Features: Everybody's Business • Bruce Johansen

A seat at the counter
My personal history with Tastee Diner

It was only a fleeting glimpse from the backseat of a moving car, but I filed away the image of a diner, unaware that one day I'd be moving to this area and that the Tastee would become an important place to me.

Photo: Julie Wiatt

Self-described "regulars" enjoy lunch and banter with staff at the Tastee Diner

That was in the mid-1980s, on one of my first visits to DC. With me were my mother, who'd grown up in Takoma Park and Silver Spring, and two of her childhood friends who'd never left; they even remained in their family home.

Since I'm the product of a much newer, Midwestern suburb, the presence of a somewhat tattered, yet classic diner in a place that was also technically a 'burb, surprised me. That's because the kind of post-World War II suburban development that led to the community where I grew up doesn't encourage the presence of informal neighborhood gathering places like diners, corner stores, bars, or cafes. Single-use zoning regulations, created to keep retail and residential space separate, pretty much planned those kinds of settings out of existence.

As a result, Roseville, Minnesota, my hometown, is loaded with strip malls and enclosed shopping centers. These are places that one typically drives to and which house mostly national and global franchises and chains. To find unique "third places," businesses that promote social interaction, not just shopping, a person must to go to neighboring Minneapolis or St. Paul, which are filled with them.

With the quest for good community hangouts a significant part of my background, it didn't take long after relocating to Montgomery County to realize that my third place needs could be satisfied both in the urban neighborhoods of Washington, DC, and closer to home. At that time, Old Town Takoma Park housed Mark's Kitchen--where all paths seemed to cross--the Everyday Gourmet, and Taliano's, which for many years housed the only thing resembling a neighborhood bar.

Photo: Julie Wiatt

"Tastee Diner Waitress"—a mosaic homage created by Arts on the Block (click here to read more about Arts on the Block)

Meanwhile, grittier downtown Silver Spring (this was the mid-'90s) was home to such gems as the Tastee Diner--then at the bustling intersection of Georgia and Wayne--the Quarry House Tavern, a classic, dark, basement bar, and Kefa Café, the friendliest coffeehouse I'd ever stepped foot in.

While I came to enjoy spending time in each of these places--they were good retreats from grad school, the purpose of my move--it was the Tastee Diner that first captured my attention and in time served as an entry point for exploring Silver Spring's history and the conflicts surrounding its downtown's redevelopment.

Becoming a regular, but never a regular

In a culture where people have long become accustomed to watching the rapid comings and goings of buildings and businesses, I was stunned to discover that patrons and staff had gone to great lengths to save Tastee from the hands of a developer who viewed the humble diner as "a disgrace." A flurry of letters, petitions, along with packed public hearings, secured Tastee's future. Display cases at the original, Georgia Avenue location preserved that piece of the diner's history.

Intrigued by what I was learning, and delighting in the atmosphere, I found myself stopping in regularly. These frequent visits, I hasten to add, never made me truly a Tastee "regular." That status was reserved for guys like Mike, Dave, and Gene, customers who could be found at the diner at least once a day, pretty much every day of the week, and often for hours on end.

Instead of being known by their standard order ("eggs over easy," "cheeseburger, medium") the wait staff knew regulars by name or nickname. Martha, one of the veteran waitresses, dubbed the group of middle-aged men who met late each afternoon, the "old crows." In many ways, Tastee resembled the setting featured in J.R. Moehringer's remarkable memoir, The Tender Bar , only without the presence of alcohol. Coffee was the beverage of choice at the Tastee.

Photo courtesy of the Silver Spring Historical Society

The Tastee Diner was originally built in 1946, then moved in 2000.

Patronizing the diner frequently enough that I was recognized by many of the servers, along with some of the customers, I'd occasionally be invited in to conversations. Eunice, who's been on staff since she was in her teens, would share new photos of her dog or a piece of gossip. The "old crows" came to know me, too. We might not have had a lot in common socially or politically, but I liked their friendliness and appreciated that a wide variety of people clearly felt comfortable at the Tastee. It was as unpretentious as any place could be, a nice contrast from the graduate seminars where I was spending much of my time in those days.

With no firm dress or behavior code, the diner attracted a mix that became especially colorful in the wee hours of the morning, but you never knew who or what you'd see there.

