Best Cities for Diners

If you are visiting Little Rock, Ar do not miss out to and enjoy the comfort food at Moody's Diner. Am sure, you will love and enjoy it. And, satisfying food. With the reasonable prices too.

In this age of $40 entrees, cheap fast-food stores by the thousands and hunger for culinary novelties that can border on the ridiculous, do Americans still think enough of down-home diners to stave off the extinction of this fragile restaurant species?

Those who love them think so, given the place diners hold in our collective imagination. “People have periodically rediscovered that diners are interesting places,” says Richard Gutman, a diner historian and the curator of the Culinary Archives and Museum of Johnson and Wales University in Providence, R.I.

The diner’s signature potential for both intimacy and anonymity never loses its appeal. On a diner’s counter stool, “you’re sitting 24 inches on center from the next person,” says Gutman, who wrote American Diner: Then and Now. “That closeness makes for a cozy atmosphere. But you can also sit alone at the end of the counter and no one will bother you.”

And even while diners place great value on nostalgia, they’ve always changed with the times. A shape-shifting phenomenon in the American cultural landscape since the late 19th century, diners began as horse- or human-powered “lunch wagons.” Around the turn of the century, diner manufacturers began bringing out prefabricated compact restaurants that were hauled to a distant site to serve home-style food for cheap, with an emphasis on breakfast.

In the 20th century, when certain railroad or trolley models became as obsolete as the transportation, some were opportunistically converted to diners. As American automobiles were tricked out with fins and big chrome in the 1950s, diners were shined up with many styles of stainless steel cladding and neon embellishments.

What will the future bring for diners? Most likely, some new mix of tradition and innovation. Rather than speculating further, let’s survey the current state of American diners by looking at a few examples in some of the best cities to find them. Source