Hub City Diner: A Place Where Everybody Knows Your Name and Your Bacon
On Friday mornings at the peak of breakfast, the hum of conversation drowns out all but the loudest clanging plates. What stands out most is that people are actually talking. This is Acadiana in all of its pleasant “loudness”. With good food and smiles, Hub City Diner serves Acadiana by setting a community table.
Owner Jason Redmon emphasizes “community table”, “That’s what we’re providing. People come for nutriment but what they’re really getting is nurturing.”
Hub City Diner stands along others in a long American tradition. Going back to the 1880’s, late-night food wagons rolled near urban factories to feed workers between shifts. By the 1930’s, the wagons evolved into stationary “dining cars,” borrowing the name from trains. By the 1940’s, stainless steel “streamliner” diners shaped like chrome bullets cropped up along America’s roads and highways.
The American diner, though, has always been about more than architecture or food. Aside from local churches, diners have always given groups in booths or solos at counters a place where people connect. For families, diners give moms a welcomed break. For those living alone, the diner breakfast can end the morning’s solitude as it did my widowed grandfather for years.
Redmon and his staff happily fill this role for Lafayette. With its 1950’s motif, neon accents, chrome edges, art deco signage, Formica countertops, jukebox and its “community table” approach, Hub City offers diners a break from cooking, isolation and an opportunity to build relationships.
Waitress Tiffany Breaux, known by customers for her kind heart and smile, has seen this for 20 years, “You’ll see families at other places with all six people on their phones. Here, they’re talking. Walking around. Everybody knows everybody. No time for phones.”
Tim Reynolds, a real estate attorney, for the past 17 years has met on Friday mornings at Hub City for Bible study. A self-proclaimed “bacon connoisseur”, Reynolds prefers his bacon “on the chewy side, not too crisp”. He notes, “At this point, I don’t even have to tell the waitresses. They bring me the bacon just the way I like it.”
Knowing a customer’s bacon preference is exactly the type of individual care Redmon instills, “Taking care of people, making them feel special, because they are special. When they receive extra special effort or attention being given to them, it really makes a person feel good.”
Reynolds sees a perfect fit between Hub City Diner and Lafayette’s size and food culture. “I think Lafayette may be uncommon in the degree to which our friendships connect with food. There are groups, either Bible study groups or groups of friends who meet on a regular basis at Hub City and all around Lafayette. It’s just the right size city to be able to maintain those sorts of social connections.”
Reynolds, who grew up in Detroit where you “didn’t know anybody” sees Hub City’s benefit in a bigger context, “In the modern era, I think, we tend toward disconnection. Texting and emails give you the illusion of closeness. But unless you’re sitting with someone on a regular basis to really understand what’s going on in their life, it’s difficult to contribute to their life, or have them contribute to your life.”
Over the decades, by staying connected each Friday at Hub City, Reynolds and a dozen or so other men have strengthened friendships, encouraged faithfulness, and travelled through the valley of death, “As we’ve walked with men with terminal conditions, we’ve been able to contribute in ways that I hope made things easier for them as they were dealing with trouble. Without a regular place like Hub City, those connections would not exist or fade.”
At another table, Lane Robertson, Marcus Mire, and Kip Stelly meet monthly on Friday mornings. They gather to keep in touch and enjoy the “grilled biscuits”. Having grown up together in Lafayette, they reflect a slightly older version of the friends in Barry Levinson’s 1982 film Diner. Set in 1950’s Baltimore, the film captured the enduring friendships of men, tied to each since childhood, who gathered in a diner to talk about life as they pushed toward becoming the successors to their fathers’ generation.
In Diner, Levinson’s restaurant was only the backdrop to the characters’ relationships. Robertson sees breakfast at Hub City in the same way, “We’ve known each other so long. We’ve been through tough personal things and have been there for each other. We can challenge each other, joke about each other, have a lot of the same common values and share the way we want to live our lives and raise our kids.”
Mire echoes this sentiment, “When we started this, I felt like I was drifting from them, I wanted to be intentional to put it on the calendar.” Their conversations move from “glory day stories that our wives have heard too many times”, to politics, to faith, and “how to do life better.”
For Phyllis Roy, Hub City Diner is not just a restaurant, it is a lifeline. A self-described “social creature”, she has been coming since the late 1990’s. In recent years, she comes almost every morning, “My daughter’s been gone for a while now,” she said plainly. “This is how I connect with people.”
Roy chooses Hub City for reasons many would recognize immediately: “It’s like that old Cheers song, I want to go ‘where everybody knows your name.’” She gets hugs. She meets new people. She’s formed relationships that go beyond surface greetings. For Roy, Hub City’s “community table” offers a place where she is embraced, even when arriving alone.
Of course, conversation and community are only as beneficial as the people who cultivate them. To that end, Redmon and his staff’s sincere hospitality sets a table that gives diners the opportunity for both. Such contributions to Acadiana deserve appreciation. For to flourish in a roaring age that devours the isolated, “community tables” and the Communion Table represent Acadiana’s best hope.
Story by J. Christian Lewis