Diner Search

Moving to a new place brings a number of problems. Of course you have the new house, new county taxes, new schools, new neighbors to annoy. I don’t believe that there can be any doubt about the greatest challenge of moving: finding a new diner.

The world’s greatest diner (and this is not up for debate) is Murrell’s in Shreveport, Louisiana. Perfectly situated at the corner of Kings and Youree, the restaurant is but a brief drunken stumble to my undergraduate college. The food was always quick and filling, the cold pies cold and the coffee fresher than a drunken undergraduate at a diner. Sure, they might have the waitress from “Five Easy Pieces,” but she was on your side. She’d give that Jack Nicholson jerk a good kick in the groin while she brought you another piece of lemon meringue. (Seriously, Mr. Nicholson. Just get the open-faced roast beef sandwich or a chicken-fried steak.)

When I lived in Kansas, I found a nice diner called Harry’s Café. They had a nice, long bar running the length of the place and the toilets placed awkwardly back through the kitchen. That’s the mark of a good diner. And speaking of toilets in diners, the toilet paper should be on one of those wire things hanging against the cinderblock wall and there should be a grungy looking plunger in the corner. Now, that’s ambiance. My only real problem with Harry’s is that it didn’t have nooks and crannies to hide in. There was no corner you could turn to find a couple of hidden tables, no booths tucked away on the side. The diner, like the state, was laid out flat and wide open. Even though the place was in the southeast corner of the state, you could look past the kitchen and see Colorado on a clear day. As long as the bathroom door wasn’t open.

When I was at LSU in Baton Rouge, I gave Louie’s a shot. You could sit right at the bar and watch the guy cook up your food on a king-size bed of a grill. He’d have those white knuckles of potatoes piled up in the corner with bits of green peppers and onions, just waiting to hear you order hash browns. Plenty of folks didn’t, though. They ordered a bowl with yogurt and granola and fresh fruit. The bowl looked shiny and healthy, but I wasn’t sure at the time what it would do to me. My guess was it would argue mightily with my diet of coffee, hash browns and any pie with a meringue so I never chanced it.

I’m still looking for the perfect spot in Virginia, without much luck. A couple of places come close, though. One diner hits on almost all points, but is disqualified because it has a salad bar. In the diner. Yeah, I know. The manager was not keen on taking it out when I spoke to him, but I might try again later. Murrell’s plays a big part in my novel, Lost and Found, so I’d feel much better working on the next one in a similar place. For now, I’ll just have keep looking for a Murrell’s replacement. Until then, this song about Murrell’s by Trout Fishing in America offers some comfort. Enjoy.

Coffee: An Excerpt from Lost & Found

“Coffee sounds great,” I said.

“Community alright with you?” Buster asked.

You might already know this, but Community Coffee is the state coffee of Louisiana. I could really have gone for some café au lait and beignets right then, even though I’d just had breakfast, but the chances of pulling that off were slim.

“You’re kidding, right?” I said.

“Where you been?” he asked me.

“Just up from Baton Rouge. I was in Virginia for a couple of weeks and Maryland after that and in Ohio until last week,” I said.

“What do they drink up there?”

“Folgers. Eight O’Clock Bean,” I said.

“Damn yankees.”

While Buster was in the kitchen, I nosed around his papers. Working at any newspaper anywhere, you learn how to read files upside-down and across a table. I could pull phone numbers from sticky notes from across the table with just a glance. Burn it into your mind like ink cutting into a page and it’s there when you close your eyes. Only here, all the papers had to do with someone named “Edward de Vere.”

I didn’t know if he was French or English, but I knew damn well he wasn’t from around here.

“You get up to New York often?” Buster asked me. In college I had said just about every day that I wanted to go to New York. I can’t remember why and I don’t know how he remembered. Maybe I wanted to do some writing or some playing in a piano bar. But I remember talking to Buster one day and telling him that was where I was heading. He’d said young people need direction and I figured New York was as good a place as any.

“Yeah, I was up in New York last year.”

“What kind of coffee do they drink up there?”

“Uh, something called ‘Chock Full of Nuts,’” I told him.

“Nuts?”

“Yeah.”

“In their coffee?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Sweet merciful crap,” he said.