Floridian Diner

I'm frequently bemoaning the loss of the city diner—two of the six last standalone diners in Manhattan have closed/been razed in the three years I've lived here—but I manage to keep finding new-to-me diners that are complete gems. My newest obsession is the Floridian Diner, located on Flatbush Avenue in the Marine Park / Mill Basin area of Brooklyn. The funny thing is that I also live on Flatbush—6.2 miles northeast and what feels like a world away.

The Floridian Diner is almost two miles from the nearest subway station, so it feels like a place for locals (like the Goodfellas Diner). Everyone was very pleasant, but our waitress didn't quite know what to make of three people who immediately started taking a million pictures as soon as we sat down. I told her that we just really loved diners, but I don't think she believed us when we said we lived in Brooklyn.

Vintage diners tend to skew more 50s/60s in their decor, but the Floridian has a late 70s, early 80s, Golden Girls feel to it that feels different, yet works perfectly with the classic diner aesthetic. Everything is padded in teal vinyl and the dishes are rimmed in the perfect shade of salmon pink, marked with a palm tree. There were COMPACT DISC jukeboxes on every table (ours worked), and all the mirrors and planters made me feel as if we were eating in some strange version of an 80s mall.

The portions we received were huge—my egg sandwich came with four slices of thick ham and the sauces that came with the Floridian Finger Platter were comically large (that bowl of marinara was for two mozzarella sticks). Of course nothing in our diner dining future will ever compare with the moment that we discovered that the Floridian has a filet and lobster combo called"Beef & Reef," with which it solidly cemented itself as one of my very favorite New York diners.