A Restaurant Called Diner

On the New York City breakfast scene

Off the bat, I have to tell you that this post was inspired by Lørd Skø, a rapper/music artist I did not know existed prior to this weekend. I discovered Mr. Skø via one of my favorite Instagram series, Subway Takes. Though I miss when Subway Takes was not overrun by celebrities or influencer collabs and was instead the product of true everyday New Yorkers divulging their most controversial opinions, this particular take stuck with me. It’s simple:

“The New York City breakfast scene is mid,” Skø says. And, poetically, he continues, “We’re resting on the laurels of bacon egg and cheeses and bagels.”

Skø is correct. In New York City, there are two types of breakfasts you can get: You can go to a deli and get a sandwich, or sometimes a plate of home fries and eggs, or you can go out to breakfast/brunch and pay a minimum of $50 even if you don’t drink. Diners in this city are not as easy to find as they once were. What we have now are restaurants called diners. I’ll explain.

After my high school prom, I didn’t go to an afterparty. I changed out of my gown and into sweatpants and a sweatshirt, and I walked my way over to Remedy Diner on the Lower East Side at 1 a.m. I ordered a chocolate milkshake, eggs, bacon, and hash browns, and probably some french fries. The food was greasy and slid around on the plate in front of me. I licked the whipped cream off my straw.

That was a diner experience. It wasn’t elevated, but it didn’t have to be.

Now, we have places like Kellogg’s Diner and Clinton Street Baking Company that parade themselves as breakfast places, diner adjacents, but are really just restaurants in disguise. I love Clinton Street, but when I think, Where can I get breakfast? when I wake up on a Saturday morning and don’t want to cook, I don’t think of Clinton. A breakfast spot, a diner—these are not places where you have to make a reservation three months in advance or places where you have to put on an actual outfit for fear of looking like a neanderthal in the background of an Instagram reel that the influencer seated next to you will inevitably post.

A 2019 Eater article wrote in its headline that Golden Diner “Turns Classic NYC Diner Comforts into Global Pleasures”—and that’s my problem. I don’t want a diner that’s trying to earn a Michelin star. That is not what I go to diners for. Arguably, that’s not a diner at all. It’s a restaurant called diner. And putting “Diner” in your name isn’t enough to make it true.

You have places like La Bonbonniere that have great pancakes and crispy bacon; it’s generally good breakfast food, but there’s a line out the door if you try to go at a reasonable breakfast hour. The fact that they’re cash only is one of the things that gets them the label of “no frills,” but that’s just a front to cover up the fact that the no-frills diner can no longer exist in NYC—not without FoodStagram and FoodTok making it impossible to get in anywhere after just a single post.

As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that maybe my problem is with the nature of the social media food scene. That is, per usual on this food blog, my problem is rooted in social media. The internet has fooled us into believing that every breakfast sandwich has to cost $15 for it to be delicious; every bagel has to be hand-rolled for it to be worth paying for; and every time we sit down for breakfast, we have to have earned it, whether by making our reservation 75 days in advance or waiting on a line wrapped around the corner in 30-degree weather.

Online food discourse makes getting breakfast in NYC inaccessible, because it creates an urgency where there is not one. NYC is a city known for all the things you can get here—go to one block in Queens, or Washington Heights, or East Tremont Ave, and you can find Italian, Persian, Puerto Rican, and even American food. The array of options is what the city has always been known for. But somehow, breakfast has fallen out of this city’s grip.

I’ve spoken before about how the social media food influencer game has changed the NYC food scene, for better and for worse. The breakfast scene in NYC has become an online competition for who can post about the best bagel shop first, and who’s followers can taste-test and completely disagree in the comments quickest. The standards for what a good bagel is have gotten morphed into which shop has the longest line outside of it, making getting a bagel impossible in New York City, and getting a good one even harder.

So, we turn to our bodegas to save us, but the problem persists, because NYC delis now lack consistency. They no longer have a reason to keep their skills up to the highest par, because people are bypassing them for the “famous” bagel shops just down the street. I live up the street from a coffee shop that charges $8 for a bagel with cream cheese, and now, when I go get my bacon egg and cheese at my corner bodega, sure, it costs $3.50, but some days, it’s dry and unevenly stacked, and only others, it’s almost perfect. I can enjoy it, but at what cost?

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I miss when finding breakfast in NYC was a low-stakes game. The stakes inevitably feel higher when there’s a line out a door or when I’m turned away multiple times from multiple different restaurants on a Saturday morning. It becomes the literal hunger games, because I end up starving, stomach rumbling on a lonesome curb in the city that was supposed to give me anything I could’ve ever wanted.

So, I’m with Lørd Skø on this one, and apparently, so are 92% of the people who voted in the Subway Takes comments. The New York City breakfast scene is mid. The laurels on which we are resting are outdated. This is the city of dreams. I need more from it.