Empire Diner: Now and Then

Illustration: Lyndon Hayes 

 My friend Mark reviewed the new Empire Diner for Chow and writes:

Finally! Now I can retire from the fringes of the food media. Seriously, have you checked out the reborn Empire Diner? I've been just once and think she's on to something there.

Read HERE.

P.S. If you missed this New York Observer piece abouut the history of the joint  -- written when it closed back in 2010 -- you must check it out now:

One night in 1976, a group of four young men walked into the Empire Diner on 10th Avenue and 22nd Street and asked for hamburgers. It was clear they’d never been there before. “I told them we didn’t make hamburgers, that we had some other stuff,” said Carl Yorke, then 23, a novice actor who spent four months waiting tables at the Empire during the weird little diner’s first year of operation. The young men, who looked like “hormone-driven Jersey boys,” were not pleased. What kind of backwards diner didn’t serve hamburgers? “They looked around, and they went, ‘Oh, fuck! This place is full of fags!’ And the place just emptied out,” said Mr. Yorke. “This brawl broke out on the sidewalk. And these guys, the customers of the Empire Diner—they may have been gay, but they weren’t pussies.” 

 Keep reading HERE.