Diner Deluxe

Deliciousness is in the details at Sam Yoo’s casual but accomplished Golden Diner.

- ROBIN RAISFELD AND ROB PATRONITE

SAD BUT TRUE: The diner is in decline. Also true: The diner is on the rise. How is this possible? Well, to put it plainly, as old diners disappear, new ones emerge. Of course, the Underground Gourmet loves a burnished-in-amber hash house as much as the next New York fresser. And nostalgists will rightly point out that shiny, new diners are nothing like their faded forebears. But these folks define the genre too narrowly. The original diner, after all, was a horse-drawn chuck wagon of sorts, and the shape has been shifting ever since—into the streamlined stainless-steel beauties of the ’30s, the postwar behemoths, the splashy space-age designs and Colonial styles of the ’60s, and the so-called Mediterranean-style diners of the ’70s that conquered Queens and Long Island (a.k.a. Diner Island).

In 2020 New York, diner design is secondary. Where these populist eating establishments once distinguished themselves architecturally, now they do so culinarily. We have diners that specialize in vegan comfort food (Champs Diner), Japanese pub grub (Diner by the Izakaya at Nowadays), and pedigreed Spanish home cooking (José Andrés’s Spanish Diner), their identities dictated less by the physical structures they inhabit than by the familiar everydayness of what they serve and the low-key comfort in which they do so.