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DINERS
TONY SOPRANO'S LAST MEAL
Between 1912 and the 1990s, New Jersey State was home to more than 20 diner manufacturers who made probably 95 percent of the diners in the U.S, says Katie Zavoski, who is helping hold a diner exhibit. What makes a diner a diner? (And not, say, a coffee shop?) Traditionally, a diner is built in a factory and then delivered to its own town or city rather than constructed on-site. Zavoski credits New Jersey's location as the key to its mastery of the form. “It was just the perfect place to manufacture the diners,” she says. “We would ship them wherever we needed to by sea.”
VISIT “Icons of American Culture: History of New Jersey Diners,” running through June 2017 at The Cornelius House/Middlesex County Museum in Piscataway, New Jersey
GOOD FOOD, GOOD TUNES
Suzanne Vega's 1987 song “Tom's Diner” is probably best known for its' frequently sampled “doo doo doo doo” melody rather than its diner-related lyrics. Technically, it's not even really about a diner — the setting is New York City's Tom's Restaurant, which Vega frequented when she was studying at Bamard. Vega used the word “diner” instead because it “sings better that way,” she told The New York Times. November 18 has since been called Tom's Diner Day, because on that day in 1981, the New York Post's front page was a story about the death of actor William Holden. In her song Vega sings: “I Open /Up the paper/There's a story /Of an actor /Who had died/While he was drinking.”
LISTEN “Tom's Diner” by Suzanne Vega
MEET THE DINER ANTHROPOLOGIST
Richard J.S. Gutman has been called the “Jane Goodall of diners” (he even consulted on Barry Levinson's 1982 film, Diner).His book, American Diner: Then Now, traces the evolution of the “night lunch wagon,” set up by Walter Scott in 1872, to the early 1920s, when the diner got its name (adapted from “dining car”), and on through the 1980s.Gutman has his own diner facilities (floor plans, classic white mugs, a cashier booth); 250 of these items are part of an exhibit in Rhode Island.
READ American Diner: Then & Now (John Hopkins University Press)
VISIT “Diners: Still Cooking in the 21st Century,” currently running at the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island