At that time, grumblings and snickers about the leaky ceiling, duct-taped pipes, small, insufficiently maintained bathrooms, and pothole-filled parking lot were regularly thrown into conversations. Because of such quirks, some parents found Tastee on Georgia an inappropriate place to take their children, while others complained that the food wasn't that good. Not everyone, I learned, shared my fondness for the diner.

A local landmark transformed

When news began spreading that the diner would need to move to a less prominent location, this to make way for the sprawling, 500,000-plus square foot Discovery Communications headquarters, many devoted patrons, including me, were concerned about what would be lost in the process.

Photo: Julie wiatt

The Tastee Diner entrance—a 24/7 invitation to breakfast

Jerry McCoy, president of the Silver Spring Historical Society, told me: "I look at the step when you come in here, how it's worn off, and that just amazes me. That's half a century of people coming into this building, twenty-four hours a day." McCoy also mourned the impending loss of the view of one of the most heavily trafficked portions of downtown Silver Spring. "It's going to pain me the first time I come into this diner after it's moved to its new site and look out these windows and not see Georgia Avenue."

The step... the view...and then there were the well-worn wooden booths, also in danger of disappearing. Along with the people who'd made this place a second home, it was the years of use that gave the beloved diner its character. How, some of us wanted to know, could a vastly expanded, cleaned-up version of the local landmark manage to maintain its appeal?

Even more troubling was word that the old prefab Jerry O'Mahoney-manufactured dining car--installed at Georgia and Wayne in 1946--would no longer be the main portion of the diner.

Throughout the years, Tastee's heart and soul had been its counter. Perched at one of the stools, customers were offered a clear view of nearly all that went on in the place: waitresses in and out of the stainless steel kitchen door, multiple plates of food stacked on their arms, refilling coffee cups and water glasses; the turning of heads as the main door off Georgia Avenue swung open and slammed shut, alerting everyone that someone new had arrived.

Reports were that with two large seating areas to be built on either side of the original structure, the dining car would come to function merely as a lobby, not the main gathering point, as it had. Unless patrons voiced a preference for the counter, they would be seated by hosts or hostesses at private tables. Lost would be the camaraderie that resulted when strangers rubbed elbows at the counter, often leading to conversation.

Some things never change

In Hell to Pay, one of detective novelist George Pelecanos's characters stops going to the Tastee. "In the last year Quinn's breakfast house, the Tastee Diner, had been moved to a location off Georgia, and he rarely ate there anymore as it was out of his foot range. Also, with its new faux-deco sign out front, it now looked like the Disney version of a diner. He wondered when the small pleasure of his nightly walk would be taken from him, too."

I'm not sure how many others did, but, like fictional Quinn, I pretty much stopped dropping in once the diner moved in June 2000.

From time to time I'd stop by, but months would elapse between visits. To my surprise I'd find that the new Tastee was far from what I'd feared it would become. Thank god it wasn't transformed into some artificially nostalgic tribute to the segregated '50s, an era when black patrons were only allowed take-out service from the diner's back door.

Lots of things, in fact, remained the same. For example, one mark of any genuine diner is that it stays open 24 hours a day, which is something the Tastee continues to do. The menu hasn't changed a lot either, and those alterations that have been made--such as the addition of a few healthier options and a selection of beers and wines--are mainly for the better. Breakfast is still served all day.

And while there are lots of new faces whenever I visit--the staff has tripled in size and turnover is more rapid--it's comforting to see some of the old, familiar ones, as well. Waitresses Eunice and Martha remain on staff. Also, even though owner Gene Wilkes might be around less often, Tastee is still very much a family-run business, with his daughter Lisa now at the helm.

Since its delivery and installation at the intersection of Georgia and Wayne in 1946 (a replacement for the diner that had been there since 1935), Tastee has had only three owners. Its founder, Eddie Warner, owned it until 1968. That's when long-time cook, Bob Traynor, bought it. Traynor held onto the diner until the stresses of redevelopment fights became too much for him. Finally, in 1988, several staff members approached Gene Wilkes, who agreed to purchase the diner from their boss. Wilkes also owns Tastee Diners in Bethesda and Laurel.

