The regulars / the usual

Slow afternoons: at a now-shuttered diner in NY’s Chelsea neighborhood / at a small restaurant in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

In restaurants (gourmet to greasy spoon) and bars (dive to swanky), there are the regulars. They come often, sometimes daily, and order the same thing. “The usual?” the server asks, knowing the answer. Or just brings the order unbidden.

There was an elderly woman in the city who would go every day to the Waverly Diner and have breakfast in the window seat so she could keep an eye on her old dog who waited quietly outside and never took his eyes off her as she ate the two-egg and bacon special.

In Vermont the same crew took the same window table at the Coffee Corner at State and Main to chew the fat. The diner closed years ago, but people still miss the ritual, the community, and even the bad coffee. “I had breakfast at the CC every weekday for 41 years,” Fred wrote recently in a community forum, “and miss it terribly.”

Fellow Substacker @Bryan Pfeiffer, (of the excellent “Chasing Nature” posts) wrote a lovely eulogy for the Coffee Corner with a dynamite foto.