One day, quite a few years ago, some friends and I went for lunch in the Empire Diner in New York City. Nowadays the Empire Diner is pretty much just a diner, but back then it was very different.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t so much a diner as it was the performance of a diner, somewhat the way the Museum of Jurassic Technology<\/a> is the performance of a museum. Everything about the Empire Diner was kind of in quotes, but in a subtle way.<\/p>\n For example, we noticed on the menu that there was a soup of the day for $3.00. There was also a soup du jour<\/i> for $3.50.<\/p>\n We called over the waitress to inquire. What was the difference, we asked, between the soup of the day and the soup du jour<\/i>.<\/p>\n Well, she said, if you order the soup of the day, it costs $3.00. If you order the soup du jour<\/i> it costs $3.50.<\/p>\n Now we were curious. “Is there any difference other than price?” we asked.<\/p>\n “Yes,” she said, “the difference is that you order one in English and the other in French.”<\/p>\n “So we can just order the soup of the day and save $0.50, right?”<\/p>\n The waitress shrugged. “Your choice.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One day, quite a few years ago, some friends and I went for lunch in the Empire Diner in New York City. Nowadays the Empire Diner is pretty much just a diner, but back then it was very different. It wasn’t so much a diner as it was the performance of a diner, somewhat the … Continue reading “Soup of the day”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21600"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21600"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21603,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21600\/revisions\/21603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}