The Diners Club

and you feel like you’ve entered a museum of Americana, a roadside portal to the repeating coffee cups, breakfast plates, slices of pie, and inviting Naugahyde booths that form a timeless, comforting network across the country. There’s a reason politicians invariably head to diners when they want to connect to actual people. The diner counter is the caffeinated version of the neighborhood bar, where you can sit with a refillable mug and talk up your server or your neighbor over a plate of eggs and home fries, a short stack, and a side of bacon, and feel somehow at home, whatever time it is, and wherever you are.

The history of the diner began not in Baltimore, filmmaker Barry Levinson notwithstanding, but 370 miles up I-95 in Providence, R.I. There, in 1872, the first horse-drawn “night lunch wagon” served hot, cheap food to overnight workers, newspapermen, and any hungry soul who was up too late—or too early.

These peripatetic restaurants—they could move to wherever they were needed—became “lunch cars,” then “dining cars,” then just “diners.” They got a makeover in the ’20s, getting indoor bathrooms and booths. And they became more respectable after World War II—Edward Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks,” with its lonely nighttime diner dates to 1942—adding AC, expanding the menu, welcoming families. In their heyday in the ’50s, there were some 6,000 across the country, though, then as now, they were heavily concentrated in the Northeast and dense East Coast cities like Baltimore.

These days, there are about 2,000 of what Richard J.S. Gutman, the author of four books on diners and an advisor on Levinson’s 1982 film, Diner—set in Fells Point—calls “honest-to-goodness diners.” This translates to “counter service, good value, and homestyle food,” Gutman catalogs. “Anybody can go in, and you can get whatever you want.”

The diner was always, and should still be, both affordable and democratic. So, while diners can be variable and cater to local demographics—which in these parts means crab cakes and scrapple—they should also have plenty of low-cost options, and the all-day breakfasts that have long fueled shift-workers and truckers, beer-drinkers and families alike. Simple, accessible food, says Gutman, noting that the earliest diners didn’t serve eggs—because they didn’t have stoves. “Sandwiches, pie, coffee, milk, and cigars. That was the entire menu,” he says, of the initial wagons. “And it was on a window. [Drawn] by a horse.”

The rise of fast food and food trucks changed the dining landscape—as did COVID—but the diner survives, thanks to a heavy dose of nostalgia and an ability to provide a particular kind of third space. With food costs skyrocketing, the importance of affordable food has only increased. “It’s really a place where you feel like you can do what you want and get what you want and leave feeling good about it,” says Gutman, “with some money left in your wallet.” And in the wake of the pandemic’s isolation, the comfort of the counter has become even more meaningful.

Illustration by CSA IMAGES

On a mid-morning weekday, the dimpled vinyl booths at Honey Bee Diner in Glen Burnie are full. A small mountain of home fries crisps on the grill as servers present plates of eggs and toast to folks sitting at the 14-seat white counter, with every seat taken. Bright red neon runs around the perimeter of the chrome ceiling like airport landing lights. Seventy percent of the diners at Honey Bee are regulars, says owner Nick Filipidis, whose parents bought the diner from its previous owner in 1974. One of the many reasons why locals regularly fill the seats is that it’s been open since 1952—always open, as it’s the last of the 24/7 diners in the region.

“As long as we have power, we’re open,” says Filipidis, who can’t remember the last time the place closed. They stayed open during various remodels and during the pandemic, though they shifted to take-out for a time. “Through all the years, we’ve never closed,” he says. For years they didn’t even have a lock on the front doors.

The first diners were only open at night, street dining cars that catered to night-shift workers and the bar crowd. As diner operators expanded their hours to include regular mealtimes at the turn of the 20th century, the diner became what diner expert Richard Gutman calls “a 24-hour phenomenon.” Over the next hundred years, diners and their hours expanded and contracted with the times—the Depression, the diner heyday of the ’50s, the fast food expansion of the ’70s—but it was the pandemic that effectively closed most of the last round-the-clock diners.

“That concept, which is one of the hallmarks, maybe it’s not that important anymore,” says Gutman. The Towson Diner was open 24-hours before COVID, but these days closes before midnight. Broadway Diner in Canton, also open 24-hours before the pandemic, now closes just before midnight on weekdays but is still open round-the-clock on the weekends.

Boulevard Diner was 24/7 when it first opened in 2001. “There was a lot of traffic, a lot of local bar business,” says owner Marc Tsakiris, and thus enough business to keep the spacious diner, on a busy Dundalk intersection, open all hours. But then the 2008 recession hit, and they shifted to round-the-clock only on weekends. “And then we just started to realize, it’s a totally different crowd at night,” says Tsakiris, whose young sons frequent the diner and work as hosts in the summer. “This is more of a family place, and it’s a little bit more of a crazy crowd at night.” Boulevard stopped its 24-hour service in 2015.

Spiros Korologos, who opened EC Diner in Ellicott City three years ago and whose father and uncles own the seven area Double T diners, says his diner has never been open 24 hours, although most of the Double T diners were open round-the-clock until the pandemic. He worked at the Double T starting when he was a teenager and took the night shift for three years. “Two to 5 a.m. was always the danger time,” he says of the hazards of staying open all night, when fights would sometimes break out. Despite the difficulties, Korologos wants to open EC Diner overnight if he can find folks to work the shifts. “My dream is to open it 24 hours,” he says, recalling his own late nights and the pleasure of finding a place that served early morning breakfast. “We’re not going to give up on it; my goal is hopefully by next summer.”

