I wanted to comment on vixmom's post about the 24-hour diners being closed at night. This is a very sad development, and I can only hope that, in the long run, it's still just a temporary thing.
Of the diners in my immediate vicinity, only a few have been 24-hr ones in recent years, and I haven't known their status since the beginning of the pandemic because I'm also one who has only been in one or two sit-down restaurants this whole time, and neither of those was a diner. There are more 24-hour diners as you get closer to the city, and I haven't been by many of those, either. But this is such a major segment of the eating culture in the northeast, that it would really be tragic if these changes became permanent.
I know from previous conversations that many of our denizens here don't totally "get" what we're talking about, and the closest thing I can think of to compare would be the classic Southern California coffee shops. And so many of those great ones I knew are long gone. But even they didn't have the comprehensive menus of which vixmom speaks that you find in the prime NY-NJ-CT diners.
