The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Whately Diner

Until last year I had quite the thing for diners. I never saw any growing up - Oklahoma was never really diner country, even in the heyday of diners, and anything of that sort had been obliterated by fast-food franchises and multi-lane expressways by the time I achieved sentience - so when I moved east I was surprised to find quite a number of them still going strong. I loved them for their authenticity, or what I imagined to be their authenticity. I was charmed by the old-fashioned design of the things, especially the dining-car diners, with their hand-lettered signs and sleek lines and all that chrome. I romanticized the patrons as true, salt-of-the-earth Americans who came to a diner as much for fellowship as for food, persisting in a type of neighborliness that had disappeared from the rest of the country around the time we stopped walking and began sealing ourselves up in steel-and-glass boxes instead. More than anything, I admired the modesty of diners, their defiant corniness in the face of so much fluorescent, national-chain bombast.

And then I moved to Philadelphia.

Now New Jersey, as anyone knows who's spent any time there, is the epicenter of diner culture. The three biggest dining-car manufacturers were once based there, and what new diner construction still goes on these days is almost exclusively carried on there. Philly, of course, is not in New Jersey, but in many ways it's a sort of cultural annex of the Garden State, which sprawls there just across the river, and the city has many, many diners both within its limits and in the surrounding counties. I spent a lot of time in these diners - many of them, it must be said, not of the quaint dining-car variety, but of the glitzy, mega-diner variety (what I called, without much regard to accuracy, "Las Vegas diners") - and as the romantic gauze began to slip from my eyes, I began to realize something as profound as it was troubling: diner food sucks. This may be because diners tend to have vast menus, offering everything from spaghetti-and-meatballs to waffles, and the quality of the food declines as the expertise of the chefs becomes correspondingly diluted. It may be because the patrons - those salt-of-the-earth embodiments of a vanishing America - are the very same people who, on other days, can be found stuffing their corpulent faces at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets or filling up on Saltburgers at the local Cracker Barrel. It may be any combination of things, but the fact is that I have almost never had a memorable diner meal - or at least not one that was memorable for the food.

It took some time for me to come to this realization, but once I had it I began, if not exactly avoiding diners, then at least ratcheting down my expectations considerably. So this morning when I went to the Whately Diner (known officially, if unappetizingly, as the Fillin' Station Diner, but no one here calls it by that name - Whately is the name of the town), I did so more for the sake of crossing another breakfast place off my list than with any great tummy-rumbling excitement. I had been there before, though not for the french toast, and remembered it principally for its unattractive location beside a gas station (hence its official name) and a parking lot filled with eighteen-wheelers fresh off I-91. And sure enough, when I walked in the door the few customers I saw munching away at the counter bore the distinct odor of diesel fuel. A glance at their copious beards and bellies confirmed that these were indeed brethren of the sacred order of the big rig.



I settled into a booth in the corner, ordered my coffee, and waited to order the only type of french toast on the menu: "french toast with bacon or sausage." I decided on sausage. And then I waited. And waited. The two middle-aged waitresses were chatting away about some acquaintance's heart condition, and then about some other piece of local gossip, and, when I finally strolled up to the counter to ask if I could order, they looked genuinely alarmed. And then, when they saw that I simply wanted to place my order and wasn't going to cause them any physical harm, they apologized. Profusely.

"I'm so sorry! I thought you got him!" (looking sternly at her counterpart)

"I thought I had, too! I was up here at the register and completely forgot!" (looking sternly toward heaven)

"We both apologize!"

"It's okay, really, it's fine," I said. "Really, really, it's okay."

While I waited I flipped through the mini-jukebox with which my booth, like all the others, was equipped. Alan Jackson. Charlie Daniels. Lynard Skynard. Eagles Greatest Hits. NOW That's What I Call Music! vol. 19. Grammy Nominees 2003.

Fortunately, my food arrived before I managed to dig out the 50 cents required to play a song (they'd clearly expedited my order to make up for the earlier lapse), and, famished by now, I tucked in with abandon. And maybe this was just my grateful tummy telling me so, but it was really tasty. The butter came in little plastic-and-aluminum cubes, the syrup had to be squeezed from a plastic bottle like ketchup, and the bread was just plain - if rather thick - white bread, but it all worked deliciously. The bread was nice and spongy, the syrup (plastic bottle or not) was nice and sweet, and the sausage tasted like breakfast sausage should - that is, like no other sort of sausage you'll ever have in any other context.



When I went to the register to pay, the waitresses were engaged in a heated discussion about food coloring.

"What makes green? Blue and yellow?"

"Yeah, but just use a little bit of blue, otherwise it'll look too dark."

Oh yeah. Today was St Patrick's Day.

"Are you trying to find something you can turn green?" I said, as I handed over my check.

"Yeah."

"Green eggs and ham?" I suggested.

"We tried that a few years ago. It doesn't look too appealing. Maybe we could do mash potatoes. We did that a while back. HEY GEORGE! Can we do green mash potatoes? What? Why not? What about for just some customers? Aw, c'mon!"

"Thanks," I said, and stepped out to the car.

And then I began getting excited about diners again, if only a little.