West Taghkanic Diner

Road tripping – for New Yorkers – is a past-time that comes far too infrequently. The challenges are many; the rewards far away. But if you have the wanderlust, as I do, you find a way to hit the open road every now and then and make, ideally, an escape upstate. In which case you need to know about the best kept driving secret in all of New York: you take the Taconic, not I-87. It’s scenic, winding and was purposefully made for picnicking drivers headed to Bear Mountain.

Parkways also do not have a lot of roadside crap. There are no Sbarros or fossilized Roy Rogers for your cartripping pleasure. They have diners instead. The old-school kind, made with aluminum siding and barstools. Take the Exit at Route 82 and you will find the West Taghkanic Diner, with a neon lit Indian chief sign offering respite in the otherwise dark wilds of the New York City frontier.

I could offer you a treatise on diners. But today, I’ll offer you pie instead. When you sit on a barstool in a diner, or in a pleather banquette, you must drink coffee and eat pie. The Taghkanic offers seven flavors, four of which are the fruity variety. It is $3 a slice and a buck for endless refills of coffee. They also offer rice, tapioca pudding and delicious caramel flan.

Frankly, the pie – blueberry – sucked. It was cold; the crust too dense and not flaky and it was factory-made with generic canned filling. But I kind of didn’t care. The open road; the diner and it’s $4.99 meatloaf special s and 99-cent coffee; the pregnant teenage waitress: this is what I really love. That’s what I came to the diner for. A big serving of red, white and blue. They know that; they sell tee-shirts displaying as much. Diners weren’t ever really meant to serve good food; their selling point is location and convenience and streamlined good looks. On that front the West Taghkanic wins. Maybe next time I’ll try the chocolate cake and a glass of milk.


Where: Exit Route 82; West Taghkanic, NY, 518-851-7117