Dan's Papers - August 10, 2007 - Honesty at the Honest Diner

Yogi Berra once said of the Hamptons, "the place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore." But Berra apparently did not know the ways of our wealthy Manhattan summer visitors. As it plays out here, the more crowded a place is, the more it is the chic place to be. And so everybody goes there to see and be seen, to wait in line and to be pushed and shoved and ultimately, to find a seat, wherever it is.

A good case in point for this is the recently opened Honest Diner in Amagansett. It has been an instant success and it is packed. Everybody wants to relive the fifties and here it is, an honest-to-goodness fifties diner, completely restored and shining, serving everything from hot java to cheeseburgers to malteds, just the way it was in 1957.

Well, not quite. First of all, in 1957 -- and I should report to you that I was eighteen years old in 1957, so this is a strong and wonderful memory for me -- the diners we all went to back then just weren't this packed. You went in, you sat down, you put a nickel in the jukebox -- they had them right on the Formica tables -- and you ordered a soda or a sundae.

I suppose that what we need now are three or four of these honest diners to cope with the demand for them and it is now a fact that a second one, owned by Alexis Stewart, will soon open in Bridgehampton under the name Delish Diner, but that doesn't deal with the problem today.

How do you deal with these crowds? It's like, oh look, here's this charming old general store, let's go in and play some checkers with the locals, and you go in and it is wall to wall people in bathing suits because everybody else has got the same idea. The checkers have long since been turned upside down onto the floor. The locals have fled.

So far, the Honest Diner has received mixed reviews in how it has dealt with this very difficult situation. Personally, I've gone there twice and have had a good experience one time and a bad experience another. I had somebody call this newspaper two weeks ago complaining about the place and when I mentioned this to Elaine Benson, she said she'd been there during a crowded time and it was fine.

My own experience was strange. I thought I'd stop there on my way to Montauk and get a coffee to go. (Yes, we had coffee to go in the 1950s, though we didn't have Styrofoam.) I went in the front door, only to be confronted by a man who was about a half- foot taller than me, who wanted to know what my business was there. It brought me up short. A bouncer?

Then I realized he was seating people. There were too many people and not enough tables and people were giving him a hard time and he was not dealing with it well. I told him I wanted a coffee to go and he gestured for me to go to the counter by the front register. This counter was about three feet from where we were talking. I had certainly not needed directions.

But everyone was so busy that nobody waited on me. After almost eight minutes, by my watch, I turned to this man and told him I would have to leave. I thought he would like to have this information.

"I'll get you a cup of coffee," he said. And so he did.

He went behind the counter himself and from his gestures I could see was not happy about having to be pulled away from his main job to do this and he went to the coffee urn and poured me a coffee to go.

Now, I have not left anything out here. If you drink coffee or tea to go, you know there was something missing about what he was doing. He had no conceivable idea how I liked it.

"On the house," he said when he returned.

I looked down. The cup had a top on it, sealed. I hadn't the slightest idea of how it was prepared.

There is an old rule that says you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, so I took this sealed cup, went out to the car and drove off, opening it after a while to see what surprise lay beneath. When I determined I would now be throwing it out, I decided instead to make a U-turn and bring the thing back to let them know what had happened. I thought, as a fellow businessman in the community, management should know.

But when I returned, it was apparent that I was dealing with the wrong time of day. The place was so packed and so hassled by all the customers that everyone there acted as if I must be crazy. Couldn't I see how busy they were? All this for a seventy-cent cup of coffee?

Oh, well. The truth is that, when you are dealing with the management of something incredibly wonderful, such as the Honest Diner, only half of running it is quality control.

The other half is crowd control. Or at least, this is the case everywhere on the island of Manhattan and its various satellites, such as the Hamptons.

What the hell is it about New Yorkers? All this pushing and shoving. I must tell you that New Yorkers are, for the most part, such a spoiled lot that when they enter all this pushing and shoving -- which means this must be the place to be -- they also act as if they are the only people on the line. It is as if BECAUSE this place is so crowded, it must be so special and therefore, if I am here, I must be special, so, damn it, I get to be treated special and who are all these other people?

This is a real dilemma for the people who run establishments such as the Honest Diner. What do you do with a bunch of prima donna New Yorkers? Well, one solution could be that you abuse them. I am not for one minute suggesting that the Honest Diner has chosen this route. My own experience and the one called in might just be unique.

But there ARE establishments, both in New York and in the Hamptons, which have, as a policy, this sort of abuse AND THIS ABUSE IS PART OF WHAT MAKES THE PLACE CHIC.

Go figure. I might add that most local people who accidentally wander in to situations such as this later talk about it with a kind of incredulity. They wonder, with amazement, why city people would flock to places where they would be abused. They don't understand.

But there is another solution, I think. And that is to raise the prices. Raise the prices and fewer people will come in. Right?

(For the moment, anyway, the Honest Diner prices are very low. Complete dinners for about eighteen bucks. Breakfast for about four. How can you beat that in this day and age?

Of course, in the fifties, dinner was about three bucks and breakfast was fifty cents. It would have been nice if they could have those prices today. How about it, guys? Just one week in the middle of January? No charge for the idea.)

To this day, I remember my first experience dealing with what I shall call New York Chic. It was the early nineteen-seventies. It was in East Hampton and a new grocery store called Dean and DeLuca had opened on Newtown Lane between Sam's Pizza and old man Rose's jewelry store. So I stopped in. I picked up a jar of jam, turned it over and saw it was imported from Bulgaria. Then I saw the price. Nineteen dollars. I damn near dropped it. I was so startled that I damn near dropped it, that I ran out of the store. If I had dropped it, I knew, I would own it. Nineteen dollars, at the time, would have broken me.

What I have been told, however, is that when you raise the prices anywhere else in America, indeed, fewer people come in, but that in New York, if you raise the prices, MORE of these lunatics come in.

"Hey, they're charging four dollars for a cup of coffee!! This must be the place."