Ironically, in elevated restaurant circles, among the taste-making cooks who cater to the arugula generation, the rituals of the diner have never been more popular. “I love the lingo, I love the food, I love the waitress calling you ‘Hon’ when you come in the door,” says Wylie Dufresne, who made his reputation as a pioneer of what used to be called molecular gastronomy, and is now applying that approach to the elaborately flavored doughnuts at his recently opened Williamsburg coffee counter. He thinks short-order cooking and barbecue are America’s greatest contributions to the international culinary canon, and he can recite the names of the great silver-clad structures — Haven Brothers and the Ever Ready Diner in Providence — that used to dot the highways of his early youth, the way nautical buffs can tick off the names of grand, disappeared ocean liners of the early-20th century.
“It makes me terrified when I see these places closing, because when they go, they’re not coming back,” the chef is saying as we sit at the counter of Joe Jr. Restaurant on Third Avenue in Gramercy Park on a recent Tuesday morning, waiting for our breakfast. This Joe’s (according to legend, the two Joes had the same owner until the mid-’70s) has become famous, in recent years, for the quality of its $6 cheeseburger, but Dufresne has been a regular since he was a student at Friends Seminary High School down the street. He dines here at least once a month with his family, and he likes to bring superstar-chef friends from out of town, like Noma’s René Redzepi, to sample his favorite meal — a cheese omelet with sausage, hash browns, and fresh-squeezed orange juice — and watch the timeless ballet of the line cooks as they break eggs over the griddle and flip the shells into the garbage can behind their backs.
