David Hunt:

“No portrait of America's culinary history or queer past is complete without memories of LGBTQ+ restaurants, where moments big and small helped shape individuals and communities.”

So writes journalist Erik Piepenburg in his first book, titled “Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants,” published by Grand Central Publishing.

It’s a history book, a travelogue, a coming-out story. But most of all, a good read about the mostly good food served up to generations of hungry queer folk across the United States.

How did dining out influence gay lifestyles of yesteryear? What’s the state of queer dining today and what makes a gay restaurant gay, anyway. Those questions and more are on the menu as I sit down to chew the fat with author Erik Piepenburg.

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In Armistead Maupin’s 1978 novel Tales of the City, Cleveland, Ohio, transplant Mary Ann Singleton arrives in San Francisco eager to immerse herself in the vibrant and decidedly alternative culture of one of America’s gay capital cities. “I’m starved,” she announces, speaking no doubt for many a wide-eyed refugee from the heartland — gay and straight.

I’m David Hunt. Erik Piepenburg followed that trajectory a decade later, leaving his Rust Belt hometown to live, work and love in some of the nation’s great gay metros: New York, Chicago and Washington D.C. If he was starving for a taste of gay life, he would find it, in his words, “in all kinds of restaurants from cozy family-run taquerias and working-class pubs to tiny dive bars and James Beard award-winning bistros.” 

But first, surprisingly close to home, at a family diner. Piepenburg explains.

Erik Piepenburg:

I'm from Cleveland, Ohio, that's a, a great diner town mid, you know, industrial Midwest kind of place, 24-hour diners, sassy waitresses. You can get pancakes, you can get a steak, you can get a quesadilla at three o'clock in the morning, that kind of place. So I grew up with that, going there with my family. But also there was one diner called My Friends in Cleveland, that's where all the weird kids would go after a concert, you know, a punk rock concert. We'd all go to My Friends and at, you know, midnight, the dining room would be filled with the goth girls and the cute boys who looked like Morrissey from the Smiths and the, the punk rock straight guys that I had a crush on. You know, all those types. And, you know, again, this was in, in the eighties, and we wouldn't have said it was queer, but that's what we were doing. We were sort of making this space our own. And I remember going there often and just sort of wondering, ‘I keep seeing this really cute boy in this trench coat, and he is got like a Go-Go's T-shirt on. Like, why am I drawn to him?’ I was deeply closeted and I didn't know what was happening, but I realized that I was attracted to these boys who were kind of into the same music, and that's what my diner background looks like.

David Hunt:

Fast forward to the 2020s and Piepenburg is now out, proud and professional. A professional journalist, as a matter of fact. And his love for gay restaurants has only grown deeper over the years. But the years have changed a lot about the queer community — and about the queer dining experience. Piepenburg worried for time that he was witnessing the end of an era. 

Erik Piepenburg:

In 2021, I wrote a feature for the New York Times about what I thought would be the death of gay restaurants. I came out and came of age as a gay man in the nineties. I lived in Chicago, in DC in New York, and on a Friday night in DC for example, on 17th Street, and you could just go from gay restaurant to gay restaurant to gay restaurant to gay restaurant, and that's the same in many other gay neighborhoods across the country. But I hadn't seen that much in New York, where I live now. And I thought, well, gay restaurants aren't a thing anymore. I was so wrong. After I started talking to people and did some reporting on the piece, I realized that gay restaurants are not what they were in New York, but in other parts of the country, they are absolutely thriving.

And I had so much material left over from this New York Times feature that I thought, well, you know what? I love gay restaurants. I remember gay restaurants. I still go to gay restaurants. So I think for my first book, I'm going to write a book about gay restaurants, which is, as far as I know, still, no one's ever written. And so, I decided, you know what? I'm going to be the guy to write that book.

David Hunt:

Piepenburg’s journalistic journey became a literary journey, a journey that wound its way across the United States and across generations. To read Dining Out is to join Piepenburg on a trek that takes you from Walt Whitman’s weekly lunches with his bohemian pals at Pfaff’s Saloon in New York in the mid-nineteenth century, to drag brunch at Hamburger Mary’s in disco-era San Francisco, where regulars included then-mayor Diane Feinstein. From Annie’s Paramount Steakhouse in Washington, D.C., arguably the oldest gay restaurant in the nation, renowned for its hefty steaks and strong cocktails, to Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a feminist salon and bookstore with no cash registers, no wait staff and a seasonal vegetarian menu.

The book includes chapters on trendsetting restaurants, like Lucky Cheng’s in New York City, cruisy clubs like Gallus in Atlanta, and trans-friendly eateries like the Napalese Lounge and Grill in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Dining Out explores the role of gay restaurants in the fight for queer equality and in the response to the AIDS epidemic. And the book takes a fresh look at queer resistance in the pre-Stonewall era at places like Cooper’s Do-nuts in Los Angeles and Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. 

I asked Piepenburg how he researched the rich history of gay dining, from automats to bathhouse barbecues, greasy spoons to Michelin star hotspots.

