What I love most, I think, is the joy of discovery — of stumbling on unexpected deliciousness in an unusually casual or inappropriate setting. “What?” we said to the woman working the counter at 10 o’clock on a recent Friday night. “You serve oxtails on the weekend?” Even before we’d ordered our food, we were making plans to come back.
At Dimond Kitchen, you should be prepared for the food to take a little while, especially if you order anything beyond the spread of entrees and side dishes already laid out in warming trays on the steam table. The chicken wings are fried to order. So are the pork chops, before they get smothered in gravy. And the garlic noodles are tossed fresh in a hot pan — again, all to order. With just one or two cooks cranking plates out of that tiny, bootstrapped convenience store kitchen, it’s no wonder we waited a solid 40 minutes.
How much you enjoy that wait might depend on how you feel about the late-night corner store vibe, which has its own brand of joyously chaotic Town energy. A white guy in a hoodie tried to sweet-talk the staff into letting him buy a (nonexistent) “two-meat, one-side” combo plate. (“It’s twice the meat, half the sorrow,” he quipped, nonsensically.) A young woman with long braids slapped a couple of dollar bills onto the counter after the chef gave her a few extra tubs of housemade hot sauce, shrugging him off when he said she didn’t have to pay. Every once in a while, someone would burst into the store cussing jovially.
“Chef, you can smell that shit up the street!” one of them shouted.
Most everyone seemed like they were a regular. Which makes sense because once our food arrived, each takeout carton steaming-hot and filled almost to overflowing, we stopped thinking about anything else except how astoundingly delicious it all was.
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