Johnny Boy's, N16

Not just another diner

From the outside looking in, the classic American diner is crystal clear: red-cushioned booths, steaming pots of coffee, and a steady succession of pancakes and burgers coming off the flattop. Even if you’ve never even been to the US, we’ve all seen it in the movies; the image will be seared into your brain from the likes of Twin Peaks, Pulp Fiction, or When Harry Met Sally.

Reality is never so simple (or cinematic). Across a century and a continent, diners have shifted and adapted, appearing in different guises depending on the decade and the demographics. Johnny Boy’s, newly opened in Stoke Newington, has been sold as a diner, but that’s only half the story: it’s an LA diner, and the modern reinvention of one at that.

Still, there are constants to the genre, and it’s here that Johnny Boy’s first earns its stripes. Any diner worth its salt offers free refills on brisk black filter coffee, but most attempts to recreate the format abroad get it wrong. European service norms are a particularly bad fit with the need to circulate the pot round the room every few minutes. It leaves you stuck with an empty cup, making more desperate eye contact with your server than a pick-up artist on a losing streak. I was relieved to discover that at Johnny Boy’s the pot makes frequent forays out, and I was offered more coffee than I could ever hope to drink in one sitting. For a diner, I can think of no higher praise.

Owner Julian Denis has also spared no effort in outfitting Johnny Boy’s appropriately. The chunky plastic water tumblers, brown-glazed coffee mugs, and vintage plates all look the part, right down to the bathroom sign reminding employees that state law requires they wash their hands. These details are exacting and specific, clearly assembled with genuine affection. I’ve seen some describe the effect as nostalgic, though to me that doesn’t seem quite right. Johnny Boy’s is less a recreation of a classic diner than it is a reinvention, and it sits firmly in the tradition of modern millennial takes on the format, like Molly’s Rise and Shine in New Orleans, or Ursula in Brooklyn. This isn’t your father’s diner: it’s kitscher, and cooler, and they make a mean margarita.

The biggest giveaway is the menu, which is compact and narrow, rather than sprawling and all-encompassing. Breakfast is especially focused, with just four real options. The steak and eggs is probably the pick of the bunch, thin-cut carne asada served with toast, home fries, and two fried eggs; prepare your inner American, and be ready to answer questions about how you want them cooked. The French toast is strong too, though specific in style. This is soft, soggy, borderline soupy — bread that’s been pushed to soak as much syrup as physics will allow. Topped with cut fruit and whipped cream, this allows no ambiguity that it’s dessert for breakfast, but that’s a luxury we should all be allowed every now and then.

I made a second visit to sample the dinner menu, which has some overlap — the steak returns, as does an all-day breakfast plate - but its own options too. There’s an excellent, towering patty melt, a thick slab of beef mince and cheese oozing into doorstop slices of just-toasted bread. Hopefully it’s a sign that sandwiches are a strength, with a burger and a promising pastrami dip on the menu too. Skip the chicken dinner though: a dinky dinner roll and a tiny pot of mac salad (read: pasta and mayonnaise) flank two pieces of chicken that were over-fried and under-seasoned. London has much better fried chicken than this, and elsewhere you won’t have to pay almost £20 for the privilege. There’s pie too, but I couldn’t try any — on my first visit none of us could face a second dessert after the excesses of the French toast, and on my return the pies were simply out that day.

Much of the menu is ubiquitous diner fare, but Johnny Boy’s has a clear sense of place, even if that place isn’t London. The Los Angeles of it all is obvious from minute one, with retro posters decking the walls advertising the Lakers, the Dodgers, and simply the city itself. Denis is an LA-native who’s long made Hackney his home, before this launching Chinese restaurant Facing Heaven and taco bar Easy 8, both on the the Mare Street side of London Fields. He spent the run-up to this opening proving his credentials with a string of Instagram reels that highlight the LA favourites that inspired his own new diner.

Some of that LA inspiration is seen in the In-N-Out-esque burger construction, or that pastrami-packed play on the French dip, or selling the Californian soda Orange Bang. But mostly it’s there in the Mexican food, which runs through both morning and evening menus.

I’ve heard good things about the crab tostada, but my eyes were drawn to the lengua tacos at dinner, the tender tongue topped simply with onion and coriander, accompanied by a bright salsa verde. It’s bold selling tacos a 30-second walk from Sonora, and the lengua here isn’t a patch on their version, which positively melts into the tortilla, but it’s a fine taco by any other standard.

I was more excited by, and ultimately a little disappointed in, the breakfast burrito. Like diners themselves these come in all stripes, but the sausage and gravy version here is all too beige: it doesn’t taste of much more than potato and tortilla, a homogeneous carby mass that’s only really as good as the salsa and pickles alongside. With Bad Manners gone, London’s burrito scene is currently dire; to say this is now among the city’s best is not an especially strong compliment, I’m afraid.

Johnny Boy’s is a painstaking effort to make the diner anew in London — not as it existed in decades past, but as other chefs of Denis’ generation have remade it already in the US. It’s a diner for people who want brunch but are too cool to call it that, who romanticise the diner aesthetic, but want a kitchen-led menu that makes the hard choices for you. It’s a diner that’s ironic, but never too ironic, because it loves all this stuff really.

In more practical terms, this is a better spot for breakfast than dinner, more unique in what it offers and how it goes about it, though that patty melt could anchor a pretty solid dinner too. There are rough edges that need smoothing out though, uneven cooking holding back the excellent aesthetic. Johnny Boy’s should look and feel just right to fans of the modern LA diner, and with a little fine-tuning in the kitchen, it could help define the London version too.