Erik Piepenburg:

Most of the restaurants in my book are long closed. The restaurant industry is very — anyone who's ever owned a restaurant will tell you that it's a volatile industry, you know? But I, I went, I went to archives across the country and cities that I visited and just sort of like looked around at the gay press, if there was a gay newspaper, because usually what you'd find are ads in newspapers from the seventies and eighties, certainly that would be filled with ads from gay restaurants saying, come to our buffet or our brunch, what have you. But for earlier places like the automats in the thirties, there's a lot of information out there about automats generally, but it, it makes sense when I sort of dug a little deeper into the automats that yeah, it was open to everyone. You could come in, if you had a dime, you'd put a dime in the, in the slot, you get a piece of pie and a cup of coffee for 5 cents, and you could sit there and if one thing, I'll speak for gay men, they're good at, is sort of scoping out the right place to be, to find each other. And I think the automat is an early example of the kind of place that was queer. They wouldn't have called it then, but it was the kind of place that there's lots and lots of out there about automats, but not so much about how gay men sort of took it over and said, we're not going to be flashy about it. We're not going to make a big scene about it. But if I'm on one side of the automat and I lock eyes with someone , if I cruise somebody else on the other side of the restaurant, that's a gay experience in this otherwise straight environment. And there were a lot of, of example of that, of other restaurants and other types of restaurants that gay people sort of made their own under the radar of anyone else who was there.

David Hunt:

I asked Piepenburg to share more about his own history with gay restaurants — and he returned to one of his favorite themes: gay diners.

Erik Piepenburg:

The Melrose was an old school 24/7 Diner in Boystown, which is the gay neighborhood, as we used to call it, back in the nineties, in Chicago, at the corner of Melrose and Broadway. And I ate at the Melrose, I would say at least three or four times a week for five years. When I lived in Chicago, it was kind of a second home for me. And diners can be a little iffy when it comes to food sometimes, but the Melrose’s omelets were the size of a catcher's mitt, and they had these buttery home fries, and they were known for their signature sweet and sour cabbage soup. And I must have eaten that meal, like I said, three or four times a week for five years. And at three o'clock in the morning at the Melrose Diner in Boystown in the nineties, it was the gayest restaurant you could possibly imagine. People were coming to and from the bars and from the bathhouse, which was down the street. And it was just the kind of restaurant that at that time, it was just nothing, but pretty much mostly gay men. Now you went there in the morning at 11 a.m. and it might be straighter, might be more moms with their kids, depending on what time of day. But let me tell you, the restaurant, simply because of where it was, it didn't advertise itself as a gay restaurant. I don't remember ever seeing pride flags all over the place, but it was in Boystown, and it was open at hours that gay guys like to go to. And so for me, that's what made it a gay restaurant. To me, a gay restaurant is a restaurant where when I open the door, I look around and I see my people.

David Hunt:

Like many of the restaurants featured in Dining Out, the Melrose is no more, lost to changing times and the challenging economics of the dining industry.

Erik Piepenburg:

I remember thinking, well, what happened to the people who worked there? What, how am I going to have this amazing sweet and sour cabbage soup again? I call it in the book, when a restaurant closes, it's a kind of dispossession. You are so used to having this restaurant be part of your life, and it's gone. And I didn't want those memories that meant so much to me to not to, to ever really be forgotten. 

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David Hunt:

You’re listening to This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine. I’m David Hunt.

Journalist Erik Piepenburg calls himself “a diner gay,” a Gen Xer who came of age in the 1980s and 90s, when meeting up often involved hashbrowns, not hashtags. 

Erik Piepenburg:

I have a whole chapter on diners because I think people underestimate the extent to which diners usually because of hours and location are, are gay restaurants. But you can be 13-years-old, a 13-year-old who's just come out of the closet and you can go to a gay restaurant. You can't do that at a gay bar. You could be a gay elder who doesn't want to go to the bars with the music and the expensive drinks, and they just want to sit there with their other elder friends, and they know, they know you there, they know how you like your food. And so, I think one of the things that you'll find often in a lot of these places is that the whole community, in terms of age, in terms of interests and types, generally can, can go there and, and be welcome, which is something that you don't necessarily find at gay bars.

David Hunt:

What you do find at many diners is an enduring gay trope: The sassy, foul-mouthed waitress with a heart of gold. At the Silver Grill in Atlanta for five decades beginning in 1958, that waitress was Peggy Hubbard. Piepenburg says the waitress, who died in 2010, was a mother figure for her gay customers — motherly in a Joan Crawford kind of way.

Erik Piepenburg:

You know the type. She had just like the, the bouffant, the thick eyeshadow. No nonsense. If it's busy, I don't have time for you. Just tell me what you want and I'll put your order in. But she was also very present at AIDS fundraisers. She was also very much you know, the gay guys were her boys, and she integrated them into her life, which wasn't always the case. I think there are a lot of waitresses who are just like, that's my job and I go home. But Peggy was so beloved by the gay community and by drag queens and people who worked there and ate there, that she sort of became part of that world.

David Hunt:

The Silver Grill, where she waited tables, was a legendary establishment, spawning a 1975 song, “The Silver Grill Blues” by drag artist Diamond Lil, and a 1997 country musical show called Della’s Diner Six, written by Tom Edwards; described by critics as “Mayberry meets Melrose Place.” Sadly, the Silver Grill closed in 2006. 

