I came prepared for disappointment. Twenty years following the diner industry has honed a healthy skepticism. I cringe more than I'd like when listening to people's plans for their newly acquired diners, and while the idea of the Miss Newport Diner spending another day decaying in a Salisbury, Massachusetts storage yard hardly warmed my soul, the thought of it landing in the hands of an inept steward made me shudder.

Approaching the freshly opened Miss Mendon Diner as we did from the west got this experience off on a sour note. Coming from that direction, I might have missed it if I didn't know it was there. Its new owner, Kevin Meehan, placed this gleeming red gem of a Worcester Lunch Car at least 100 yards back from the road, behind several rows of new cars sold from his multi-brand dealership aptly named Imperial Motors. Obscured in this vast expanse of vehicular topography, the diner elbows out a comparatively small footprint in the shadow of three towering structures, two showrooms and a professional building. In our initial confusion, we pulled into the professional building's lot which doesn't connect to the diner's lot. So, we had to drive back out to Route 16 and enter further up, back-tracking through the maze-like dealer lot. Not a great way to make a first impression.

Fret not, diner purists. We brought our own maple syrup for these very good banana pancakes. No, we didn't try the home fries, which we do regard as a true litmus of any breakfast menu. Next time.

The good good breakfast is truly an elusive commodity around here. While we have no shortage of breakfast joints, diners, and diner wannabees, a true standout has yet to come to the older suburbs north of Philadelphia and south of the turnpike. Still, we keep looking. We'd like to find some place that serves up something a little better and more creative than just the standard eggs, pancakes, and French toast affair found throughout this region. And if only someone around here would features a real homemade corned beef hash. If I miss New England for only one thing, it's that.

Yesterday, during the big snowstorm, we decided to give the Moonlight Diner another chance. Mrs. Roadside remembers it as the Kenyon Diner, where she and her high school friends would tumble into after her late night bacchanals. Since then, the diner changed hands and names a few times. I can't say for sure, but I also suspect that despite its current appearance, a real prefab structure once stood at this location. Today, you'd have great difficulty discerning any original features. Only the general footprint of the place indicates the possibility of any real diner heritage.

Andy Pinto (left) and an able assistant at the reopened Yankee Diner in Charlton, Massachusetts. (Photo by David Goldberg)

The Yankee Diner, a circa 1939 Worcester Lunch Car Company diner (#735), has been an enigma for the fifteen years I’ve been a customer. At first, coinciding with the five years my would be wife lived a few blocks away, its early — for city folk used to having late weekend breakfasts in the early afternoon — 10:30 a.m. closing time always provided a challenge. Subsequent ownership changes always made timing the diner being open in the decade that followed a challenge and it seemed it might actually have served its final customer until Andy Pinto became its new owner earlier this year.

While its imminent reopening was announced back in via the local newspaper in August, its doors weren’t opened. and the first customer of the new era served until mid-November. It had been open two weeks when my now wife and I returned to the scene of those early too-early breakfasts to meet a friend for lunch. That first story suggested the diner would be serving an all-Indian menu, which sounded ominous for a diner, but still, quite exciting to this fan of Indian food. But when we arrived, around 1 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, we were slightly disappointed to find out we had missed the one Indian special of the day, chicken curry, one of my favorite dishes in the world.