A more inclusive Tastee Diner

Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term, said that a "third place" should possess a number of traits. Among other things, it needs to be distinctive, one-of-a-kind, encourage sociability instead of isolation, promote relaxation and friendship, create a sense of place and community, and be comfortable, with no pretensions. Ideally, he added, a third place promotes social equality by leveling the status of those who use them.

This bit about being a social leveler is where the realities of such settings often fail to measure up to the myths surrounding them, and why historian Andrew Hurley offers a different slant, calling them "borderlands" or "battlegrounds." As with bowling alleys, Hurley writes, diners may be touted as forces of egalitarianism, but have more commonly been places where deep racial, ethnic, class, gender, and generational divides are revealed. Formally or informally, explicitly or implicitly, part of the legacy of third places is that they've excluded certain groups, although at their best they're the places where cultures intersect.

The Tastee Diner is no exception. I pointed out in an earlier piece (June 2005) that long-time African American residents like Ruby Rubens remember its decades-long policy of serving black customers only from the back door.

By 1962, when Montgomery County banned discrimination in places of public accommodation, Tastee's policies had undergone a gradual change, an indication of how everyday places like diners reflect their times. When the diner was removed from its moorings and transported from Georgia and Wayne, in the summer of 2000, it arguably reflected downtown Silver Spring's diversity more than any other third place. This trend has continued with the move to Cameron Street. Instead of functioning primarily as a meeting place for working-class, white men, Tastee now attracts couples, professionals, families, and residents of a wide range of ethnic and racial backgrounds. The changes are reflected in the staff as well.

If you look around, you'll spot several other changes, too: outdoor, patio seating; an up-to-date, spotless, open kitchen; the presence of television screens and ATMs; spacious, sparkling, clean bathrooms; a small, but paved parking lot. Now, instead of being fluent in dinerese, servers are more prone to be heard speaking the language of their country of origin. But perhaps most striking of all is that the majority of customers choose to pass the old counter by, apparently preferring the privacy a booth or table in one of the new dining rooms affords.

After all these years, Tastee remains a Silver Spring fixture

Returning to the Tastee, my first time in months, I didn't recognize a soul. Still, I enjoyed my exchanges with my waitress--who was filling in for Eunice--and taking in the scene. Because it's been an important place to me, I vowed to return more often.

My visit prompted me to recall that the Tastee had been a welcome place I could go as a new resident and feel a part of the community. I would see the same faces, maybe take part in a little banter, and be entertained by the exchanges. The diner helped ground me, and I liked the spectacle of it all. However, at some point I discovered that that's mainly what I was, a spectator; I didn't feel quite as home there as I'd have liked. Sure, the diner had changed in some ways, but so had my needs and expectations.

While I've largely drifted away from Tastee, I'm glad that it remains a part of downtown Silver Spring, if not so regularly for me, then for others who enjoy the interactions that occur there, and for the community as a whole which benefits from holding onto everyday local landmarks like these,that lack pretensions.

It's always worth another visit.

The Diner: Many things to many people

Like the 19th century working men's lunch carts from which they evolved, prefab diners have largely been a regional phenomenon, with the heaviest concentration being in the Northeastern states. Even so, one of the diner's appeals is that it's distinctly North American in origin.

Romanticized in all sorts of ways, diners hold a special place in the popular imagination. They're frequently depicted as symbols of democracy, settings where auto mechanics, construction workers, professors, and business executives rub elbows, let their guards down, and forget about social status. Especially for those who are able to overlook their segregated histories, diners are icons of a simpler, happier era of US history.

Not everyone views the diner in such a positive light. For those who know well the pain and indignities of segregation, these eateries are often viewed with lingering suspicions. Meanwhile, for painter Edward Hopper and a host of noir writers the diner evokes a particular type of atmosphere, dark, occasionally seedy, where society's drifters and outcasts gather. Finally, for vegans and the health-conscious it's hard to overlook the centrality of meat, grease, and calories.

That the diner is capable of meaning so many different things to so many different people points to one of the qualities that makes it, like other "third places" (i.e. informal community gathering places) a source of ongoing interest in popular culture. As one local example shows, a diner is capable of reflecting changes in communities and the fluctuating needs of its patrons.

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