I spent two winters driving Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, and I ate every meal I could at a counter. Not a booth, not a table — a counter. There is a difference that most people under forty have never felt: the counter at Mahoney's in Joplin, Missouri, where the cook turns your eggs three feet from your elbow and the waitress calls you hon without thinking about it. You sit shoulder to shoulder with a traveling salesman and a farmer and a kid skipping school, and nobody asks why. The counter does not care who you are.
Formica as Civic Architecture
The boomerang-patterned laminate that tops most American counters was never meant to be beautiful. It was meant to wipe clean. But somewhere between the war and the interstate, those turquoise and white surfaces became the most honest civic architecture this country ever produced. No velvet ropes, no dress code. You paid sixty cents and you sat down.