Good diner: Max and Gwen Who: Max and Gwen What: Really bad food (there's a trend, here) When: Recent Where: Good diner
The thing about the diner off Main was, people were gradually getting to know that the man now running it was no longer the man who had been running the diner off Main for thirty years. The food then had been consistent; it had not been good, exactly, but it had been convenient. The menu hadn't changed in at least fifteen years and the short-order cook had been short-tempered, which meant if the waitstaff got the order wrong, you ate whatever it was the short-order cook had made, because otherwise, you didn't eat at all. Now the diner (known only as 'the diner', partly because Max didn't think to give it a name, and partly because the locals couldn't remember the name it had had before, given it had always been called 'the diner') was renowned for being convenient, and not very good, but at least cheerful. This was due to the obliviousness of Max setting wages (a good two dollars an hour more than they had been previously) and to Max's own inability to lose his temper, as well as the sense that a diner meal was no longer quick and easy, but required of you enough time that you unwound by sheer necessity, rather than by choice.
Max had given in and hired a short-order cook out of sheer necessity. Not because he was so very bad at cooking - which he was, and while he enjoyed it immensely and was happily oblivious to his own ineptitude - but because the volume of custom had ticked up as it had gotten colder and colder and Christmas shopping had drawn people out and left them hungry and without the desire to go home and make food for themselves.
The short-order cook was finishing up now, and all the wait-staff were gone, save Max. He was sat behind the counter, with a folded newspaper and a pencil, and a cup of the ever-present black coffee, a pot simmering on the burner behind him. The air smelled like cheese and eggs, and beneath that coffee and apple pie: there was a great slab of it behind Max, under a plastic cover. The pie was made by someone enterprising in the neighborhood, rather than Max, so it sold very quickly.
The radio was crackling and static, but beneath the static, there were carols: the old and extremely traditional kind rather than the sort that would come on a pop station in between hit numbers. Max was tapping and humming, and when the bell over the door jangled, he looked up startled, and the glasses slid from being propped on his forehead to onto his nose.