Lori's NZ Blog

It's the little things

I woke up this morning with an incredibly powerful, overwhelming urge for a diner breakfast. I wanted to walk into a warm, bright, noisy diner that smells of coffee and bacon, and see cheap plastic booths with scratched formica tables with little bowls of half-and-half containers and bottles of ketchup (not tomato sauce) on them, and walk up to a counter lined with stools covered with that same cheap plastic, and sit my butt down and be served a bottomless carafe of coffee. Coffee == filter coffee. Coffee != espresso. I wanted to read about omelettes (egg whites $1 extra) and hash browns and Belgian waffles and 6 kinds of pancakes off a laminated menu, then go ahead and order what I always order, an egg white omelette with vegetables, and maybe a little feta, with a side of fruit and a dry english muffin, and not get any 'tude from the waitresses for ordering egg whites. Then I'd sit and read the comics section in the paper, because there IS a comics section in the paper, then do the crossword that has clues I understand, and drink cup after cup of my bottomless filter coffee while I wait for my omelette. Then my breakfast would arrive and the omelette would take up half the plate and it would be beautiful. I'd leisurely eat my breakfast and drink as much coffee as I wanted and do the crossword and maybe the sudoku.

What I did instead, after working out, was go eat at one of the few places I've found that doesn't give me Egg White 'Tude and get the "veg breakfast" with steamed spinach and tomatoes and mushrooms, and get a $3, 3-ounce espresso drink that's served in a tiny cup with a microscopic handle and is gone in three sips.

My options, as I see them, are:

• Move back to America.
  
• Open Wellington's first American Diner.
  
• Stop living in a fog of nostalgia.
  

I'll write something more interesting soon.

posted by Lori @ 3:48 PM