lunch, American classics or Greek specialties. You eye the chicken souvlaki, which makes your heart flutter, but find yourself flipping back to ole reliable: the tuna melt, with curly fries substituted for regular fries for a dollar extra, because what are you, some type of street urchin who can’t cough up an extra buck for a more whimsical, seasoned fry experience? Might as well toss in a vanilla milkshake for good measure. Papadopoulos returns and you recite your carefully curated order to him, making sure to speak up to avoid being drowned out by the slow-moving stampede of older adults with walkers who just entered the diner after being bussed over from their retirement home.

The order has been placed, and instead of reaching for your phone, you find yourself scanning the room, appreciating both the standard diner décor and some of the more unusual art installations. Of the former, there are single serving size boxes of cereal stacked up above an old-school espresso machine with three options, “French vanilla: and a shit-ton of it”, “Hazelnut: for sissies”, and “Dark-roast: sent to hell and back in the Auschwitz crematoria”. A signed picture of John Stamos shaking hands with a much-younger Mikelos (still seated at the register, a four-foot-long receipt snake coiled up on the table next to him) hangs on the wall above the flat top griddle. Of the latter, there is a massive framed picture of a stuffed grape leaf with the caption, “Stuffed grape leaves, EAT ‘EM!” side-by-side with an image asserting the highly questionable proclamation that the industrial stronghold of Bethlehem, PA is sister city to Mykonos, white and blue pearl of the Mediterranean. An older Vietnam vet with a camo hat reading, “USMC” sits in a bar stool stirring his coffee while watching the 24-inch box TV in the top-right corner of the bar. A white-toothed news anchor can be seen on the screen above a banner reading, “Greenland purchase key to finding autism cure?”. The wrinkly Barbara/Priscilla/Marianne waiting on the vet can be heard saying, “Who knows what’s under all that ice?” while the vet takes a long, slow sip of his coffee.

Papadopoulos drops off your food and asks you to let him know if you’ll be needing anything. You ask him the same question back with a wink, moving your eyes back and forth from his nametag to his face to see if he’ll get the message. You catch his face appearing deeply affected for one split moment, but then he turns around and flies off back to the kitchen. You take a thick slurp of your milkshake and then top it back off with the excess shake from the metal chalice that Papadopoulos had also placed on the table. Diners that don’t give you that extra four ounces of shake in a tin cup are 83% more likely to shut down within their first three years of operation. It turns out having the foresight to stock larger milkshake glasses that can hold an entire shake doesn’t translate to diner success—what translates to diner success is being served that holy grail alongside your standard shake glass. Psychologically speaking, the purpose that cup serves is to distract you from the bloody fallout of the blind, three-lane traversing turn you took to get off the exit ramp convince the customer that he/she/they/fatty/recovering alcoholic replacing booze with sweet treats is getting more milkshake than he/she/they/fatty/alcoholic replacing booze with sweet treats paid for.

The extra thick milkshake hits a leadoff homerun, and the tuna melt on toasted rye in the on-deck circle steps up to the plate looking to go back-to-back. The Jewish ancestry of this sandwich isn’t harming its chances of hitting one out of the park, per se, as we’re not interested in athletic ability so much as food preparation, something Jews don’t struggle with quite as much (we are omitting gefilte fish for the sake of this argument). You take a bite of the melt. It is so savory, so satisfying, that it has you questioning whether or not the Greeks borrowed this recipe from the ancient Jews during the Hellenistic period when cultural exchange between the two groups was common. You chase the melt with a curly fry, and while you’ve never been to Arby’s (for good reason, living past the age of thirty-five seems like something you might be interested in doing), you can’t imagine that their signature side has anything on these golden-brown payes (colloquial term for Hassidic Jews’ curly sideburns). You scarf down your entire meal and waive Papadopoulos back over for the check. He brings you a surprisingly cheap bill, and you leave him a nice tip, suspecting that Mikelos might not be paying entirely livable wages to his pseudo-Greek employees.

You bring your check up to the counter and hand it over to Mikelos, who is still seated in the same position, his eyes still fixated on some spot in the distance, his register still printing out a continuous scroll of blank paper. He grabs the receipt without looking, punches a few buttons on the register, and pins the bill down on the needle holding the rest of that day’s orders. You hand him your card and then reach into the repurposed bingo-ball-spinner containing those bulbous, semi-soft mints with fruity jelly interiors. Legend has it that diners come equipped with these things. When you build a diner, these mints magically appear. Mikelos hands you back your card and asks if you would like your receipt. You are about to say yes, but then remember that you wanted to take a piece of carrot cake to go. Mikelos seems not just annoyed, but baffled by your request. “What do you mean, you want a slice of carrot cake?” He asks. You tell him exactly that, that you would like a piece of cake. Mikelos waives Papadopoulos over and tells him to direct you to the dessert case. Papadopoulos guides you over to the case and then motions you to come around with him so you can peer into it from behind. Inside the case are just stacks and stacks of My Big Fat Greek Wedding DVDs. The desserts are not real desserts, but rather images pasted to the front of the case to obscure its true contents. Mikelos informs you that they have never once had anyone even enquire about the desserts, but he can give you a deal on one of the DVDs, since his cousin worked as a backup boom mic operator on the set of the film. You tell him that’s really alright, you’ll be on your way now. He hands you a 12 foot long receipt and wishes you the best. On your way out the door you notice the claw machine, also stocked with My Big Fat Greek Wedding DVDs, body-hair grooming kits, and tzatziki-scented hair gel. You step outside, back into the open-air of Mykonos’ sister city, and are immediately swarmed by police cars. If the diner was the last piece of the outside world you’d ever get to see, so be it.