Shady Glen Diner

Turners Falls is a mill town on a bend of the Connecticut River, the kind of place where the old factories still stand along the water and the main street has more history than traffic. In a town like this, the diner is not a novelty; it is infrastructure. Shady Glen Diner, on Avenue A, is that kind of room: a counter, booths, a griddle, and a menu that has been doing the same reliable job for the people of the village for decades.

The cooking here is the old New England kind, and the dish to understand is the boiled dinner. Corned beef, potatoes, carrots, cabbage and onions, simmered together until everything is soft and the broth has taken on the flavour of all of it — a meal built for cold weather and long shifts, and one that has almost vanished from restaurant menus. The other is corned beef and cabbage, the same idea in its most direct form, and both are served plainly, without garnish or apology. If you come for breakfast instead, you will find the eggs, the hash and the toast that the griddle turns out all morning.

This is not food that is trying to impress you. It is food that is trying to feed you, in a room that has been doing so since long before anyone thought to call this kind of cooking a genre. Come for lunch on a weekday, order the special, and watch a small town eat.

Bourdain's western Massachusetts hour, for Parts Unknown, was about the towns that the state's more famous corners overshadow, and Shady Glen is a fine ambassador for them: unpretentious, a little worn, and completely sure of what it is.