Imagine a great sitcom premise; Two young guys in DC.  Make one of them a Federal employee for some local flavor.   They go up to an out of the way town in upstate New York and find an original 1940’s diner for sale at its original location.  They pick it up and bring it back to lower-middle class, African-American, North East DC.  A mix of all races and classes come together for coffee, country breakfasts and a little bit of waitress love and wisdom…

Turns out Matt and Patrick, the two owners, are real people and this is a delicious new place on Bladensburg Road NE, near hopping H Street.  Matt had originally just wanted to open a cheese steak cart to capture some of the drunks leaving H Street at night.  Patrick convinced him to go up to buy an original 1940s diner on EBay.  Now, both are deep in personal debt and have hurdled amazing amounts of city red tape to get the diner in place. 

Its completely vintage, down to the refrigerator and milk shake machine. The only problem, Patrick told me, was that there is no storage and they are going through an incredible volume of food.  The place was packed on a Friday lunch with a wide variety of locals from the neighborhood and diner lovers from far and wide. 

When the H Street streetcar opens in 18 months, the place is going to be even hotter, but they can’t hold any more than the 16 small seats at the counter and five booths, which are already packed.   Its open 24/ 7 on the weekends.  And the mammoth “Super Happy Fat Boy Breakfast” is a steal at $8.75.  With coffee, pancake, 2 eggs, bacon and biscuit, this is going to be every H Street bar hound’s new hangover cure.

The best part the amazing waitresses from the surrounding Trinidad neighborhood, who tell stories, talk to everyone, constantly ask how everything is and still mange to get the food out from behind the tiny counter space.   The Capital City Diner can only be called a brand new, old-fashioned, one of a kind for our city.

Capital City Diner

1050 Bladensburg Road NE

20002

202-396-DINR (3467)

      

Before the Internet and ESPN, there were a few baseball beacons in America.  They were the 50,000 watt AM signals of a select group of great stations, and on summer nights they followed you for hundreds of miles.  For decades in Michigan the station was WJR and the voice was Ernie Harwell.   Pre-internet, I even spent at least a few evenings a summer, listening to big games in my parked car in DC, where the signal was somehow better than indoors.
 
Ernie was so big in Michigan that my family used to have a record album of his greatest calls from the Tigers Championship of 1968.  The Tigers of the late 1970's weren't very good, but it was easy to put the record on and remember the good years.  By 1984 they were once again World Champions, and I bought the cassette tape of all of Ernie's calls to remember that great season.  In 1999 I took my Dad to the last game ever at beloved Tiger Stadium, and like my Dad had done for decades, I had Ernie in my right ear, even as I watched the game in person. 
 
Ernie was, like Mel Allen in New York, a smooth southern blend that kissed your ear and never let you forget how wonderful baseball on the radio could be.  Football was made for TV. Baseball was made for the radio and especially for Ernie.  
 
He was known for being traded to the Brooklyn Dodgers by the Atlanta Crackers for a catcher and making the forgotten TV call for the famous Bobby Thompson home run.  But for me Ernie will always be the voice of the Tigers games and the calls I still think of today, "He stood there like the house by the side of the road", for a called third strike or "That ball is long gone" for a home run.  My fellow Tiger fans and I know that the voice of baseball and our childhood is gone, but he'll remain in our mind's ear forever.