Photo courtesy of Silver Lining Diner
Welcome to the eighth Edible Eat of the Week! A recurring series, Edible Eat of the Week celebrates the bounty of the East End by showcasing special, seasonal eats and the people who make them.
The Eat: The creamiest Greek yogurt.
The Place: The Silver Lining Diner in Southampton.
The Story: Be still my heart. When my husband and I were young(ish) and still dating, we used to go to the Silver Lining Diner (then called the Princess Diner) for diner breakfasts, where we would spread the newspaper out and laze about on Sunday afternoons. Gone are those days, for many reasons (two of them were born 22 months apart, in 2016 and 2018). But, this summer, the recently closed Princess Diner was resurrected, this time with a pop of midcentury style and some stunning food from chef Eric Miller.
When I went in to eat, a solo diner, in mid-August, the restaurant was packed (what did I expect, really, in mid-August in Southampton), and as I perseverated as one does with a diner’s hefty menu offerings, chef Miller appeared with a yogurt I didn’t know I needed. It was a thing I had forgotten from a place where I used to live. It turns out Miller used to live there, too, back in Astoria. He had worked at Cavo, a cavernous lounge-slash-nightclub, where you could get a piña colada and dance it off until four in the morning. I lived in Astoria for eight years, in a walk-up apartment that had roaches and bad light, and I loved it there, and, somehow, I forgot about the yogurt.
That yogurt. Strained thick, it’s richer than ice cream. You could eat it for breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, or dessert. Chef Miller’s iteration comes doused in sticky honey, crunchy granola, and sun-sweet seasonal fruit. It transported me instantly to a moment in my life that I had left behind, not because it was terrible, but simply because I had grown up and away from it, and I was homesick for it, not even realizing that I had missed it. Get the yogurt. Did you even know how much you missed Queens?
Read more about Southampton in our archives here.
