Why the best restaurants are all diners at heart

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In recent months, I’ve become obsessed with a new Netflix discovery, Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories. It’s a sleepy little show about a late-night bar and food counter in the city’s Shinjuku district. A series in which an ensemble cast of eccentric regulars interact and we discover small stories from their lives. It’s perfect wee-hours viewing. Restful, gently contemplative and entirely impossible to binge watch. Initially, I was drawn to it when someone said it was like Japanese Cheers, but now I realise it’s because it embodies the most important thing that I love about restaurants, what you might call “diner democracy”.

After I graduated, I followed a romance with an American waitress back to the Deep South and spent a few years working in diners. Back then, when the enforcement of green cards was a little less aggressive, a couple could turn up in a small town, have a coffee in the local diner and be pretty sure of picking up some work. I imagine you have a particular image in your head — big cars with fins, The Moonglows on the jukebox, roller-skating waitresses — but that’s just a tiny part of the real diner story. Though diners later became a convenient shorthand for teenage life in the 1950s, the truth is wider and more interesting. They’re a unique symbol of small-town American community.

When America began its great boom, immigrant families found fewer barriers to jobs in hospitality. Small restaurants were comparatively cheap to set up and provided work for a whole family. Everyone could communicate in their own language and could work insane hours, pouring in sweat equity and slowly establishing a financial footprint in a community that might otherwise have rejected them. It’s the also story of how Indian and Chinese restaurants found their way to every tiny town across the UK. In America, where the road network played a huge part in the country’s development, diners flourished.

The places I ended up working had all been started by immigrants — Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, Ukrainians — serving simple food, not necessarily from their own culture but dictated by their customers. Favourite classics, made with care and served at a reasonable price. Most importantly, the customers were, well, everybody.

I worked in one place where farmers would drive in just before sunrise, park their tobacco-harvesting machines outside and have breakfast. The local church paid for the bag lunches we made for kids being bussed in from poorer, outlying towns. The guys from the local law firm came in for lunch every day. The volunteer fire brigade would pull in on the way back from a call out. What was astonishing to an Englishman, and so utterly inspiring, was the variety of people. What I grew to love was the levelling power of hospitality, the democracy of the diner.

Of course, this isn’t news. Edward Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks” might be a bit existentially bleak, but the mix of customers at the bar and the implied interactions between them celebrate a unique dynamic. Warmer, perhaps, are Norman Rockwell’s images of bobby-socked teenagers, cheeky, freckled runaways and benign old cops all propped at the counter. The diner became a symbol of everyday egalitarianism. It’s therefore unsurprising that some of the earliest images of the civil rights struggle were photographs, some unattributed, of people of colour demanding democracy at diners and lunch counters. And of course, in a thousand movies, from Barry Levinson’s Diner to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the diner becomes the default setting to mash together unlikely characters.

Now I write about restaurants for a living, democracy is one of the criteria I secretly apply. I realised that “exclusivity” was a problem for me when I first went to The Wolseley. Corbin and King had created possibly the most lovely restaurant interior in London at the time, but once the maître d’ had explained to me the purpose of the “inner circle”, how they’d created a special area for favoured and important guests, I never went back. It seemed unforgivable. To build part of your brand on excluding some of your customers seemed like anti-hospitality at a fundamental level. (C&K, by the way, rescued themselves in my esteem when they later opened Zédel, on a truly democratic brasserie model.)

For me, a restaurant that needs to define itself by keeping some people out has failed. And it takes surprisingly little to trigger this feeling. It doesn’t need a snotty maître d’ and a velvet rope. Any restaurant that is “curating” a crowd is, by definition, excluding. You can exclude in a thousand tiny ways, from PR, through menu choices, the wine list or even the volume and type of music. It doesn’t even matter if you’re carefully selecting for “my kind of people”. I’m uncomfortable if you’re excluding others and furious when I feel I’m somehow complicit. If a restaurant can’t welcome everyone, how can anyone feel welcome?

There simmers in the back of every restaurant writer’s mind one painful truth. When we write about restaurants, we write about a commercial transaction around food, and, ultimately, we write about how people with enough extra cash spend their disposable income. Discretionary spending. A luxury. We can write all we like about wild little pop-ups of startling authenticity, but only ever with the same moral authority as someone writing about sports cars or luxury watches. I hope I’m not entirely naive, but I rest a whole lot easier when a restaurant is attempting to be democratic, not making efforts to exclude.

And I’m happiest when it has the spirit of a diner.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com

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