Every Sunday morning, I walk to my local diner and order a stack of three pancakes, a bowl of fruit, two scrambled eggs and a black coffee. Two friends almost always meet me there. Ty — whom I first got to know in San Francisco, where we both volunteered at a music-events company — gets the corned-beef hash with melted cheese on top. David, whom I met through Ty, drifts from eggs benedict to a breakfast burrito to the occasional chopped cheese. What’s for breakfast doesn’t really matter much, though. That we meet — at the same time and place — does. Recently, we marked almost 40 Sundays running.
I got the idea to create a “standing appointment” last year. Sitting on a balcony on my final night in Berlin before I moved to New York, I was having a farewell conversation with my roommate — recounting good memories and prophesying when our paths might cross next — which I’d had many times before. I’d spent 12 years bouncing between various jobs and living in six different cities. I’d been lucky to make friends in places like Shanghai, Chicago and San Francisco, but the more people I met and said goodbye to, the more trivial many of those connections began to feel. I also had a tendency to cast my net too wide, gathering so many acquaintances that I rarely gave myself a chance to explore the deeper waters of friendship, which can be discovered only with time.
That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy a night with good friends. We would watch European soccer at a bar or eat falafel by the river, a collection of €1.50 beer bottles at our feet. But I often felt compelled to seek out the excitement of new friends rather than develop the relationships I already had.
As time went on, I noticed that my friends had small, tight circles made up of people from important periods of their lives — those they grew up with, attended college with or lived alongside in the same city or neighborhood. They seemed so much better than I was about keeping up with the people they cared about. Perhaps I’d mistaken my feeling of familiarity and comfort with existing friends for apathy or boredom. While I appreciated my friendships, I was often distracted by and attracted to the connections I didn’t have and the high that each new acquaintance seemed to always bring.
I’d gotten so good at setting up a social life from scratch in each new city, but I’d forgotten how to nourish it. Now, I was older, more settled. In New York, I longed for depth. The precursor to that, I knew, was consistency.
While in Berlin, I learned about the German tradition of a stammtisch, which translates to “regulars table,” where bars reserve a table for everyday goers to sit together and socialize. In a way, this idea of community reminded me of the one I enjoyed when going to church every week as a kid.
So during my first months in New York, I tried my version of a stammtisch. Standing appointments, I decided, could provide the structure of my new life. The diner in my neighborhood seemed like a natural place to start. With its booths, high-top stools and thick-rimmed mugs — not to mention its big, cheap portions and an aesthetic reminiscent of something you’d find in a small town — it seemed ideal for a regular weekend rendezvous.
Ty and I had each moved to New York the same month and were getting our bearings. We’d heard of this diner from separate friends, so we decided to give it a shot last January. It’d been almost four years since we’d seen each other, but as we caught up over golden-brown pancakes and corned-beef hash, it felt soothing to be reminded that sometimes our lives’ paths don’t cross only once. Instead, they can intersect at irregular intervals, or disappear altogether, only to reappear in new places with new meaning. After breakfast, I walked home feeling optimistic and full. It could have ended there — a tradition dead upon arrival. I’d been in this situation before: Unintentionally, a meeting would render itself a pleasant but forgotten wave in the sea of one-off memories. So the following Sunday, we returned. Ty brought David, and our core diner group took shape.
As each week went by, a revolving cast of characters joined: roommates, neighbors, significant others, out-of-town visitors, old friends. We talked about movies and $10 fortune tellers and bands coming to town. We got to know our waitress, who started stashing away two or three cornbread muffins from her shift the night before (they usually sell out early on Sunday) and delivering them to our table. One time, someone in a passing car randomly hurled an egg at me as I waited outside the diner. None of us could figure out who threw it or why. In the hazy aftermath of that truly strange occurrence, our waitress gave us muffins on the house.
After almost 40 weeks, Sunday mornings no longer feel susceptible to competing distractions in a city full of them. The secret to the longevity of our standing appointment is the simplicity of the concept. All that’s required is a single confirmation text, once a week, the night before. In some ways, the diner appointment has become my adult version of church — the soothing structure it provides and the community it promises — but with more coffee. Each week, the diner’s large, back-corner booth welcomes us, as the pews once had.
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