The White Spot
Sometimes I wish there was a 24-hour diner in the neighborhood. There’s a Zippy’s not too far away, and Zippy’s is fine, but I mean a real diner. The kind of diner where coffee mugs are continually refilled and portion control is unheard of. The kind of place where Mama has made cooking with grease an art form, and news of the day is shared freely with complete strangers.
Many years ago when I was living up in Alaska, my friends and I ate at least one meal a day at a diner called The White Spot. It was a hole in the wall kind of place nestled in the heart of the low-rent district of downtown Anchorage. For a while, a friend and I couldn’t get another friend to eat at the place because he thought the name had racial connotations, but after we assured him that it was all about the food, he agreed to come and soon became a regular.
The White Spot was owned by an elderly woman, and she did most of the cooking. She was a tough-as-nails kind of woman that grew up in the hard times of the depression. She chain-smoked and cussed a lot, but very much like her restaurant, she had a certain charm.
The restaurant had a long bar seating from wall to wall that split the place in half; one side for customers and the other side for staff. Most of the seating was spinning soda fountain stools, although there were a couple of tables and chairs alongside the wall. All the meals were served on metal pizza pans, and the food always covered the entire pan.
The food at the White Spot was so good. Everything was cooked homemade and with an old fashioned style. Plenty of grease, lots of gravy, huge biscuits, and big fat home fries with the skins still on them. Granted, this wasn’t health food, and my arteries probably hardened after every meal. Still, I would often leave the restaurant looking forward to my next visit. The specialty of the house were the hamburgers, which I have yet to find a better hamburger anywhere.
One of the cool things about The White Spot was the diversity of customers. On one side of the bar next to you could be sitting a white-collared businessman and on the other side someone that had hit hard times. Everyone ate and talked and sometimes argued and often laughed and there was a familial sense to the place. No matter who you were or what you did on the outside, everyone was the same while inside The White Spot.