Welcome to Grim Yelp Reviews, a new regular feature where we share people’s worst experiences at the worst places. This week: 24-hour diners. Need we say more?
Strange things happen late at night. Any 24-hour institution—a Super Walmart, a truck stop, a laundromat—has a magic hour around 3 a.m. when things get really, really weird. But 24-hour diners have a special magic to them, the kind of bizarre dreamlike state that settles over a place when the lights never go out and the griddle never goes cold. A kind of perpetual 3 a.m., if you will. And that can lead to some truly delightful times, or, just as often, some very grim ones.
Your Grim Yelper’s passion for bad reviews was ignited at one such institution, one very late night, as I watched a waitress I privately and admiringly thought of as “Ursula.” Ursula had been a waitress at the diner for a very long time, and she had been all done taking shit some time ago. Her hair was wild, her nails were tinged with yellow, and her hatred ran swift and deep. Anyone who ordered anything was subjected to a withering glare and an unintelligible mumble, delivered in her smoker’s hack, which was less “gravelly” and more “facedown in a swimming pool full of gravel for 100 years.” She would drag herself to and from the kitchen as though the act of bringing coffee and creamer to the table physically pained her, occasionally flopping down on a counter stool, where she’d moodily toy with a butter knife while watching her customers with an impenetrable expression of disgust.
Watching Ursula confuse and terrify a table full of drunk bros was one of my truest joys at the time. The 24-hour diner has never let me down since: I have another golden memory of a late night at a similarly upstanding establishment in Dallas, Texas, watching, almost hypnotized, as a man shoved menus down his pants with one hand and threw ice cubes at the staff with the other, laughing maniacally all the while.
We’ve found that grim Yelp reviews of diners fall into three categories: bad food, bad service, and The Inexplicable, the kinds of weird things that can only happen at a place that never closes. To protect the names of the innocent and not-so-innocent alike, we’ve redacted the names of the businesses, as well as the identities of the Yelpers who wrote the reviews. We realize you can probably find out all of that information by employing five seconds of Google magic.
The Food
Biscuits probably shouldn’t be al dente:
Kind of impressive that it was still alive, though, no?
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
