Comments (0) Best Diner - 2006
Egg 'N' You
Readers' Choice: Howley's
Fifty years is a good age for a diner. That's about the time it takes to burnish the plastic of the booths to a gentle glow and for the waitresses' "honeys" and "What'll y'all haves" to attain a practiced verbal caress. At that age, the menu contains delightful fossils like liverwurst and forgets itself only in fits of trendiness with one or two items such as the "Mexican" burger, which, thankfully, is nothing more exotic than a chilidog. Nobody is ever in a rush. The walls have had time to collect the bric-a-brac of half a century, from photographs of the owners' epic hunt for a black marlin to a collection of ceramic roosters. The regulars have had time to perfect their routines, some sidling up to the long counter for a meal of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, others staking out small fiefdoms in corner booths with newspapers. The hum of Federal Highway long ago became more lullaby than annoyance. And the name -- well, only a diner that was christened in 1956 could get away with a name like the Egg 'N' You, which even the waitstaff doesn't know the meaning behind. "I don't know," they say when asked about it. "It's been around for 50 years -- that's what it's always been called."
2 comments
I lived and worked in Ft. Lauderdale in the nineteen-fifties. If someone had asked me then which restaurants would survive until today, Egg 'N' You would not have made the list. Still, it was a good place for breakfast at any hour. As for the staff not getting the literary allusion, why would you expect them to? People don�t read current books, let alone those from the forties. I doubt that many of the staff or customers understood it when I was there.
