Modern Diner in Pawtucket, RI | Local Flavor

On a Saturday morning at the Modern Diner, the length of the line waxes and wanes. Arrive at 10 a.m. and you’ll find only five people in front of you. Fifteen minutes later, the line snakes out the door. In the entryway, art school students, workers just off the night shift, and parents wrangling antsy kids all take stock of a wall that’s covered in laminated cards listing the day’s specials: pumpkin pancakes, pesto cheese grits and eggs, cranberry-apple French toast, linguiça hash Benedict. Although these are technically specials—they’re not printed on the menu—few dishes actually come off the wall. Customers come specifically for those grits and that homemade hollandaise.

An elegant octogenarian in a linen vest and newsboy cap leans on a cane as he talks to a waitress who’s too busy to chat but always stops anyway. “I’m so proud to be in this country,” he tells her. He’s from Portugal, she says later—an arborist named Manny who can bring anything back to life. Sometimes he likes to come in and sing a heartfelt “God Bless America” to the assembled crowd.

It’s fitting that this, the first diner to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is located on a Pawtucket thoroughfare just four miles from the spot where Walter Scott began selling sandwiches and coffee to fellow Providence Journal workers back in the late 1850s. Scott expanded his business in 1872, converting a horse-drawn covered wagon into a rolling café. His meals-on-wheels innovation was the precursor to the modern diner, and his success begot a succession of New England companies manufacturing “night lunch wagons.” In time, the wagons were replaced with more-permanent structures. Massachusetts became a center of diner production, and Rhode Island became an accumulator of them.

Which brings us back to this red-and-cream-colored Sterling Streamliner, shaped like a locomotive and manufactured in Merrimac, Massachusetts, sometime between 1939 and 1942. This is the place that Nick Demou bought with his father, Arthur, back in 1986, after they both lost their jobs at a Pawtucket textile mill. “I was young and my father was forced out of a job, and so I went to Johnson & Wales and he helped me open up my first restaurant,” Nick says. With his formal training, Nick could have become another young cook making his way up the ranks in some French kitchen, but he sought a different path. “I wanted to try to create a normal life for myself, and the only way I could’ve done that was to do the kind of restaurant I have,” he says. “Unfortunately, I’m in there at 4 a.m., but I’m out by 2:30 and I could see my wife and do the father-son things.”

With Arthur managing the business and Nick in the kitchen, the diner found a following on Thayer Street near the Brown University campus. When the city decided to build senior housing on that spot, the Demous simply did exactly what Walter Scott would’ve done: They moved their eatery to a new location, a few miles north on Pawtucket’s west side. They polished up the wood paneling, shined up the chrome-and-green-vinyl stools. Despite heavy use, the old girl is still a beauty.

A little over a year ago, the Food Network named Nick’s custard French toast the best diner dish in the country, and so the lines got longer. “Honestly, I was making pudding one day and I made too much and it wouldn’t fit in my cups,” Nick says. “In the restaurant business you just don’t throw stuff away, so all I did was thin down my pudding and added a bit of rum to it and put it on the French toast with fruit.” He also adds candied pecans, which he makes himself, and raspberry syrup. It’s an abundant dish: creamy, tart, crunchy, deeply satisfying. Most everything Nick serves is homemade, from the stock that goes into the lobster grits to the linguiça hash and desserts. And that’s with just five guys on the line, max. “No one ever leaves me,” Nick says of his staff.

The one person who has left is Arthur, who passed away in 1993. “He was a tremendous loss to me,” Nick says. “He and my mother took a chance on a kid who had such bad dyslexia that they had to write the order slips in a certain way so I don’t get them confused.”

Now well into his 60s, his sons grown, Nick keeps on. He likes seeing the next generation of customers come up, the parents he knew when they were themselves children. Last spring, one teenage boy even sought his help with a rite of passage. “He asked us to make us a special pancake for this girl,” he says. “We wrote ‘Please come with me to the prom’ on it.”

She said yes.

Modern Diner. 364 East Ave., Pawtucket, RI. 401-726-8390; moderndinerri.com