23rd Street Diner

November 27, 2006

!(inset)http://static.flickr.com/82/270653691_55e3b17bcc_m.jpg!

There’s this diner on 23rd street in Arlington that the Elf and I have been to a few times. It’s been there for years, but I’ve never stopped in, because it looked like it was on the bad end of a game of Architecture Telephone. You see, the original diners were designed after railroad dining cars, which was why they had so much chrome. It was also why they were long and thin like a mobile home. There are plenty of these places still in the Washington DC area, although you tend to have to squint to see them. Then came the retro diners, like the “Silver Diner”:http://www.silverdiner.com/. These have the massive fern-bar layout but keep the chrome and bright colors. I tend not to think of them as diners but as theme restaurants.

fn1(sidenote). “All subsequent comers loomed large and close, as if both near and distant, according to some abnormal geometry.” _At the Mountains of Madness_

The diner in Arlington is an odd squarish, asymmetric, Lovecraftian[1] design, all chrome and smoked glass windows on the outside. Inside it’s Mood Indigo Blue — blue booths, blue tiles. Small plants sit in glass vases filled with blue glass beads. There’s so much blue I’m probably remembering more blue than there really is, but lordy is it blue. And crowded. We’ve been twice and the place has been jammed each time.

Here’s the thing: both times, they managed to screw up our orders. The first time, they just confused the Elf’s egg order. But the second time, they managed to bungle _both_ orders, and it took so long to get those that I swear the plant next to us (in the blue glass stones) went through a full season cycle while we waited. The Elf’s order was slightly confused, but mine did not resemble what I ordered in the least. The joke is “we can go to the diner if you don’t care what you get.”

On this last trip we were sitting near the kitchen where three harried short-order cooks were trying their best to fend off an extraordinarily angry seven-foot-tall waiter. He kept yelling and swearing at them, while the rest of the staff tried to calm him down. He looked a bit like a junkie Tom Petty, and if he was my waiter I probably would have backed slowly out of the building. As it was, I was uncomfortable having my back to him when he went to serve his tables.

If the joint had a Basil Fawlty and Manuel, we’d have been able to recreate yet another great British comedy. If you’re in the area, _avoid avoid avoid_ unless you like high-drama meals and don’t care what you are eating. Otherwise, try the _Cantina Mexicana_ or Urban Thai, both on the same street.

??Photo: “Buttermilk Pancakes”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/pgoyette/270653691/ by “Paul Goyette”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/pgoyette/.??

Posted in Diary