Diners I Have Loved and Lost
In this newsletter: Greasy spoons, Big Pharma gets smaller, and some housekeeping.
Part I: Diners I Have Loved and Lost
A litany of lamented diners, mostly in Manhattan. Ranked in the order in which I recite their names while dipping white bread in soup at the B+H Dairy on Second Avenue.
Orloff's, 66th and Columbus.
The ur-diner of my heart, the diner against which all other diners shall forever be measured. Gone these twenty years. Closed to make way for the expansion of the Mormon temple on Columbus with the golden angel who blows his horn in the direction of the place formerly known as Avery Fisher Hall, as though he’s auditioning for the philharmonic. We used to eat frozen yoghurt at Orloff’s each Wednesday after elementary school, a chocolate and vanilla swirl served in a steel sundae dish. If I were inclined to write to the Metropolitan Diary, which I’m not, I would write about the time a man leaned across the partition from an adjoining table, interrupting my grandmother as she read to me from an Oz sequel, perhaps “The Patchwork Girl of Oz,” to ask her to catch him up on the story. (I’m not inclined to write into the Metropolitan Diary for a number of reasons, among them an incident in which a college friend abetted a scheme to get the Metropolitan Diary to print a made-up item crafted as Metropolitan Diary bait, and the Metropolitan Diary fell for it, and then the Metropolitan Diary editor actually called the dean to complain, displaying a degree of humorlessness perhaps not surprising in a Metropolitan Diary editor.)
Vicky's, 187th between Fort Washington and Pinehurst.
This wound is fresh. Vicky’s closed last year. There’s a very decent sushi place there now with no tables. Vicky's had like five tables and a counter, and it was full every weekend. The waffles were just right, the egg creams well-proportioned, the sandwiches surprisingly good. Vicky ran the register and walked around showing off videos of her granddaughter. I'm getting sad just typing this dumb paragraph. Vicky’s was a neighborhood place, and it’s gone, and I’m not sure I like the neighborhood as much without it.
Manhattan Diner, 77th and Broadway.
This wound is less fresh, a condition reminiscent, if I recall correctly, of the fare at the Manhattan Diner. I think there’s a big apartment building there now. The mystery of the Manhattan Diner lay in its cake display, a rotating case of elaborate cakes and pies. I suppose lots of diners have those cake displays, and this one only seemed such a puzzle to me because this was the diner of my youth. Still, I remember being unable to imagine who was ordering those cakes. Who had two eggs over easy with hash browns at the Manhattan Diner, and then decided to finish up with a triple-decker frosted carrot cake? Were the cakes even real, or were they plastic replicas put there for ambiance? And if they were real, how long did they sit there? A month? A year? Where are they now, a decade after the Manhattan Diner served its last pancake? I imagine the display case glowing in the corner of a junkyard somewhere in Queens, plugged into an overloaded extension cord next to jukebox that plays “Dance Me to the End of Love” on repeat, the cord trailing off vaguely into the night. Inside the display case spins that same triple-decker frosted carrot cake, just as inexplicable in that imagined junkyard as it was in its place in the diner on 77th Street.
Carroll Gardens Classic Diner, Smith between Bergen and Wyckoff.
There was a time, before children, when a thing I would do on the weekends was go down to the Carroll Gardens Classic Diner to eat eggs on toast and read a book. Carroll Gardens Classic Diner was a fine diner, though its name was misleading, as it wasn’t exactly a classic, and I'm not sure it was strictly in Carroll Gardens, either. I'd always thought that Carroll Gardens kind of peters out around Sackett, and that by the time you get down to Bergen you're pretty firmly in Cobble Hill. There is, however, a diner called the Cobble Hill Coffee Shop between Sackett and Degraw that’s probably actually in Carroll Gardens, so the two misnamed diners kind of balanced each other out. The Cobble Hill Coffee Shop is still open now, while the Carroll Gardens Classic Diner is closed, which suggests something of an imbalance in south Brooklyn. I don’t live there anymore, so I couldn’t really tell you.
Pearl Diner, Pearl and Fletcher.
People will say that Manhattan has no alleys besides that one near the Puck Building, but there are a few, and one of them is Fletcher Street, a little stretch of nothing that runs parallel to Maiden Lane way downtown. The Forward’s offices were in the building between Maiden Lane and Fletcher Street, and sometimes I would have people meet me at the Pearl Diner on the corner of Fletcher for breakfast or lunch. Joseph Mitchell would have liked the Pearl Diner. He would have been friendly with the owner, and gone down to the cellar with him and out into the forgotten old vaults under Water Street, if such vaults exist, which I hope they do. The Pearl Diner put pickles on your table whether or not you ordered them, a mix of sour and half-sour, and they had candies in a tray by the register. This diner is not actually closed, it turns out, but I had been told it was, and as such had added it to my yahrzeit list. I don’t know that I’d ask people to meet me there anymore. It’s not that I’ve grown out of my Joseph Mitchell fantasy. Or maybe it is.
Part II: Big Pharma Gets Smaller
What does Pfizer’s new Covid-19 pill mean for Pfizer? I wrote about it this week for Barron’s:
Two years ago, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla asked investors to take a big gamble on the research-and-development operation that [Pfizer chief scientific officer Mikael] Dolsten has rebuilt over the course of more than a decade. That bet is looking smarter than ever.
Bourla has gotten rid of Pfizer’s off-patent drugs division and the last of its consumer health products, leaving behind a pure-play biopharma company that will live or die on the strength of Dolsten’s science.
In a cover story in November 2019, Barron’s argued that Bourla and Dolsten could pull it off.
The new antiviral data reaffirms the case for Pfizer that Barron’s made two years ago. Continuing to profit off the pandemic, however, brings new risks, as criticism grows over the global inequity in vaccine distribution.
Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson are splitsville, and what’s going on with Moderna?
Part III: Housekeeping
As close readers may notice, I used to send this newsletter out via TinyLetter, and now I'm using Substack. This is because TinyLetter's text formatting is and always has been broken, and I figured I'd better get with the times. I started sending this newsletter out in 2014, when most of the diners listed above were still open and I could sleep as late as I wanted on the weekends. Now it’s 2021 and all my favorite diners are closed and when I actually finished a New Yorker article on the couch one morning last weekend it felt like an enormous achievement.
Part IV: Words of Advice
This belongs in the Library of Congress.
Yet another Misfits cover.
“There used to be more of us in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.”
The photo at the top of this email is not a table at a diner, but rather a breakfast place setting at the old Homowack Lodge in Mamakating, New York. Here’s a picture of the breakfast itself, and one of the breakfast orange juice, and one of a waiter in a powder-blue suit wading between packed tables, and one of the coffee, and one of the prunes, and one of the indoor miniature golf course, and one horrifying shot of how it looks today, 45 years later.
That’s all I’ve got!