Goth Girl Diner

I've always liked breakfast food, and because of this, I love diners. But they are a little risky. There is a fine line between a dive diner that is amazing, and a dive diner that will give you the shits. And if you don't have local knowledge of the diner, the only way to learn where that line is is to order and hope for the best.

I currently live in a pretty rural area. Not the most rural place I've lived, but it's no metropolis. To give you a better feel of my town, there was an incident at my work where someone parked in a way that forced another person to have to have to actually parallel park, and that's the kind of thing that makes issues. There were meetings, emails, etc. No one lives where I live and then suffers being forced parallel park.

But back to diners. I like them. My favorite thing is very, very crispy bacon, runny eggs (sorry mom, I know you hate that), pancakes and then jam on the pancakes. This is simple, but you can mess this up. I ate this exact meal in a diner in Casper, Wyoming once and nearly exploded while trying to get to the nearest bathroom, only a eye-sweating two hours away in Gillette.

So when we moved to our current home, we cast about for a good go-to diner. But the first one we went to was actually some sort of conspiracy theorist hot spot, and they clocked my flip flop wearing husband as an interloper and while we didn't get sick from eating there, we knew, it wasn't the place for us.

Then we learned there was a diner in the nearly condemned train station. The far end of the condemned building wasn't actually condemned, and that was where the diner was. The diner was fine. It was not great, but it wasn't terrible either. All of its tables had advertisements printed onto the tabletops. One of their top sponsors was a biohazard clean up agency which specialized in cleaning houses after people died or were murdered in them. I learned this while eating my bacon and reading the tabletop. Again, not terrible, but not great.

Then we figured out there was a diner not far from our house, but it catered to the more religious demographic of our town, and once again, my husband's flip flops make it clear we do not have Live Laugh Love on our living room walls. That diner was pretty good, and there was one server who was young and nice, and they had a giant TV which only played rodeo. I did like that. Rodeo names are legitimately the best names ever. I just Googled "Top Rodeo Cowboys" and Google spit the following names at me: Wacey Schalla, Brushton Minton, Paden Bray. For a writer, things don't get much better than that.

But then one day I was getting gas at this place I always get gas, and I realized, the far end of the gas station was not condemned, as I thought it was, but rather it was a diner. My husband and I showed up one morning to try it out.

A server greeted us. She wore an oversized black hoodie, had layers of pale foundation and heavy, black eye makeup, had black fingernails, multiple facial piercings (also black) and then wore, you guessed it, giant, black Doc Martins.

She was perfectly nice and walked us past the open kitchen where a pale guy with giant plugs in his ears was working the grill. She sat us and another woman, also in her own gothy outfit and makeup, poured us coffee.

Sunlight streamed in the giant windows that looked out across the majestic gas pumps, and several groups of white haired septuagenarians sat at the surrounding tables.

My husband and I exchanged a look that said, Why are all the church people here when all the staff are goth girls?

Then our food came. The bacon was limp. I was very sad about this, and decided to ask if they would sizzle it up for me. I asked the black clad server. She was very nice and took the bacon and returned it a moment later, fully crispified. I tried a piece. She watched with obvious worry.

"Can you tell the cook this is really perfect?" I asked.

She let go a bright smile that contradicted the screaming black haired men silk screened on her T shirt.

"Of course," she said.

Once done and back in our car, my husband said, "I don't understand. All the people working there were goths. But all the people eating there are the churchy people. But no one seemed upset by it."

This was a fair question from the man who was regularly judged for wearing flip flops.

"Maybe it was a fluke?" I said.

But the best part is, it wasn't. The gas station, goth girl diner is now our favorite. The servers are nice and good at their jobs. The food is good. I don't know why the same people who glare at my husband for his footwear choices are nice to the waitresses wearing chains and fangs, but they are.

And I love it.

You never know where you will find a hidden gem of a diner. Sometimes you think it'll be in a falling down train station, but actually it's in a gas station you visit every week.

Here's to crispy bacon.