Stick a fork in a Fairfield dining landmark.

It's all over for the Fairfield Diner and Vegetarian Enclave, the oldest of five diners in Fairfield, closing Sunday after 63 years.

"It's a loss," said Eileen O'Hara, of Fairfield, a longtime customer fond of the fresh vegetables, reasonable prices and family atmosphere. The diner has been known by several names over the years — most memorably, perhaps, as the Green Comet.

O'Hara, a regular at the 90 Kings Highway Cutoff diner for 15 years, said she formed friendships with waitresses and the diner's owners. "It has warmth," she said. "It's like a family. You kind of get to know everybody."

In addition to the regulars, the diner has also won favor with generations of travelers passing by on Interstate 95. It sits near the foot of exit 24.

Lola Mema, 31, a waitress at the diner for 10 years, said she shared her life with the diner's owners and customers, and they have shared theirs as well.

"I started here when I was just married, and I had my children when I was working here, and I shared my life with this place," Mema said. "It was so much more than just working here."

Georgette Maiorano, of Orange, whose family owns the diner, said the property has been leased to Lexus of Westport, operator of a car dealership and maintenance center next door.

Maiorano, 29, said her parents, George and Irene Anthis, have retired, and that she and her brother, Nic Anthis, can't run both the Fairfield Diner and a Guilford diner, called Shoreline Diner and Vegetarian Enclave, also owned by the family. The Anthis family has owned the Fairfield Diner since 1993.

"My brother and I, we've both recently married and are thinking of starting our own families," Maiorano said. "It's too hard with both of us just left to run the two places."

"We were approached with an excellent opportunity, and we decided to take it," she said of the Lexus offer.

Maiorano started working at the Fairfield Diner when she was 16 and has met "a lot of nice people and friends." Diner fare differs from most restaurant menus because of the wide variety of food and customers, who can order anything from the extensive selections at any time, she said.

"It's like opening your fridge and making what you feel like," Maiorano said. "It's a place where [customers] can feel comfortable, get home-cooked food, make friends and chit-chat."

"Chitchat" of a more notorious sort brought the diner into the news a few years ago when conversations by figures in the corruption investigation into then-Bridgeport Mayor Joseph P. Ganim were secretly taped on the premises.

Mema isn't sure where she'll work after the diner closes, but she said it would be "very difficult to find people like this to work for."

"There's a million places to work for, but you don't find the warmth," Mema said.

Waitress Olga Hlinka, 60, who served customers for 25 years at a Fairfield Howard Johnson's before it closed in the mid-1990s, said she also would miss working for the Anthis family. "This is like my second home," she said.

Maiorano said her family has many friends in the restaurant business and that she's trying to find new jobs for all of her staff. "We basically offered, as backup, a job in the other diner [in Guilford] in case they have trouble," she said.

The torch for the town's oldest diner will pass at midnight Sunday to Penny's Diner on Black Rock Turnpike. Penny's opened in 1943, a year after the Fairfield Diner.

A sign that Anthis family members put up in the diner lobby said a smile comes across their faces when the last 13 years flash through their minds. "We hope as you drive by this very spot one day in the future, a smile comes across yours, too," the sign says.

Originally published online here: http://www.connpost.com/news/ci_3065748