Washington DC -
What’s not to love about diners? The food, decor, characters, and sheer Americana are often superb. One’s love of diners, however, does not immediately indicate let alone require an equal and opposite disdain for fine dining.
It is permitted, after all, to enjoy both of them. Indeed, as with many things in life, an experience with one can inform the other with much learning and creativity to be found in the spaces between.
Regrettably, an otherwise fine Boston Globe review of Providence diners recently served up the same claptrap in its lede. “You can keep your five-star restaurants, with their heart-stopping prices and pretensions” read the first sentence. Whose “pretensions” are these exactly in a world where all manner of art, craft, literature, architecture, and even scientific inquiry can be reduced by some to mere pretension?
This kind of thinking instantly reduces the love of diners or casual dining to an “us versus them” battle between, say, plutocrats and regular folk, discrediting fine-dining restaurants, chefs, staffs, and patrons with tinges of class warfare and social schism.
These binary constructs in writing and speech are intellectually lazy. There is no need to create sides here or, seemingly, to try to appeal to one tribe at another tribe’s expense. Leave that to the shameless politicians and ideologues. These false dichotomies do not work for thoughtful people who reject the idea of being shoehorned into one camp or another - or at least they shouldn’t work. Let’s have a little less “or” and much more “and” in our thinking. After all, this is not all some kind of zero-sum game in which your gain is my loss.
You like or dislike diners? No problem. You like or dislike fine dining. Again, no problem. We are all entitled to our opinions, of course. If you like both of them, however, and do not wish to be relegated to one camp or another, then pull up to the counter, take your seat, honey, and dine out on some well-deserved discernment and critical thinking. And then, get a slice of the Boston Cream Pie for dessert.
