On a recent Thursday at Golden Diner, two patrons took three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spins, in perfect unison, on their swivelling stools. They looked gleeful. And who could blame them? It was a gorgeous fall morning. Warm light flooded the room on the Lower East Side, just south of Chinatown. They were drinking Yuzu Palmers, a cocktail that cleverly replaces an Arnold Palmer’s lemonade with yuzu-ade and iced tea with Darjeeling-flavored soju. On the other side of the counter, Samuel Yoo, a pedigreed chef masquerading as a short-order cook, was making them something delicious to eat.
In New York, the classic diner is an endangered species, mostly owing to rising costs of rent, food, and labor, and one that’s unlikely to be protected from extinction. When, after thirty years in business, the Cup & Saucer, on Canal Street, packed up shop, in 2017, it seemed as if that would be it for greasy spoons in the area. But then, this past spring, Yoo, who once cooked at Momofuku Ko, opened Golden Diner, which does an excellent job of upholding the archetype while meeting modern standards.
Take, for example, Yoo’s grilled cheese. It’s a perfectly unpretentious, familiar-looking specimen: yellow goo melting between buttery slices of white bread, branded by the griddle and sliced on the diagonal. It arrives alone on a plate unless you upgrade to deluxe, which gets you a pile of medium-cut fries and a wedge of sour pickle for three dollars and fifty cents. The fact that the sandwich is vegan—made with coconut-oil-based Gouda and pepper Jack from Follow Your Heart, the company behind Vegenaise, and griddled in garlic oil instead of butter—is negligible from a flavor perspective, especially when you compare the ingredients in the dairy-free cheese with those in, say, Kraft Singles. Both are highly processed. Both taste of fat and salt. What the imitation lacks in stretchiness, it makes up for in buoyant ooze.
The fact that the sandwich is vegan is crucial and exciting if you believe, as I do, that humans should cut down on animal products for environmental reasons but enjoy, as I do, a diner-style grilled cheese. There’s a vegan Caesar salad, too, which made me want to spin around on my stool, a simple but exceptionally satisfying bowl of crunchy green romaine in a punchy, garlic-heavy dressing made with Tabasco and mushroom powder and tossed with shreds of Follow Your Heart Parmesan and big toasty croutons.
The restaurant, on the Lower East Side, just south of Chinatown, is the first diner to open in the area since the Cup & Saucer, on Canal Street, closed, in 2017, after thirty years in business.Photograph by Heami Lee for The New Yorker This is not a vegan diner. Neither of those dishes comes with a hint of sanctimony, or even of prescription; in fact, the menu suggests adding crispy (real) chicken to the salad. It’s also not a trendy restaurant posturing as a diner for the sake of nostalgia. It’s a genuine catchall, in the mode of its forebears, but better. There is plenty to satisfy the staunchest traditionalists. The matzo-ball soup is plainly excellent, no bells or whistles. Two eggs are indeed served, as the menu promises, “How you want ‘em,” scrambled, fried, or folded into an omelette, and plated with a superlative crackly edged hash-brown patty rough-chopped into bite-size pieces. Just like at your local Athenian, you can order half a grapefruit; a side of bacon; a Diet Coke. Coffee refills are free.
Unlike your local Athenian, Golden Diner tops its enormous, fluffy pancakes with salted honey-maple butter instead of syrup, in homage to a popular South Korean potato-chip flavor. Like a formal poet, Yoo, who is Korean-American and grew up in Bayside, Queens, finds creativity within constraints, telling an enchantingly personal story without ever quite coloring outside the lines. Why does the fairly ordinary-looking burger taste so distinctive? Because the extra-shiny bun is a sesame-scallion milk roll from a Chinatown bakery, and because the patty is dressed with a dash of mushroom-gochujang sauce. Why can’t I stop thinking about the pumpkin-seed-and-cranberry granola? Because it’s topped, in a stroke of genius, with fresh orange zest. The diner is dead; long live the diner. (Dishes $8-$15.)