By ZACHARY WILLIAMS
Contributing Writer
Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been a little homesick the last few weeks. Well, maybe in hindsight “a little bit” wouldn’t aptly describe exactly how homesick I’ve been over the last few weeks. Maybe something more like “take all of the grains of sand in the Sahara Desert, the bottom of the ocean (all of them), Long Beach and your childhood sandbox, multiply them by a factor of googol, square that and you have about a quadrillionth of how homesick I’ve felt for a while”.
It got bad there for a bit, yeah.
Anyways, there are about two things that pull me out of the moody blues, and since people keep telling me that bear-wrestling is bad for my health, the one thing that I can still do is binge on diner food. Greasy spoon-type restaurants were a staple of my diet back home, and a restaurant could pride itself not on the diversity of its menu or the skill of its chefs, but rather by the framed photos of friends and family hanging from its walls. The kitschy memorabilia and the smell of a grease-trap fryer bubbling away in the background, preparing a delicious heap of golden-brown French fries for a group of small but fervently-devoted eaters of all walks of life (albeit some of these walks being more along the lines of hobbles, limps or shuffles). No matter what kind of cuisine I favor at the time or whatever kind of budget I’m on, I will always hold a special place in my heart for that tender slice of Americana that is the diner.
But since leaving home I’ve discovered a disturbing truth: Albany doesn’t have any diners. Or at least, outwardly it doesn’t – every restaurant I’ve seen so far here is some kind of haute cuisine or foreign place – not that that’s a bad thing; I’m all for diversifying one’s palate – or closed. This is a tragic thing, the fall of the family owned diner, but there are at least a few bastions of American history clinging on by the skin of their teeth.
Take, for example, the Western Diner, located just a few minutes down the road from Saint Rose (2019 Western Avenue, to be precise). It is an unassuming place, a simple stone façade behind a slightly-leaning road sign, the diner itself shielding the view of a run-down motel, the type of place you see featured in B-grade schlock movies with names like Dawn of the Brainsuckers, Part II and the like. Its parking lot, through normal dining hours, can alternate between deserted and frantic, and yet you can always find one place to park there, which is good for me, I guess.
Dining there is standard fare for any diner on earth. For breakfast you have the typical pancakes, home fries, eggs, bacon (Yes, it is real bacon, none of that crunchy-granola vegetarian friendly nonsense here) and any combination thereof in addition to breakfast sandwiches (Yes, you can order a Western… At the Western… On Western… Western-ception?) and all that. Lunch and dinner is your choice of burgers, fried or steamed fish, hot or cold sandwiches, wings and anything you can think of. None of it is stellar quality and I don’t expect it to be anything for potential buyers to write home about. It’s diner food – it’s there to taste good and fill you up, not to be foreign and complex.
And in the end, that’s what it should be – comfort food. It’s something that makes you feel good and damn the calories, it’s a thick, juicy burger with melted cheese and bacon, crisp fries on the side, a bowl of soup (canned or not) with saltines. It’s a plate of haddock the size of your head with a lump of steaming macaroni and cheese, breaded and fried to crisp perfection with dishes of tartar and cocktail sauce off to the side. It’s a warm interior with a long bar in the front where you can sit with an enamel mug of coffee and shoot the breeze with the staff once you’ve dined there a few times, even if it is a little kitschy-seeming with its all wood walls and part-stained-glass windows in the back (I eat at diners, not cathedrals, okay?). But diners are all about serving food that makes you feel better, and the Western does that. It fills a hole, however temporarily. It warms you up in the wintertime, or on a cool day, and gives you enough quick, greasy energy to make the last leg of that journey home or out of town.
Bottom Line: People who love diners will like it here. Nothing revolutionary, but if you’re at a diner you’re not looking for the latest haute cuisine. Prices are reasonable, wait times can drag out a bit but that’s because it’s a somewhat busy place. Worth the price you pay. Just don’t think about the calories – but it’s a diner, you shouldn’t be thinking about them anyways.