"We're a diner, and that's a fading institution," owner Kevin Huggins told the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Another gay restaurant that obtained legendary status is still going strong. The servers are just as sassy as Peggy Hubbard — with a difference.

Erik Piepenburg:

Lucky Cheng's was a restaurant that opened in the early nineties in the East Village in New York, and it sort of set itself apart because the servers and the people who worked there were all in, in the first year for sure, were all Asian drag queens and Asian trans women who worked in a drag context. And that had kind of never really been done exactly quite like that before. It got very popular, very fast. And it, it made an appearance on Sex in the City, and celebrities would go there, rich Wall Street guys. It was the hot downtown hotspot to be. And I think it became a place to have bachelorette parties, and it just has continued to do so. And Lucky Cheng's is still around. It's still serving drag brunch, still doing its thing. It's not quite as groundbreaking anymore, because as anyone who's been to drag brunch will tell you brag, drag brunch is a dime a dozen these days. But what Lucky Cheng's was doing back in the early nineties was in some ways groundbreaking. And I love that they're still around and still living their commitment to dining and drag.

David Hunt:

After crisscrossing the country on a quest to document the history and current state of dining in the LGBTQ community, what did Piepenburg learn? Is the gay restaurant scene fading — or is dining still a foundational experience in queer life?

Erik Piepenburg:

I think the state of LGBTQ dining is really, really strong. And I think it is more diverse than ever. Does it look like what I remember back in the nineties mostly? No. But it's so much broader and so much different, and I think so much more queer. I think that's the thing that sort of surprised me the most, is that restaurants that are are queer, the food has queerness in them. The people who work there are trans and non-binary, and just much more open about what it means to be LGBTQ and sort of define sexuality and gender in ways that I think have never really been done before. On the other hand, you have restaurants in Fort Lauderdale, for example, Wilton Manors, that looked like the eighties never ended. You have the Stonewall generation that's like, no, no, no, no, no, we want hot, you know, gay servers to serve a salmon and steak, and then we want to go to the bar and, and flirt. And it's, it's really like the eighties never ended, and God bless them. But then you have a place like Napalese Lounge and Grill in Green Bay, Wisconsin of all places, which once a month becomes a a meeting place for trans people from throughout the, the region. And so I think gay restaurants are serving many, many new purposes in our social, digital, in our social media age that they just didn't before, because people know about them. And so I think if you're a trans person in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin, and you want to be with other trans people, and you certainly aren't going to do that at the local Denny's, you're going to find a way to go to Napalese and be with people in your community which I think is just really, really special.

David Hunt:

Researching and writing Dining Out was a profound experience for Piepenburg, an opportunity to celebrate the people and places that shaped the LGBTQ movement — and his own, personal journey as a gay man. 

Erik Piepenburg:

I'm 54, and when I think of nostalgia, I think of, oh, what it was like to be in my twenties and go to these restaurants and, you know, flirt and, and listen to music and maybe, you know, meet someone in the, in the bathroom or, you know, just the things that you take for granted when you're in your twenties. And I think if, if I was in therapy, my therapist would probably say that I'm looking back on my life now and sort of understanding what it was like to be at a time when gay restaurants were thriving now that they're really not, at least in New York, in the way that I remember them. And so I think I've learned about how, how fun it is that gay restaurants are sort of evolved, how they have evolved and changed, but also I have a new respect for the gay restaurants that were open way before I was even alive. And the ways that gay people have for decades found each other through meals.

David Hunt:

“In our new century gay restaurants may be fewer,” Piepenburg writes, “but they are more queer than ever by embracing trans, nonbinary and diverse sexual and gender identities in ways that 100 years ago would have been unthinkable or undefinable.”

What does the future hold? That’s a tough question and nobody — not even a gay dining expert — has a crystal ball.

Erik Piepenburg:

Now we sit at home and we order delivery or, you know, we as gay people, we have certainly changed. But I think there's a real interest in bringing back the experience of being in a restaurant with other queer people. But that also costs a lot of money. And I think just dining out in general, not just for gay restaurants, has certainly changed. COVID did a number on restaurants, you know it, it's expensive, it's risky, it's unpredictable, but I think there's still that yearning. And I think that gay restaurants in some ways may not be what they once were, but I think we're in for a new wave. I hope so, at least.

David Hunt:

There’s more — a lot more — in Erik Piepenburg’s new book, Dining Out. If you have a favorite gay restaurant — past or present — you may just find it among the book’s 300 or so pages. Are you a fan of Casita del Campo in Los Angeles. Do you remember the Florent, an all-night diner in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. Are you a regular at Laziz Kitchen in Salt Lake City? 

Wherever you do your LGBTQ dining — fine or otherwise — you’re part of a great gay tradition. As Piepenburg writes, recounting a youthful experience at the Melrose in Chicago: “A bad date, a satisfying meal, the promise of sex. That’s what happens, or used to happen, at gay restaurants.”

I’d like to thank Erik Piepenburg for talking with me for this program. For This Way Out, I’m David Hunt.