West Side Canvas: Utopia

By Robert Beck

There is a special place in my heart for diners; I can find them scattered throughout the story of my life. I am forever drawn to Formica and chrome, doughnuts under a glass dome, and big windows that look out at the passing parade. Like me, diners have evolved while remaining tethered to an era.

The diner of my youth was a late-night way station at a directionless time of life. It sat next to a grass airstrip at an intersection of two-lane highways in a rapidly disappearing rural landscape. The short-order grill was along the back wall, and if you sat at the counter, you could watch the cook make your breakfast from behind. He wore drab whites and had a well-used apron strung around his hips. Navy tattoos danced beneath his T-shirt sleeves. A Lucky dangled from his lip with an impossibly long ash. He would grab two eggs with one hand, crack and plant each in turn on the steel grill, then lob the shells into the tub to his right. That backhand motion, the arc of the toss, executed hundreds of times every shift, left a trail of egg white across the back wall, identically traced from cooktop to trash, leaving a built-up horsetail crust that would be scraped off right before the morning cook came in.T he grill was mesmerizing to a teenager unwilling to give up the night. If you were there when he cleaned the wall, it was long past time you went home.

The first diners started as retired train dining cars, placed at the edge of the railyards as a place workers could eat. They were later transported to locations beyond cities that didn’t have restaurants. In an era when the railroads competed with each other using elegant cars and top chefs, the decommissioned diners found second lives as greasy spoons, truck stops, and lunch wagons on the industrial side of town or out on lonely highways. Companies began constructing prefab buildings using the dining car template and shipping them to distant states, sometimes by rail. That streamlined aluminum diner you ate at last summer shares DNA with the 20th Century Limited and the City of New Orleans.

The Utopia Diner on Amsterdam at 72nd is a clean and efficient restaurant. It’s not the diner from my youth, but it has more of the feel and menu than some others purporting to dinerhood on the UWS. (I had the host at a different UWS “diner” snarl at me because I didn’t have a reservation. Really? Not a problem; the food and accommodation didn’t warrant a return.) Utopia has the pies and cakes in the glass case, the swivel stools, the booths, and the menu. It’s the kind of place you can just drop in for a waffle or ham and eggs on your way somewhere. Need a grilled cheese or a salad with some soup? A triple-decker or a burger? Some fish or chops? Or, in my case, an open-face turkey sandwich with extra gravy on the potatoes (swoon). If there’s a cuisine to go with the American spirit—and of course there is—you can enjoy it while watching the spectacle out the big windows. Don’t forget the pie.

See more of Robert Beck’s work and his UWS studio by visiting www.robertbeck.net  And let Robert know if you have a connection to an archetypal UWS place or event that would make a good West Side Canvas subject. Thank you!

Note: Before Robert Beck wrote West Side Canvas, his essays and paintings were featured in Weekend Column. Read Robert Beck’s earlier columns here and here.

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