“So many of grandchildren and cousins worked there,” adds Tsonis, a longtime Lutherville resident who has been absent from the diner for many years. The other Nikoludis daughter, Eva, was Michele Tsonis’ mother. Nick had married one of Nikoludis’ daughters, Evelyn. Fochios, whose father, Nicholas, had worked alongside the original owners. If she saw a regular crossing 25th Street, she’d have their coffee waiting the way they like it when they walked in the door.”Īfter the Nikoludis family left in 1982, they sold to the late Michael J. “My grandparents had a red-headed waitress for years who didn’t take no stuff from anybody. “My mom would come home from Eastern High School when she was about 13, put her books on the back steps leading upstairs where they lived, and help out in the restaurant,” said Michele Andriotis Tsonis, granddaughter of the founders. Through three different owners, all Greek or Greek-American, business was brisk, as it was right up to the end. The diner dates back to 1939, when it was founded along a streetcar line as the Wyman Park Restaurant by Michael Nikoludis and the former Mary Gianoulis-Greek immigrants who arrived separately from the island of Chios about the time of the First World War. When he was trying to lose weight he’d order a plain burger with no bun every day for lunch. Estes, an artist living nearby.Īdds Lynne Heneson, a longtime customer: “My father owned a drugstore at Charles and 25th, it’s now a junk shop. “You could get a bacon sandwich-not a BLT, just bacon,” said Steve E. It was a six-day-a-week drama worthy of a soundtrack by Tom Waits. To see the show up close, you just squeezed in sideways at the counter when the place was packed, which was often. “…the menu sizzles, heads of lettuce ready to roll…hey sugar loaf, you want coffee in your cream?” ” “A spatula instead of a scepter, a king without a crown,” wrote Brewer. Purnell was so charismatic that local poet Shirley Brewer wrote an ode to him: “His Royal Grillness. Said Remington resident Lynda Gomeringer, who began patronizing the diner when she moved to the neighborhood in 2005: “Listening to Bruce expound on the world and hit zingers out of the park was delicious.” The most legendary cook of recent memory was Bruce Purnell, who said he worked the grill for the past 17 years and didn’t see the price of an omelette go up more than a buck or so in that time. “Judges, power lawyers,, all having cutting edge conversations about politics, sports, jurisprudence, and public policy.”Īll complete with news-of-the-day schtick, with cooks cracking eggs and cracking wise at the grill behind a counter with nine deco swivel stools. “It was a great place to run into a who’s who of Baltimore,” said Rinaldi, recently retired from the Baltimore City Department of Social Services. The kind of place where you could stand front-to-back and shoulder-to-shoulder with bus drivers, auto mechanics, school teachers, clerks at the neighborhood locksmith, and DJs from WYPR from 6 a.m. It was the kind of place, said one of the many longtime customers who stopped in for goodbye and one last meal, where you could eavesdrop on three disgraced alumni of the Maryland General Assembly breaking bread in one of the narrow diner’s eight booths. Back then, school headquarters was a few blocks east of the diner on 25th Street. Rinaldi, was assistant superintendent of Baltimore City Public Schools. Rinaldi began going to the Wyman diner as a kid in the 1970s when his father, Dr.
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