Sitting in the Front Booth With UWS Diner Dynamo Frank Tsiamtsiouris, Upper West Sider of the Month

By Andrea Sachs

Real New Yorkers know that nothing compares with the food served at a good Greek diner. On the Upper West Side, those dishes frequently come from the kitchens of the diner dynamo known to his clientele simply as Frank. While few of his customers can pronounce his last name (Tsiamtsiouris is a mouthful), they are devotees of his burgers, omelets, blintzes, mashed potatoes, and more.

Frank dominates the Upper West Side’s busy Diner Row on Broadway. He owns the Metro Diner (at West 100th Street), the Manhattan Diner (at West 95th) and the City Diner (at West 90th). That’s a lotta French fries! In honor of over 50 years of bringing delectable diner fare to a hungry neighborhood, West Side Rag is naming Frank Tsiamtsiouris the Upper West Sider of the Month for July.

Though Frank professes to love his three diners equally (“they’re all my babies”), he spends the most time at the Metro. So, a few days ago, I headed up Broadway to meet him there for a good schmooze. Denizens of diners, like me, are famously picky about everything in the place. As writer George Blecher elucidated in The New York Times in 2016, “The ambience has to be friendly but not intrusive, the sound level low but not funereal, the smell a little greasy but not cloying, and the décor more utilitarian than fussy.”

I arrived at 9:30 a.m. Despite it being a drizzly Saturday morning, the regulars were already in place. Some Metro customers come in twice or even three times a day, Frank says. Grey-haired and friendly, he was standing up front, casually dressed in a rumpled white shirt and jeans. Still, I could easily pick him out as the boss; he exudes quiet authority and a sense of purpose.

As well he might. Frank offers Upper West Siders invaluable “third places.” That’s a term coined by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe the places outside of the home (the first place) and the workplace (the second place) where people go to gather and connect with their community. In academic parlance, “In this casual and social environment, no one is obligated to be there, and cost should not prevent people from attending. It is a place where we can interact with members of our community and even turn strangers into friends.”

In Frank’s words, “The diner is the meeting place of the neighborhood. It’s always been that way. Customers who came in at seven years old and used to get the children’s menu, today are the parents. I think it’s a bonding thing for the neighborhood.”

Sitting in the front booth with Frank, I could see the handsome renovation that the Metro has just undergone. With pride, Frank declares, “We didn’t raise the prices.” He has been at the diner since 5:15 a.m., getting ready for the breakfast crowd, checking the huge refrigerator to make sure it is cold, clean, and properly stocked. He will be there until 6 p.m. — hours that will expand on July 29, when the Metro will begin staying open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Running a diner is hard work, part of a proud Greek immigrant tradition of seeking the American Dream via the restaurant route. Frank does the ordering, bookkeeping, and hiring. Still energetic at 68, that’s fine with him. Times are good now for the man who married “a Jersey girl” 43 years ago, lives in the Garden State, and has two adult children and four grandchildren. Mercifully, the pandemic, which pulverized the restaurant industry, is in the rear-view mirror. During those desperate days, Frank’s business went down 75 percent. He had to lay off two-thirds of his employees and closed a fourth diner downtown.

Even now that the pandemic is over, diners are not as profitable as before because of the high price of food and payroll. Frank is aware that many UWS diner customers experience sticker shock when it comes to the current price of diner food. To say that he is irked by the talk of high prices is to mischaracterize the matter; Frank is genuinely pained and puzzled by the reaction.

“Let me just say this,” he offers. “A hamburger at my place is $10; a hamburger deluxe at my place is $14. A hamburger deluxe in any other setting without the word diner after it is $25 or $30.”  Plus, at a diner “you get a pickle and coleslaw,” he points out. And if food prices have gone up for those who dine out, he says, they have gone up dramatically for the restaurants as well.

Frank offers a cri de coeur for his industry: “The diner right now is a place that will become extinct if people don’t look at it as a community business. A diner is fresh food, reasonably priced, and family-oriented. McDonald’s is not much cheaper than a diner, and the food is not the same.”

So, what’s on the menu these days? It’s not only about burgers. A diner has to keep up with food trends, says Frank. That explains the addition of chicken and waffles, avocado toast and seafood dinners. Stews like goulash and pepper steaks have fallen out of favor, he adds. Is gaining weight an occupational hazard? “I’m no skinny chicken,” he laughs.

Frank was born in Karpenisi, Greece, a remote village with a population of just over a hundred. His family members were impoverished sheepherders. “I was a UNICEF kid,” he recalls. “There was a gentleman from Arizona who ‘adopted’ me. He used to send me, not money, but two cans of Spam, two cans of corned beef hash, one can of American cheese that didn’t spoil, and powdered sugar. I was eight years old and I used to look forward to those packages, which came twice a year.”

At 11, Frank came to the United States with his parents and two sisters, because of “economic conditions,” settling in Queens. “We were in the hole for $8,000,” he recalls. Their debts included their tickets from Greece, buying furniture, painting their new home, paying a security deposit and two months of rent. By 13, Frank had a full-time job in a Greek restaurant as a porter. By 17, he worked 70 hours a week as a counterman at the Argo Diner, the predecessor to City Diner. Hard work and business savvy begat better and better positions, and by 1974, Frank owned the Argo.

Frank’s early experience with poverty changed his perspective for life. When he bought his first restaurant, he tried to contact his UNICEF benefactor. “Someone like that affects your life. I wanted to call the guy, but they wouldn’t give me his information because of privacy issues.” Still, it continued to inform his personal journey, as he found ways to pay it forward. “My belief is that you get to people’s brains through their stomachs,” he says. Diner diplomacy.

Every few years, someone writes a requiem for Greek diners, saying they are destined to disappear as the owners age and their children lose interest. But Frank isn’t going anywhere. “I love this business,” he says simply. “I’ve been doing it all my life. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t do what I am doing. I’ve been on the UWS for over 50 years. I have longstanding customers and employees that are loyal, and I want to be loyal to them.”

That’s great news for his sometimes kvetchy, but always satisfied, customers. “Eggs over easy, please, coffee light with sugar.”

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