“It’s more of a hassle to go through the motions of closing everything down, because you have to be open again by five,” says Filipidis, who worked the night shift for a decade when he was younger. It hasn’t been easy. The hours are long and hard, and there are the fights among customers that often come with running a place where people come after the bars close. “Finding help has been a huge issue,” he says, and for a time they hired local cops to work security. He feels a responsibility to keep the place open round-the-clock. “It has a value,” he says. “Honey Bee’s been a part of Glen Burnie for 70 years now. People come in during snowstorms.”

Illustration by Disha Sharma

Scan a crowded counter at any Baltimore-area diner and you’ll likely see a walnut-colored rectangle, crisped into oblivion, adjacent to eggs-over-easy and a pile of home fries. This is scrapple—a pressed loaf of pig bits, cornmeal, buckwheat or wheat flour, spices, and plenty of salt—and it’s a Mid-Atlantic delicacy. It is old-school regional food, inherited from Pennsylvania Dutch, German, and Quaker farmers, and the object of deep nostalgia for folks who grew up eating the stuff, albeit mystifying for those who did not. It is our answer to Spam, originally made at home and on farms, these days mostly trucked in from Rapa, a 1926-founded Delaware company that is the world’s largest scrapple producer and supplies about three-quarters of the Baltimore area. Unlike Spam, which can be found in Korean Army soup, Hawaiian musubi, and trendy bakery pastries, scrapple is mostly found in the kind of breakfast joints that are as nostalgic as it is.

“It’s diner food,” says William Woys Weaver, whose book, Country Scrapple: An American Tradition, came out in 2003 and whose great-grandfather was in what Weaver describes as “the Quaker scrapple business” in Pennsylvania. “You know, 3 a.m. hot coffee and a slab of grease.” Indeed, scrapple, fried on a flattop until it is no longer gray but the color of 70-percent chocolate, does call for a pile of eggs and rye toast and a bottomless mug. This is not highbrow food, but a primitive kind of terrine built with German sausage-making skills and an abundance of Mid-Atlantic corn.

“Everybody wants scrapple with their eggs. It’s a Baltimore thing,” says Ray Crum, owner of both Pete’s Grille in Waverly and Werner’s, a diner that’s been in downtown Baltimore since 1950. Crum says the two restaurants go through seven cases of Rapa’s product a week. “It’s always been on the menu,” he says, “ever since I can remember.” And while diners serve the stuff mostly as a side, some have gotten a bit more creative, putting the scrapple into egg sandwiches or skillets. Honey Bee diner in Glen Burnie even has a scrapple wrap on the menu, with vegetables (gasp) and melted Swiss.

“Baltimoreans are creatures of habit,” says Weaver. “They’ve been doing this for 100 years, and so that’s the way you do it.” By which he means both the making and the consumption of scrapple. And although you can buy your own loaf of the stuff, it is perhaps best at a diner counter, fresh off the grill and bestowed by a server carrying a jug of strong java to wash it down.

The tall pastry case at Towson Diner features a display of chocolate cakes, cream and fruit pies, strawberry shortcakes, turnovers, cheesecakes, pastry horns, eclairs, baklava, carrot cakes, and oversized chocolate-chip cookies. But what’s even more impressive than the contents of that case is 82-year-old Sam Kourtsounis, the man who bakes everything in it. These days he works three or four days a week, down from the seven that he often worked when he and his brother, Pete, bought the diner on a busy stretch of York Road in the early ’90s. A decade ago, Kourtsounis’ son Nick, a former Maryland state trooper, bought out his uncle and now spends his time running the place, while his father works the decades-old Blodgett deck ovens in the basement kitchens, rolling out dough for cherry pies and sliding trays of cheesecakes into the heat.

Kourtsounis immigrated to New York City when he was 14, arriving alone from Greece. After high school, he joined the Army, started a family, and began cooking in diners, mostly Greek diners that had full-scale bakeries. He and his brother bought their own diner on Long Island and then, some three decades ago, the family relocated to Towson and took over the Towson Diner, open since 1957. Over the years, Kourtsounis has collected recipes, which he keeps in a thick folder, some written in Greek on old guest checks.

“Baking is actually an art. It’s complicated. When you cook, you can play with it. With the baking, you cannot cheat,” says Kourtsounis, who bakes all the bread, including challah and the loaves for the diner’s popular French toast. Given the expense and the difficulty finding bakers, he notes that many diners don’t bake what he does anymore. “It’s like a dying art that you’re trying to keep alive,” says his son. “It has a history, and I don’t want that history to go away.” “Back in the ’60s, ’70s, every diner had a bake shop,” says Kourtsounis. “[I know] because I worked in them. A lot of the bakers, they retired. Some passed away.”

He’s been trying to teach some of the cooks he’s worked with. One got so frustrated, says Kourtsounis, that the young would-be baker would bang his head against the wall. “Others just don’t pick it up,” he says. Another issue, patron’s palates differ according to region. Kourtsounis now makes chocolate-chip cookies, apple pies, and lemon meringue pies instead of Black Forest cake, the layered, German gâteau preferred by New Yorkers. “It takes a lot of effort, but I can make everything that Yia Yia’s Bakery makes,” he says, smiling, referring to the popular Greek bakery in Rosedale.