_Diner Opens in Catskills After a Hell’s Kitchen Worth of Trouble - New York Times_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/nyregion/06towns.html) December 6, 2007 Our Towns When last spotted in its ancestral home, there was the Munson Diner, steel and chrome shining off the streetlights, noirish blue exterior like a ghost from the ’40s, loaded onto a flatbed truck and lumbering toward the George Washington Bridge, bound if not for glory, at least for Liberty, a faded resort town in the Catskills. It was May 5, 2005, and, as it turned out, getting a 50-foot-long, 30-ton diner onto a truck was the easy part. One of its new owners and a cameraman were taken off the George Washington Bridge by the police as they tried to film the big event without a permit. The diner hit not one, but two highway bridges on the way up. And when it finally arrived, dinged up but more or less intact, the crew lowered it triumphantly onto its new foundation ... backward, with the vintage neon sign and steel facade facing away from Main Street. And then for two and a half years, the 15 local investors behind the diner transplant considered and discarded ideas from at least 23 potential operators. A Catskill kosher deli! A Catskill history museum! The site for a reality show featuring a talking diner and chatty patrons reflecting on city and country life! All of which explains the sign by the entrance (“Come in. We’re finally open!”) and the somewhat disproportionate expressions of contentment on the face of patrons — not to mention investors — when the Munson finally reopened to big crowds last week, a lesson in comfort food, diner lore and other themes that could have been explored had anyone been nuts enough to greenlight the reality show. “All you’ve heard for two years was: ‘What’s happening with the blue diner? What’s happening with the blue diner?’” said Maureen MacDonnell, a 71-year-old house painter, who frequented the diner at its original site at 11th Avenue and 49th Street and now considers herself a regular at the new one. “You don’t know what a big deal this is.” Built in the 1940s, the Munson was a modest classic of its era in style and ambience. It featured a base of vertical strips of stainless steel holding in bowed, bright blue enameled panels; glass-block infill and horizontal blue and stainless steel striping along the top, all accented under lurid red neon. But by the late ’90s, it was a relic in newly fashionable Hell’s Kitchen, where the original ethos of diners — as places where, as The Times put it in a 1941 article, “men and women in evening dress swap jokes with men in overalls” — was as out of date as 10-cent coffee. The Volvo dealership that bought the space put the diner up for sale, the Liberty 15 took a flier, and there we were. THE Munson might still be closed if not for Fred LaGattuta, 47, a retired diesel mechanic turned populist entrepreneur whose projects have included a bowling alley in Callicoon ($7 unlimited-time bowling, $2 beer, $1 pizza slices) and a motel and diner near Parksville (rooms at $49.99). He leased the diner with an option to buy it, along with a partner, Tom Russell. Mr. LaGattuta figured the old diner should just be a diner, and worked every weekend for eight months with his 18-year-old son, Paeden, to fix it up. There’s a new tile floor, new and bigger red booths, a new kitchen, a new ceiling, new laminate on the tables and the counter to go with the old facade and neon sign, old menu boards and old twirling stools. The whole project will cost about $300,000, not the $125,000 the investors originally planned on, but at least it’s open, with two eggs, potatoes and toast for $2.50, $5.20 ziti, and a 12-ounce Monster Munsonburger with three cheeses, bacon and other extras, plus fries and cole slaw, for $6. “I’m a fatso who likes to eat, and I thought this little town needed a restaurant like this,” said Mr. LaGattuta, whose family moved to the Catskills from Yonkers in the early 1960s. “You go to an old diner and you get, I don’t know, a warm feeling. That’s what I wanted.” Urban chauvinists might pity the Munson, exiled from the bright lights. And yet. In its latter days, the Munson was a setting for shows like “Law and Order” and the famous Bizarro Seinfeld episode, where Elaine met at a diner with her new, friendly, noncynical pals, the opposite of Jerry, Kramer and George. So, maybe, it’s appropriate it has gone full circle, not just to a pre-concept-dining diner, but to a Bizarro version of its old locale, where the killer meatloaf is still in fashion and people walk in and say hello. And then, there was the guy at the counter yesterday morning. “You got Heinz?” he asked the waitress, looking askance at the ketchup on the counter. “In little packets,” she said. “Well, anything’s better than this,” he replied, like a dyspeptic regular from 11th Avenue and 49th Street who had found his way home.
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