My hometown breakfast diner

If I spend more than a few days in a new town, I start to poke around for a breakfast diner. It’s a sort of greasy time bubble where everyone sets aside their differences to gorge on eggs and coffee.

Eggs, coffee, bacon, pancakes. Notes to a song that we (and our physicians) know by heart. I take comfort in the knowledge that I can walk into almost any diner and order the same exact meal.

However strange and unfamiliar a town might be, the diner is neutral territory where we all know the rules. Like an airport, but less degrading.

My hometown spot is perched along Highway 101 in a beachside town in San Diego county. It’s got the best chocolate chip pancakes I’ve ever had. I’ve since lived in Oregon and New York and I haven’t found anything close.

There’s something about the reckless amount of chocolate chips and the sheer scale of syrup and butter that I’m entrusted with. It says that moderation is for Out There, where boring (and, even worse, flavorless) concepts like physics and estimated tax payments exist.

This sentiment must be written down somewhere, because years have passed and the experience remains the same. I like to think that there’s a curled and splattered post-it note above the chocolate chip bin that says something like “live a little” or “who’s counting?”

I took guitar lessons down the street as a kid, walking past the diner without a second glance. It wasn’t until college that I began rediscovering my old haunts. I’d come back home during sophomore year after an injury, and after recovering I took to driving up and down the 101.

Many of the usual spots my friends and I raced to during lunch break in high school were disappearing. Hole-in-the-wall burrito joints were becoming “elevated Mexican fusion” tablecloth bistros.

One morning, I walked down the street and counted the places that still remained. The old landmark theater, the guitar shop where I had my lessons, the 7-Eleven with opera music playing outside, and ye olde faithful breakfast diner.

I floated in on the scent of coffee like a Looney Tunes character, and I’ve been going back ever since.

At the time, many of my friends had moved away for college, so I carved out a space for myself at the counter with a book. It’s around this time I started to get comfortable taking myself out on “solo dates” at restaurants and bars.

My hometown diner heyday was probably around 2013 until I moved to Oregon in 2015. A couple years of waking up early, driving up the coast, and watching the day begin from behind a bottomless mug of coffee.

Maybe this is a sign of a mundane life, but I was always excited - nearly giddy - when I’d wake up early and could sneak out of the house before anyone else noticed. In reality I was 24 years old and no one cared to stop me, but I played out my Solid Snake fantasy anyway.

I took this little charade to Oregon and later to New York, where I lived alone until I met my wife in 2023. There was no one to sneak past except the rising sun. If I could get out early enough and slip into that greasy time bubble, maybe the morning would last forever.

In the meantime, live a little. Who’s counting?