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But, in fact, the big-haired hostess, co-owner Loula Athans, died in 2011, and places like this have been quietly vanishing for a long time. As Eleven City Diner owner Brad Rubin noted to me of the genre, old coffee shops “used to be on every corner and they’re about gone. I think it’s a generational thing—the parents did it, maybe they owned the building, but they worked seven days a week, and the kids look at that and they don’t want to work that hard . . . they sell the place and it becomes a bank or a Starbucks.” It’s also true that people don’t want to eat that style of food any more. They’ll eat a hipster take on the style—see the Little Goat or Au Cheval—but not the real deal in a place that kind of feels like an old-folks home.
When I first moved here from Kansas to work in the ad biz, I used to go to coffee shops like the Lincoln Restaurant all the time. Part of it was a genuine affection for midwestern (and ever-so-slightly southern) comfort food, and part of it was the delusion that this kind of food was somewhat more real and healthy than fast food. But mainly it was just that if I was working late and my associate attorney wife was working late and I didn’t feel like braving some ethnic cuisine I knew nothing about, diners were comforting in that big-city way that allowed loners to dine alone . . . together.
But, see, this is where I run into a problem as a foodie who believes firmly that the revolution will come when the food on your plate gets more local and natural. You could talk Trotsky and Bakunin all you wanted at the Lincoln Restaurant, but pretty much anything you ordered there came with Kraft cheese on top of it, ensuring that industrial capitalism was getting its cut from your discussions. I’m as much for the dictatorship of the proletariat as the next good bourgeois, but it isn’t getting any closer talking Occupy Wall Street while eating the Man’s most plastic, alienated-from-the-means-of-production food products.
