Diner an important American institution which originally, in the middle of the 19th century, was a railway dining car. However, by extension it came to mean a cheap roadside restaurant which could be either a disused railway dining car, or something built to resemble this, or something else giving the impression of mobility. Although diners, almost by definition, offer modestly priced food of an unsophisticated nature, they offer scope for connoisseurship and even minor cults, and various publications had been devoted to them in recent decades.
