Regulars Who Paid Six Dollars for Eggs and Toast for Thirty Years Now Invited to Pay Eighteen Dollars for ‘Heritage Grain Toast and Pasture-Raised Egg Composition’
The Last Diner: Gone. The Heritage Concept: Here. The Eggs: Still Eggs.
The Lexington Diner on East 51st Street closed its doors Sunday after forty-seven years of serving eggs, coffee, BLTs, and the specific atmosphere of a New York City diner at six in the morning — which is to say: laminated menus, fluorescent lighting, counter seating that allows strangers to eat in proximity without any obligation to acknowledge each other, and coffee that arrives immediately and refills automatically in a tradition so fundamental to the diner experience that its absence in contemporary food service is a loss that has not been adequately memorialized. Owner Spiro Papadopoulos, sixty-eight, told regulars on Friday that the lease renewal cost had made continuation impossible and that he was ‘grateful for every customer who sat at this counter and wanted nothing more than eggs.’
The space reopened Monday as Hearth, described in its press materials as ‘an American comfort cuisine concept exploring the nostalgic through a contemporary lens.’ The menu retains eggs but calls them ‘morning compositions,’ retains coffee but describes it as ‘single-origin pour-over from a collective in Honduras,’ and retains the counter seating in a reconfigured form that adds forty percent more space per seat and charges accordingly. The laminated menus have been replaced by a chalkboard that requires squinting from the counter distance.
Regulars React
‘I ate breakfast here four times a week since 1997,’ said retired transit worker Anthony Carusone, seventy-two, who has been eating at the Lexington Diner counter since before the server who served him there was born. ‘Six dollars and fifty cents. Eggs, toast, coffee, two refills, no questions. I went to Hearth this morning out of curiosity. Heritage grain toast, pasture-raised egg composition, pour-over. Eighteen dollars. I have nothing against heritage grain. I have nothing against pasture-raised eggs. I have something against eighteen dollars for what is eggs.’
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SOURCE: http://prat.UK