Dueling diners

Most people love diners because they're cheap, because the food tastes good, and because you're never guaranteed less attitude than when you get your fried-egg sandwich served to you backhand by the guy who cooked it. In the city, diners have their own meaning. If a roadside diner is a haven on a lonely stretch of highway, a downtown diner is a haven in a lonely stretch of time. Think of the insomniac stragglers in the all-night coffee shop in Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Boston, for its part, has never been much of a late-night town, and offers few places to grab a cheeseburger, a milkshake, and a stack of pancakes at 3 a.m. That's why Friday and Saturday nights find club kids, cops, and off-duty bartenders migrating toward Kneeland Street, just past Chinatown, to the only two all-night joints in Boston: the Blue Diner and the Original Boston Diner.

The Original Boston Diner, at the corner of Kneeland and South Streets, occupies the spot that was home to the Blue Diner for 13 years. It's a tiny, freestanding structure from the 1920s -- 36 seats, wooden booths, brick and blue tile outside -- dwarfed by the surrounding warehouses and office buildings. The restaurant called the Blue Diner (more later on this) still exists: it has simply moved around the corner, where it dishes out barbecue and microbrews in the front space of the grungy Soho-ish bar called the Art Zone.

If the Original Boston Diner isn't exactly the original, it does have the personality of a "real" diner, not only because it's microscopic and ancient and the waitresses sneak cigarettes down at the end of the counter, but because it confines itself to the absolute basics of short-order cookery: pancakes, eggs, burgers, pie. Unhappily, the menu is so stripped-down, you can't even get a milkshake; happily, the food you can get is made carefully, and with sneaky touches of credible restaurant ingredients. There's real Swiss cheese in the cheese omelet ($3.95), for example. And the hamburger ($4.95) is a huge, ragged thing, perhaps needlessly asymmetrical, but definitely handmade. (If the burger wasn't quite medium-rare, who were we to complain? This was art, I decided, and you'd hardly commission a Picasso and complain because it didn't have enough orange in it. And they're flexible, too: I asked for my turkey sandwich ($3.75) with gravy, and it arrived split in two, open-faced, smothered in a deliciously peppery gravy.

It seems to be a rule of thumb that you get the freshest food when restaurants are at their busiest, and the fries ($2) at the Boston Diner are no exception. Fries are important at a diner, so we ordered them twice. The first time -- on a Tuesday night, with no one but Big Dig hardhats to keep us company at dinner -- they arrived oddly stiff and greasy, as though they'd been cooked before and re-heated in the fryolator. Then on Saturday, around 2:30 a.m., with booths full of bar-goers and a clove-smoking art chick sketching at the counter, we tried them again, and bingo: fresh, hot, much lighter-tasting. The French toast ($3.95) we got along with them (we had a hankering for a French meal) was made with your basic white bread, nothing fancy.

Nothing fancy is the last thing you'd say about the Blue Diner. Eighteen months ago, it vacated its "real" diner space in favor of 124-seat digs around the corner. Now, not only is it not technically a diner, it's not even very blue. Within its robin's-egg exterior, it's got the tokens of dinerhood -- counter service, chrome-edged stools, vinyl-upholstered booths -- but the whole package has a just-off-the-lot feel: all the trim is custom-made, the front wall is a row of plate-glass windows, and the lighting has the neon glare of the self-consciously retro. (Funny, because the Art Zone bar in the back of the restaurant feels genuine: dark, eccentrically decorated, and with truly appalling restrooms.)

One thing to remember about the Blue Diner is that you're not supposed to take the posted hours seriously. A sign on the door indicates that the kitchen closes at 4 p.m. on Sundays, and there we were eating dinner at 9 p.m. The next thing to remember is that you are supposed to take the food seriously. "American Diner Fare" is only one component of the menu, which also offers a steak dinner for $14.95 . A cheeseburger costs $7.25; a full rack of spareribs $16. This isn't diner food, but it's not highfalutin cheffery, either. Let's call it hipster Americana.

That said, the Blue Diner folks don't mind getting their hands dirty by frying and smoking American food every which way: hush puppies with maple syrup ($2.95); crab cakes shaped into ovoid balls ($6.95), served with cayenne dip; and the obligatory messy half-plate of baby back ribs ($7.95), served with Boston baked beans. The Blue Diner takes a certain pride in its barbecue: dry-rubbed, smoked for several hours, finished on the grill. For meatphobes, there's a skewer of grilled vegetables ($7.95) with a sweetish, teriyaki-tasting sauce. Some lunch-counter staples really shine; a turkey club special used thick slices of fresh turkey, stacked on bread slices so big they could have made two full sandwiches. And the second night we went -- the night the milkshake machine was working -- we got a pretty credible chocolate shake for $2.50 and a fine vanilla one too, even if they were out of malt powder. Of course, running out of things is a hallmark of diners everywhere, so maybe the Blue Diner is the real deal after all.