Everything will always stay beautiful here.
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quituninstall asked:Yo, I don't know how popular your tumblr is but seriously, it's the most aesthetically pleasing thing. Just seeing diners are just such a beautiful pieces of Americana which I spend too many nights and mornings in day to day and I like seeing the love of diners being spread. Keep on keeping on with your cool ass blog.
Gee whiz you just made our day! We’ve spent days & nights in diners as well, so we completely understand. Keep on spreading the diner love. <3
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Anonymous asked:Everyone always has suggestions, but maybe listing the address of each establishment would be nice for those following your blog when they try finding the place.
Great idea! We’ll list the address on the archive page so you can play along at home. Thanks!
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Diner Porn: A Talk with Tom Smith and Alecia Eberhardt
To give a little background to this month’s cover photo, we sat down with Chronogram filmmaker Stephen Blauweiss to discuss the project, its challenges, its perks, and where we’re going next.
Special thanks to the always-amazing Eveready Diner in Hyde Park, NY for allowing us to film on location!
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Square Diner in New York, NY. Contributed by Alex Fitzpatrick.
Square Diner actually isn’t. It’s a triangle-shaped oddity in the heart of Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, where lunch under than $15 is nearly impossible to find. You walk in on a brutally cold Wednesday afternoon. The owner, who’s been here 13 years, boasts that they serve the “best grilled cheese in town,” made with real butter, but he doesn’t sway you—you go with the Tommy’s Special, a chicken salad BLT. The waitresses fill ketchup bottles and joke in Arabic; the only other customers are a couple at the diner’s opposite vertex.
The sandwich is gone in less than ten minutes. You pay cash—no credit—and you’re back out into the cold and on to the subway.
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Chronogram featured a Diner Porn photo on the cover of the March 2014 issue, along with this short profile.
Tom Smith originally created Diner Porn as an homage to the importance of diners in his own life. As a child, his parents took him to Park West Diner in Little Falls, New Jersey. He fell in love at 7th Avenue Diner & Donuts in Brooklyn. When he was kicked out of his New York apartment, he spent the night sitting at the counter of the Washington Square Diner on West 4th Street. In a way, diners are home to Smith, and he has tried to capture that through his photographs.
After he began sharing his work, he realized that he was not alone in his love of 24-hour greasy spoons—nearly 40,000 people follow the blog, and it’s been featured on Huffington Post, Thrillist, and a variety of other food-focused websites. But it’s not strictly a food blog. Diner Porn highlights the best parts of the diner experience—the vintage decor, the chrome buildings, and most importantly, the people and the communities. Through photo essays and editorial vignettes, written in collaboration with his partner Alecia Eberhardt, Smith maintains a focus on the stories of diners and the people that patronize them. (The photo featured on the cover is of the couple during a recent visit to the Phoenicia Diner.)
Smith and Eberhardt are headquartered in Saugerties, and have recently featured diners all over the Hudson Valley and Catskills region. To date, they’ve covered over 25 diners in New York and New Jersey—as well as one in Iceland on a trip there last year—but the project is constantly expanding and evolving. Several new contributors have joined the team and the site has begun taking submissions from readers who want to share their own “diner porn.” The next step for Smith and Eberhardt is a road trip this fall to capture diners across the country; they plan to collect their experiences in a book of photos and narratives.
The establishments captured by Diner Porn are classic representations of American culture, where anyone and everyone is welcome inside and invited to share their story. Like a train station or a bar, diners are a crossroads, a space of genuine human connection, fueled by coffee and all-day breakfast, and to Smith, preserving this culture is essential in a world run by corporate chains. Diners have given Tom Smith a home in the way that they have for thousands of others across America, and that’s perhaps why this project has struck a chord with so many people—in every cup of coffee, stack of pancakes, or ice cream sundae, readers can find a bit of themselves.
Month after month, Chronogram delivers coverage of the coolest arts, culture and events throughout the Hudson Valley. We can not thank the Chronogram staff enough for featuring our work. We love you!
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rhmimages asked:What was the worst/most challenging experience while shooting diners? Any diners that just didn't "get" what you are doing? What did you learn from the experience?
The most challenging aspect is communicating the project to the owners. Most are very familiar with the Internet, but for those who aren’t, explaining how the work is shared and how it benefits them often sounds like a terrible sales pitch.
However, the diners we’ve featured have been nothing but warm and friendly—sounds cliché, but it’s true. Diner owners are hard-working, so even when we show up unannounced, they still take care of us. We’ve met people who treated us as if we were their family. Honestly, if there’s one thing we didn’t expect when starting this project, it’s how friendly people would be. But that’s what keeps us going.
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Phoenicia Diner in Phoenicia, NY
The Phoenicia Diner is a ’50s-style-greasy-spoon-meets-modern-Brooklyn-bistro. It’s been serving food since the 1980s, but thanks to new owners, the current menu is far from the “kitchen sink”-type affair offered by most diners. They serve a curated selection of breakfast and lunch options, like this amazing “California-style” eggs Benedict (with avocado and tomato!), bacon-egg-and-cheese biscuit, and home fries.
The food is fresh (made with mostly local ingredients), the booths are sunny, and the coffee is delicious (and free-flowing), so it was the perfect setting for a Saturday morning brunch with a few friends from out of town. So there, New York—not only Brooklyn can do brunch right!
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sublimedailyshades asked:Oh my God, I love your blog! I'm Italian, your way to show all these places make me feel close to your country... I wish could travel so far just to see your world! So thanks for sharing! It makes me fly! :)
Wow! Love all the way from Italy… THAT is exciting.
If you ever make the journey to the NYC metro area, go to an all-night diner and get a burger, fries, and a milkshake. It’s the American way.
Ciao!
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dead--end--justice asked:I love that this blog exists
Shucks! We love that people like you exist to share in our appreciation for breakfast food and retro decor.
Thanks for following!
(Wanna send us a love note? It is almost Valentine’s Day, after all…)
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