An Ode to Diner Coffee

Don’t get me wrong. I am a coffee snob.

I was an avid reader of Oliver Strand’s now-defunct coffee column, “Ristretto.”

Name me any block in New York and I’ll tell you what coffee shop within five blocks has the best cortado, cold brew, and the cutest baristas.

At my old office, I would disappear for thirty minutes at a time into Midtown’s coffee wasteland, desperate for a bean whose lineage was a real place, that didn’t have to be over-roasted to be rendered edible. If bad weather struck, I had a stashed bottle of cold brew in the office fridge that I always mixed way too strong.

And nowadays, the only office coffee I drink is supplied by a roaster so talked-about that a wealthy private equity firm deemed its 7-shop operation worthy of a sizable investment.

But I also love diner coffee.

I went to college in Rhode Island, a liberal northeastern state sandwiched between Boston and New York with a blue-collar feel and the second worst unemployment rate in the country. They knew how to do diners right. For better or for worse, Guy Fieri filmed a fittingly large number of hours there.

The best diners in town were unmistakeable. Their interiors had more unironic kitsch than a hipster’s dorm room. There was this awful metal siding on nearly every one, or maybe a red-and-white striped awning, and they were always open at ungodly hours. Open at an hour when you had to debate whether it was early or late; when you would spot union workers up before sunrise sharing the counter with students indulging in a bedtime snack.

And the glue holding this odd, chaotic arrangement together was the coffee. The watery swill, the been-on-the-heat-too-long, always-from-the-pot-with-the-black-handle-and-never-the-orange brown stuff. It was to the diner what beer is to the pub, the red sauce in an Italian restaurant. It fueled the conversations, whether heady or gossipy, hung-over or post-all-nighter, with strangers or with friends. And best of all, there was always one nearby, each with a unique experience but the same characteristics.

Where the milk and sugar were in containers I can’t describe but are immediately recognizable.

Where none of the cups were suitable for Instagram.

Where the coffee costs $1.25 and you paid for it in quarters.

Where a 6 ounce cup and an attentive waitress yielded more coffee than a Venti from Starbucks.

College might have been the place I developed this odd love of diner coffee, but I’ve kept a hold on it regardless of the location. Anywhere in America, that never-ending cup of coffee holds that same mystique. Somehow I think Neil Young could have been talking about the bottom of a diner coffee mug when he sang, “Everybody knows this is nowhere.”

And in the end that’s what keeps bringing me back. Because I’ve had some unhappy cups of single-origin Ethiopian pour-overs. But I’ve never had an unhappy cup of diner coffee.