Читать книгу Starlight in New York - Helen Cox - Страница 6

Next time you’re in New York, take a turn off Broadway onto East Houston. Walk on past 2^nd Avenue subway station. Past Russ & Daughters fish shop and Katz’s Delicatessen. Beyond these local landmarks of the East Village, just a skip from where East Houston meets Clinton Street, you’ll see it: The Starlight Diner. A fifties throwback joint serving burgers and breakfast foods long into the night.

There’s no missing the blare of its blue neon sign. Even from a block away, you can hear the songs of Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and, house favourites, Marvin and the Starlighters spewing out of the jukebox. Step closer, and you’ll note the modest claim inscribed just above its glass frontage: Best Diner In Town.

Press your hands against the window. Peer in at the long procession of red leather booths, at the aging signs, hanging all around, for vintage sodas, malts and ice-cream floats. There’s a refrigerator stacked with vanilla cheesecake and blueberry pie, and the waitresses wear candy pink uniforms with black kitten heels.

Bernie Castillo was just twenty-two when he opened The Starlight Diner. A business decision he made about a week after John Kennedy was shot. Like many others he knew, he wanted nothing more than to return to a time before anyone understood what it meant to see a president gunned down. To a time in which rock ’n’ roll reigned supreme and gas-guzzling Cadillacs clogged up the highways. A time when America ‘stood at the summit of the world’. So, the 1950s is still in full swing at The Starlight Diner, and they serve the tastiest milkshakes in the five boroughs.

If there’s one thing Bernie’s learned in his time managing a diner, it’s that you never can tell just who’s going to walk through the doorway. But no matter who they are, no matter where they come from – whether they’re a tourist with a tripod or a local who’s ordered the same breakfast there for twenty years – they’ve all got one thing in common.

All of them, every last one, has a story to tell.