If I really think about it—and I have, in annoyingly large portions—I think the diner booth was my first love.
Like many first loves, I can’t remember exactly when the obsession began. One of my most common phrases as a teen was “Merry Ann’s after?” as if I were referring to a childhood friend’s house—except this house was a 24-hour diner in Bloomington, Illinois, full of close-but-far-away strangers, cheap red leather seats, paper-thin drip coffee, and the profound smell of burnt butter on a frying pan.
Every “why” I’ve ever pondered makes a little more sense when I’m sitting in a diner booth. That’s probably why I find the experience so unequivocally romantic, and why a world without access to those slightly-torn faux leather seats at midnight feels extremely bleak. Something about hunching over a mosh pit of lukewarm cheese fries while also sitting at the edge of my own melancholic intrigue makes me feel so in love with all of it, with life.
Once in my perfect playground for existential thinking, I’ll begin to wonder: how many hundreds of people might have occupied this same spot before me? What do you think they talked about? How many bonded over a nostalgic classic like La La Land or Fantastic Mr. Fox? How many people fell in love here? Questions like these can be asked in a lot of places, but I’ve found the diner booth to be the most welcoming host.
And yet, for all the time I’ve spent in them, I’ve still never quite understood why this ordinary little place makes me feel so close to life. Since moving to New York City, where there are cool diners everywhere, my wondering has become downright maddening. So, in a curious attempt to get to the bottom of my peculiar fixation with this place, I did what I usually do when I’m having an existential crisis: I turned to the movies. Specifically, a movie whose dead-giveaway title seemed eager to serve me some answers: Barry Levinson’s 1982 Oscar-nominated classic Diner.
Admittedly, Diner has been on my watchlist for quite some time, but it kept slipping out of my loop until—like a lot of my recommendations—an A-lister mentioned it in a red carpet interview. So I have to thank Jeremy Allen White for declaring Diner as his perfect, no-notes movie, because after finally finding my way to the cozy classic, I think I have begun to understand why being surrounded by strangers in a corner booth feels so utterly exhilarating.
Set in the late 1950s, Barry Levinson’s directorial debut is a punchy comedy drama that follows a group of recent college grads who are revisiting their hometown for a wedding. Seeking refuge from all the expectations of marriage, family, and general adulthood, they all pile into Fells Point Diner’s familiar leather booths and reunite over the nostalgia of their younger days. Which means: playing incredibly stupid pranks, bickering over the last half of a roast beef sandwich, placing bets, and arguing over whether Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mathis is the better singer. This group of young men may not have life figured out just yet, but in this booth, only the most trivial of things have the most importance.
Their enjoyable banter is similar to what you’ll find in diner-based sitcoms like Seinfeld; it’s like listening to Elaine and George bicker over who paid for a Big Salad, but instead it’s a roast beef sandwich. But there’s also something more profound beneath Diner’s playful exuberance. These characters definitely have a lot to learn (like the definition of misogyny), and even though you don’t see a lot of that change happen on screen, the movie’s superpower is that it somehow makes you believe they’re gonna one day figure it out.
Really, Diner is quite a remarkably ordinary story, but beautifully so. Like many of us who pay a visit to our hometowns, none of the characters get pulled into any profound sense of change, and their lives look pretty much the same at the end of the trip as they did at the beginning. But I still found myself captivated by the film’s brilliant simplicity. And the more I watched, the more I came to the conclusion that this attribute was also the same thing that made the entire diner-going experience so special—that it’s also so remarkably ordinary.
The eggs are utterly plain, the coffee is usually average, the menu is always standard, the diner’s design is common, and I’ve never been one to call the hash browns anything life-changing. It’s all pretty… ordinary. But the diner’s ordinary design, I realize, is also why it is secretly one of the most underrated and beautiful places we have to sit in.
I found myself captivated by the film’s brilliant simplicity. And this attribute was also the same thing that made the entire diner-going experience so special.
As humans, we spend a lot of time trying to reach for the impossibly extraordinary. It’s our cursed quirk. Like a lot of the characters in Diner, we can’t help but feel haunted by a pressure to have extraordinary jobs and partners, to find extraordinary cities to live in, art to make, food to taste, and people to meet. We’re constantly trying to make our lives feel grand, as if to compensate for how infinitesimal and temporary we are in the grand scheme of things.
But in the diner, all that overwhelming grandeur gets distilled into an ordinary plate of eggs and an average cup of Joe. Sitting in a diner feels so cozy and profound because the experience feels just as ordinary as we are.
And without this expectation for anything grand to be served to me, I find myself with more room to be curious about everything. It’s easier to fall into deep contemplation about the ordinary people around me: the ordinary rain on the window, the ordinary food on my table, this ordinary bunch of college graduates just trying to figure it all out, and how nice these simple features actually are when there is no pressure for them to be anything super special.
I don’t know how that feeling is able to pack into my mildly good cup of coffee and corner booth, but it’s an ordinariness that also feels weightless. At least, for a little while.
