A diner is a prefabricated restaurant building characteristic of North America, especially in New Jersey, Long Island, and other areas of the Northeastern United States. Some people apply the term not only to the prefabricated structures, but also to restaurants that serve cuisine similar to traditional diner cuisine even if they are located in more traditional types of buildings. Diners are a favorite pop culture memory for many.

History

Diners developed from mobile lunch wagons. The first manufactured dining wagons with seating appeared in the late 19th century, serving busy downtown locations without the need to buy expensive real estate. As the number of seats increased, wagons gave way to pre-fabricated buildings made by many of the same manufacturers who had made the wagons. Like the lunch wagon, a diner allowed one to set up a food service business quickly using preassembled equipment.

Until the Great Depression, most diner manufacturers and their customers were located in the Northeast, especially New Jersey.

Diner manufacturing suffered with other industries in the Depression, though not as much as others, as people still had to eat, and the diner offered a less expensive way of getting into the restaurant business as well as less expensive food than more formal establishments. After World War II, as the economy returned to civilian production and the suburbs boomed, diners were an attractive small business opportunity. During this period, diners spread beyond their original urban and small town market to highway strips in the suburbs, even reaching the Midwest, with manufacturers such as Valentine.

In many areas, diners were superseded in the 1970s by fast food restaurants, but in parts of New Jersey, New York, New England, and Pennsylvania the independently-owned diner remains relatively common. During this period, newly-constructed diners lost their narrrow, chrome, stainless steel, streamlined appearance, and grew into much bigger buildings, though often still made of several pre-fabricated modules and assembled on site and still manufactured by the old line diner builders. A wide variety of architectural styles were now used for diners, including Cape Cod and Colonial. The old-style single module diners featuring a long counter and a few small booths sometimes now grew additional dining rooms, lavish wallpaper, fountains, crystal chandeliers and Greek statuary. The definition of the term diner began to blur as older pre-fab diners received more conventional stick-built additions, sometimes leaving the original structure nearly unrecognizable as it was surrounded by new construction or a renovated facade. Businesses that called themselves diners but which were built onsite and not prefabricated began to appear. These larger establishments were sometimes known as diner-restaurants. These probably reached their apex in the 1970's, when the film American Graffiti brought the traditional 1950's diner and its decor back into the pop culture landscape.

Architecture

Like a mobile home, the original style diner is narrow and elongated to allow roadway transport (in the case of a diner, to the restaurant's ultimate location). A service counter dominates the interior, with a preparation area against the back wall and floor-mounted stools for the customers in front. Larger models may have a row of booths against the front wall and at the ends. The decor varied over time. Diners of the 1920s–1940s feature Art Deco elements or copy the appearance of rail dining cars (though very few are, in fact, refurbished rail cars). They featured porcelain enamel exteriors, some with the name written on the front, others with bands of enamel, others in flutes. Many had a "barrel vault" roofline. Tile floors were common. Diners of the 1950s tended to use stainless steel panels, porcelain enamel, glass blocks, terazzo floors, formica and neon sign trim.

Diners built recently generally have a different architecture; they are laid out more like restaurants, retaining some aspects of traditional diner architecture (stainless steel and Art Deco elements, usually) while discarding others (the small size, and emphasis on the counter)

Cultural significance

Diners attract a wide spectrum of the local populations, and are generally small businesses. They are often seen as quintessentially American, reflecting the preceived cultural diversity and egalitarian nature of the country at large.

In television and cinema (e.g. The Iron Giant and Diner), diners and soda fountains symbolize the period of prosperity and optimism in the United States of the 1950s. They are shown as the place where teenagers meet after school and as an essential part of a date. The television show Alice used a diner as the setting for the program. The diner's cultural influence continues today. Many non-prefab restaurants (including franchises like Denny's) have copied the look of 1950s diners for nostalgic appeal, while Waffle House uses an interior layout derived from the diner.

Diners provide, in rather the same way that fast food chains do, a nationwide, recognizable, fairly uniform place to eat and assemble. The types of food served are likely to be consistent, especially within a region (exceptions being districts with large immigrant populations, in which diners and coffee shops will often cater their menus to those local cuisines), as are the prices charged. At the same time, diners have much more individuality than fast food chains; the structures, menus, and even owners and staff, while having a certain degree of similarity to each other, vary much more widely than the more rigidly standardized chain and franchise restaurants.

Diners frequently stay open 24 hours a day, especially in cities, making them an essential part of urban culture, alongside bars and nightclubs. Many diners were historically placed near factories which operated 24 hours a day, with night shift workers providing a key part of the customer base.

Cuisine and ethnicity

Diners almost invariably serve generically American food such as hamburgers, french fries, club sandwiches, and so on. Much of the food is fried, as early diners were based around a grille. There is often an emphasis on breakfast foods such as eggs (including omelettes), waffles, pancakes, French toast and so on. Many diners will serve these "breakfast foods" during all the time that they are open. Many diners have transparent display cases for the desserts, sometime with the desserts on rotating platforms.

Several ethnic influences are strongly present in the diner industry. A disproportionate number of diners are owned and/or operated by Greek Americans, and there are also a large number with a strong Eastern European influence, chiefly Polish, Ukrainian, and Eastern European Jewish. Italian Americans also have a notable presence. These influences can be seen in certain common additions to diner menus, such as Greek Mousakka, Slavic Blintzes, and Jewish Matzoh Brie.

Manufacturers

• Bixler Manufacturing Company, Norwalk, Ohio
• Comac, Irvington, New Jersey
• DeRaffele Manufacturing, New Rochelle, New York
• DinerMite, Atlanta, Georgia www.dinermite.com
• Fodero Dining Car Company, Newark, New Jersey
• J. B. Judkins (Sterling), Merrimac, Massachusetts
• Jerry O'Mahoney, Elizabeth, New Jersey
• Kullman Industries, Lebanon, New Jersey
• Master Diners, Pequannock, New Jersey
• Modular Diners,Inc., featuring Starlite Diners, www.modulardiners.com, Atlanta, Georgia
• Mountain View Diners, Singac, New Jersey
• Paramout Modular Concepts, Oakland, New Jersey
• Paterson Vehicle Company (Silk City), Paterson, New Jersey
• Swingle Diners, Middlesex, New Jersey
• T.H. Buckley Lunch Wagon Manufacturing and Catering, Worcester, Massachusetts
• Ward & Dickinson, Silver Creek, New York
• Worcester Lunch Car Company, Worcester, Massachusetts
• Valentine Manufacturing, Wichita, Kansas
• Valiant Diners, www.valiantdiners.com, Ormond Beach, Florida

Trivia

• Diners in a certain part of western New York State, northeastern Ohio, and northwestern Pennsylvania are sometimes spelled Dinor rather than the traditional Diner. The phenomenon exists within a roughly 50 mile radius of Erie, Pennsylvania. Historians have not reached a consensus concerning how the unusual regional spelling originated.
• One-third of all currently operating diners in the world are located in New Jersey, though many of these have been remodeled. New Jersey has approximately 600 operational diners.
• The Duchess Diner John McHale the Pop artist frequented in the mid 1950's was on Chaple Street near Crown, in New Haven, Connecticut.