Musingsgalore

OK, we admit it, San Francisco’s Fog City Diner should be disqualified from diner-dom on more than one count: the menu is too uptown (cheddar biscuits with fennel garlic sausage gravy), the prices are too high (you can pay more for a bottle of imported water here than you’d fork over for a full breakfast at a real diner) and there’s no breakfast (only lunch, dinner and weekend brunch). But this Battery Street favorite does have glorious neon and stainless steel, inventive comfort food and generous (too roomy for a diner, really) booths. Purists be damned.

Cheap eats this way. / Photo by John Rossheim for MSN City Guides

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Worcester, Mass.: Don’t Knock This Rockin�?Diner
As the home of the Worcester Lunch Car Company, manufacturer of 651 diners between 1906 and 1961, Worcester has a special place in the hearts of diner addicts. The lunch car company is gone, but the diner tradition carries on in the mill cities of Massachusetts. Some of these diners have made big changes. One such is Worcester’s Ralph’s Diner, which has a rock stage and a couple of architectural annexes to the original dining car. Is this burger joint with a fairly rowdy night-club scene in the back still a diner? If diners must adapt to survive the 21^st century, maybe the answer is yes.

Postscript: Diners for Sale
In case you’re intrigued by the idea of buying a prefab beauty and slinging hash yourself, here are a few diners for sale. Typically the sellers are asking $25,000 to $100,000. Why so cheap? Spend a few years fixing one up and you’ll find out.

John Rossheim is a journalist with more than 15 years of experience covering travel, city life, the workplace and employment trends, technology and other topics. He works from his office in Providence, R.I., through his company, Rossheim.com Inc.

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