Adolphe Pierre-Louis

LANDING SITE: The Rio Grande Diner in Belen shines like a UFO parked on a mesa in a desolate landscape of arid cliffs and desert. The Rio Grande is part of a new breed of diners being manufactured by the Starlite Co. in Florida.

Roadside Nostalgia

Nothing could be finer than to find a timely diner

By Miriam Sagan
For The Journal
I love diners. Maybe it's because I'm originally from New Jersey, where I grew up crammed into a booth with my friends, sharing one order of mashed potatoes, drinking coffee and playing the jukebox. In the yellow light of a diner we discussed boys, gossip and dreams. It wasn't until many years later that I learned what diners really were.
A genuine diner is not, as I originally thought, an old railroad dining car put out to pasture, although in style it resembles one. Nor is a real diner any roadside cafe that hangs out a DINER sign in neon. For a diner to be the legitimate thing, it must be constructed of prefab parts.
This prefabrication is part of what gives diners their distinctive style and which makes them mobile. The look of diners draws on elements of art deco, of the 1950s look and of Airstream trailers. Diners speak of the mystery of the road and the revelation of good coffee. Wherever I travel, I try to eat in diners. There are currently only eight of these prefabricated diners rumored to be in New Mexico, and I think I've located them all.

Happy Valentine
The first diners in New Mexico were manufactured in the 1930s by the Valentine Co. in Wichita, Kan., and shipped west. Valentine built 2,000 diners, six of which ended up in New Mexico. These were small by diner standards -- and very charming in their details. Of the Valentine diners, only about 200 are still in existence; and New Mexico has only two functioning eateries.
Not everyone who loves Albuquerque's Tic Toc Diner (601 Osuna NE; open 6 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Friday) realizes it is Valentine No. 543. The Valentines were manufactured as tiny restaurants that could be run by two people during the Depression as a family business. The place is so small that the waitress sometimes pops out the back door and in through the front door to serve the lone table in one corner, facing the stool counter.
The Tic Toc's proprietors are Sonya and Jordan Roberts, who have owned the diner for two years and brought new pizazz to the menu. The Robertses have the Tic Toc up for sale because they want to move back to southern Colorado to be near family. They say they won't sell, though, until they find just the right buyer. Favorites at the Tic Toc include the green chile cheeseburger and pie -- both the apple that is baked weekly and the more occasional lemon meringue.
I took my husband to lunch there, and he startled the regular patrons by ordering the vegetarian burrito with a veggie burger on the side. "You can't possibly eat all that," a complete stranger informed him, unaware that my husband's skinny frame held a competitive all-you-can-eat digestive tract. But the patron was right. Bested by the burrito, the burger was packed up to go for dinner. Both were delicious.
The other functioning Valentine, just called The Diner, sits in the hamlet of Tres Piedras amidst the wild rock formations that might be the Australian outback. (The Diner is open seven days a week, Monday-Saturday, 8 a.m.-4 p.m. and Sunday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Look for it at the intersection of 285 and 64, just north of the blinking light at Tres Piedras, on the west side of the road).
I spent one snowy winter commuting between Santa Fe and southern Colorado, and I always stopped there, drawn by the tiny white building with its promise of soup and hamburgers, and a break from the lonely road. Ancient glassware, burnished blue with age, sat in the cabinets, speaking of bygone Depression days.
I was pleased to discover The Diner was truly a diner -- Valentine No. 650, to be exact. The Diner, with its 12-stool lunch counter, is currently owned by Barbara Cozart. Cozart is a Valentine enthusiast, who renovated The Diner in 1991.
The four others of the original Valentines tell a sadder tale. All are abandoned -- including a deserted shell on the highway outside of Tia Amarilla and one in a salvage lot in Alamogordo. Albuquerque's defunct two are the gutted Line Shack on Edith and the Little House, which is now, as a historic building, owned by the city and part of a police substation at the intersection of Girard, Central and Monte Vista.

Starlite, star bright
However, I'd been hearing through the diner grapevine that there were new diners being manufactured, predominantly by the Starlite Co. in Florida. Diner purists were cynical, telling tales of mass-produced gravy and chicken-fried steak. Were these new diners the real article, or were they close to being chain restaurants that were capitalizing on nostalgia? When I heard there was one such new diner in Belen, I drove several hours round trip just to sample breakfast there.
The Rio Grande Diner (open 24 hours a day) shines like a pie plate in the sun, or a UFO parked on a mesa. Off the second exit to Belen, it sits next to Best Western (and is owned by the corporation that runs Best Western) in a desolate landscape of arid cliffs and desert. Welcomed by its neon sign, I stepped into what is certainly the cleanest diner I have ever encountered. The place is spotless, from its pressed chrome ceiling to the '50s-style pink formica that looks like it might welcome poodle skirts to cozy up in a booth.
Coffee at a diner is often an acid test for the food to come -- and at the Rio Grande it is fresh-brewed without any of the bitter burnt taste that sometimes passes for high octane at roadside eateries. The menu serves up such diner classics as chicken-fried steak with gravy and a breakfast steak with eggs, but also nods to the local love of chile with a green chile stew as well as burritos -- for breakfast or dinner.
And you can tell it isn't 1950 anymore, because of the stir-fried veggies and the chicken teriyaki; healthy eating has infiltrated even the bastion of mashed potatoes. But food at the Rio Grande -- whether light or not -- tastes fresh and surprisingly ungreasy. The decor hasn't changed from the classic diner, but the food has actually improved.
While it's true that the Rio Grande Diner is no mom-and-pop, the other Starlite diner in the state, Dad's Diner in Farmington (4395 Largo St., located by the J.C. Penney Co. side of the Farmington mall), is indeed family owned, by Michael Nyce and his parents, Robert and Margie Nyce. So it isn't as if the Starlites are in danger of becoming a fast-food chain.
Besides, the Rio Grande Diner has a genuine feeling that won't disappoint even diner fanatics. It makes a great stopping place on a trip south -- whether to Bosque del Apache or Mexico. And the staff says diners make special trips from as far away as Santa Fe perhaps in search of a genuine down-home eating experience.
I've eaten in funky diners in deserted mill towns and in refurbished ones serving nouvelle cuisine. I've eaten in Manhattan diners, where the silver bullet-shaped eateries are sandwiched between looming skyscrapers. I've eaten in New England diners formally named "Miss" for the towns they grace -- The Miss Adams and the Miss Bellows Falls. I've eaten triple-decker sandwiches and eggs over-easy and I've drunk enough coffee to keep me awake for a lifetime. And now I'm planning a trip to Chaco Canyon motivated by a secret yen that has nothing to do with archaeology -- I want to be within eating distance of Dad's. When I walk through the door it will be a blind date, just me and the diner, its curves, its promise of the open road, and I'll fall in love all over again.