Tastee Diner is not Silver Spring’s soul

On Star Trek Deep Space 9 there’s a holosuite program everyone likes that’s a re-creation of a Las Vegas club in the 1960s, with a charismatic bandleader named Vic Fontaine. Captain Benjamin Sisko won’t go. His wife Kasidy asks why and he says it’s set in 1962, and at that time I wouldn’t have been allowed in there.

It’s the 24th century, and there are all sorts of different species living on the space station, implying that racism is Basically Over (nevermind that there is a ton of xenophobia towards the Changelings, who the Federation is fighting a war against) but Sisko and his family are the only recognizably Black people. Kasidy tells him that it’s time to move past that and have fun. So Captain Sisko gives in and he has fun with his friends in a pretend version of 1962.

What does this have to do with the Tastee Diner, which abruptly closed last month? The owner of the Silver Spring diner, which opened in 1946, sold it to an apartment developer who promises to keep the original train car. Still those who have years or decades of memories there are in mourning. The workers lost their income, the regulars lost their routines. There are two other Tastee Diners, in Bethesda and Laurel, but this one hits different.

“Silver Spring is changing, and not, for my generation, in a good way,” wrote longtime Post reporter and Silver Spring resident Gene Meyer in a piece decrying not only the diner’s loss, but rising crime, the bike lanes that “are mostly unused,” Purple Line construction “interfer[ing] with traffic,” and new restaurants serving “lattes and avocado toast.”

Like Captain Sisko, I wondered why I can’t just give in and enjoy Tastee Diner the same way. One reason is that, for a few reasons, I didn’t go to Tastee Diner much. The other is that to say one diner marks the decline of an entire community is short sighted.

Cheap, familiar, consistent

In 2009 a Black, lesbian couple went to Tastee Diner after a night out. It was 2am, and as they waited to give the waitress their tip, they hugged and the manager kicked them out. “Can you please go outside with that?” he said, adding that this is “a family establishment and people are trying to eat.” The couple file a complaint and hold a “kiss-in” protest where people of all backgrounds and sexual orientations.

Management doesn’t apologize, insisting that the couple were making out, and produce a blurry video as proof. And two years later, another lesbian files a complaint against Tastee Diner, claiming the manager kicked her out for her orientation.

Did it surprise me? When my brother and I were growing up, my parents were often wary of locally owned places like Tastee Diner. I went there exactly twice as a child. I know I’m not the only child of immigrant parents who has had this experience, but my parents love fast food chains. They’re cheap, familiar, and consistent. When you don’t have a lot of money to spend and/or are in an unfamiliar place, it’s important that you do it in a place where you know what you’re going to get and you won’t get any trouble. This is why Indian subcontinental families love Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza: it started as an accessible food for vegetarian families navigating a new country, and eventually it felt like home.

Fast food restaurants feel like home to me. I have been to so many McDonald’s in so many locations that I have a taxonomy of which DC area McDonald’s are good and bad. The ritual of standing in line, choosing a number, holding the paper bag as it crackles and the smell of salt and fat wafts out. Grabbing a stack of napkins to shove in the door pockets of the car, every time you blow your nose a reminder that Wendy’s exists. My brother must have his cheeseburger plain; my mother always gets a kid’s meal, my dad has a diet Mountain Dew. Tradition. Never truly welcoming but always there, waiting for you off an unfamiliar exit or subway stop. As the writer Hanif Abdurraqib notes, “within the walls of Popeyes, no one is too good or too educated to not be treated like a burden for someone behind the counter.”

“Your memories are out of date”

The Popeyes on 16th Street in Silver Spring opened in April 1987, a year before I was born. It is one of the few Silver Spring restaurants I can remember sitting inside as a child—a special occasion, as it was more expensive than the other fast food chains—and it remained for about 30 years until the shopping center was torn down to build the Purple Line.

I was sad when it closed. When a new one was going to open on Georgia Avenue in a 1920s-era building, many of my older, white neighbors complained vigorously, up to and including hassling the construction workers. They said they preferred a “local” place, one that reflected “the community.” I and others on our neighborhood listserv spoke up in support of Popeyes–especially those of us who came from families for whom Popeyes was a night out–and one older white resident replied simply, I think your memories are out of date.

Am I supposed to remember Tastee Diner instead? For Meyer’s generation, Tastee Diner is as much a place to eat as it is a symbol of the Silver Spring–the Montgomery County–we say we are. The food is simple and unpretentious. The clientele was relatively diverse as described by John Kelly, a Post columnist who grew up in Rockville and calls Tastee “a Silver Spring staple.” It is the food equivalent of the 1920s bungalows that line the streets around it, houses built for middle-class people that signify you’re a middle-class person today.

If only those things can represent Silver Spring, everything else must exist in opposition to it. Those houses, like the Tastee Diner, were built for a much more homogeneous place, in race and socioeconomic status. Silver Spring has become a dramatically more diverse community in the decades following, but that doesn’t mean that everything within it automatically became more diverse or more inclusive. There are lots of people who at best didn’t go to Tastee Diner and at worst were literally unwelcome there. Those middle-class bungalows are now $800,000, more inaccessible to most than even the fanciest new apartment building.

Today, most of the people in Silver Spring who live in single-family houses are white, and most of the people who live in townhomes or apartments aren’t. Still, some neighbors feel comfortable saying that international grocery stores or apartment buildings do not belong here, even where they already exist. Those things–along with bike lanes, lattes, Popeyes, take your pick–were a product of Silver Spring becoming a diverse place, and make it welcoming to others still, whether or not you personally enjoy them.

Go ahead and mourn the Tastee Diner. To live in a place for a long time is to carry around with you a mental map of memories that grows more detailed with each day. It is amazing and beautiful and good that so many people have memories of this place. But we must also acknowledge its limits. Tastee Diner is not Silver Spring’s soul.

There will still be pancakes. There will still be places where people find a sense of home and belonging. It will look different. (Even for me, Popeyes doesn’t feel like Popeyes did once.) It may not, or it will not be for you. But somebody else will feel what you feel. This community is big enough and resilient enough to hold that too.