The Nashua Telegraph | May 6, 2007

On the outside, the Red Arrow Diner is a pretty unremarkable place, a squat brick building whose most distinctive feature is the funky overhead sign that points helpfully to the front door.

It’s what’s inside – quirky comfort food served up in a time-capsule setting – that keeps the hungry and the curious coming back for more.

Head chef Roy Donohue, a hulk of a man with a bald head and bushy mustache, scurries through the kitchen holding a pan of steaming-hot mashed potatoes while pancakes and eggs sizzle on a flattop grill.

Donohue scoops the spuds into a bowl of seasoned pork, turns on a mixer and watches as the blades churn round and round. Satisfied, he dumps the pork-and-potato mixture into a pie shell, tops it off with a freshly rolled crust and pops it in the oven.

A few minutes later, out comes one of the Red Arrow’s signature dishes – pork pie – hot, tasty and ready to be served.

“Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” host Guy Fieri, center, and head chef Roy Donohue, right, are being interviewed while food is cooking on the grill at the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester.

“It’s all-American food,” said Food Network chef Guy Fieri, watching as the diner’s cooks hurriedly whip up another menu favorite. “It’s good food done right, and I think that is what people get in a diner.”

Fieri has been sampling a lot of diner food since he set out in search of some of the best and most unusual small eateries the country has to offer. His adventures are chronicled in his new television show, “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” which airs at 10 p.m. Mondays on the Food Network.

The Food Network is owned by the E.W. Scripps Co., which also owns Scripps Howard News Service.

For Fieri, whose spiky bleached hair, gold hoop earrings and long, baggy shorts make him look more extreme skateboarder than serious chef, the television show is a chance to spotlight what he calls “the warriors of the business” – the men and women who turn out hearty, homemade meals in unglamorous and sometimes unconventional settings.

Places like the Red Arrow or the A1 Diner in Gardiner, Maine, are “reuniting America with its grass-roots food,” said Fieri, who owns four restaurants in Northern California.

“This is where it all started,” Fieri said. “Before there were gigantic restaurants, people ate in a coffee shop or a diner or a dive.”

Diners and dives need more recognition and respect, Fieri said, “because this is where 15-year-olds learn how to cook. This is where people have their first shot at what they will become.”

Fieri’s travels have taken him to some unusual places, such as The Frosted Mug Drive-In, which is just outside Chicago and is famous for its homemade root beer, or Mo Gridder’s BBQ, a Bronx dive where you can get your car tuned up while you chow down on a plate of ribs.

At some places, the food has been as offbeat as the restaurant.

Hamburgers are topped with caviar at Patrick’s Roadhouse in Santa Monica, Calif. Cheeseburgers come with peanut butter at the Triple X Family Restaurant in West Lafayette, Ind. Fieri was especially fond of the pickle chips at The Penguin in Charlotte, N.C.

Another memorable experience was the chicken-fried lamb chops at Mac and Ernie’s Roadside Eatery in Tarpley, Texas, about an hour and a half outside of San Antonio.

Waitresses work in overdrive to feed the crowds at the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester. The restaurant is a little wooden shack that sits on a dirt parking lot, with a deep fryer, a refrigerator and a few picnic tables set up out back. The lamb chops are dredged in flour, deep-fried and served with white gravy. Customers who want beer or wine with their meal buy the drinks at the country store next door.

“They are serving 150 people on a Friday night out of a dirt parking lot,” Fieri recalled incredulously.

At the A1 Diner in Maine, the cuisine is served in a custom-made dining car that has been dishing up good food since the eatery arrived in town aboard a flatbed truck in 1946.

The restaurant, which sits on steel girders at the foot of a bridge, was a dying business when Mike Giberson and his partner, Neil Anderson, bought it in 1988. The most loyal customers were getting older, and the restaurant wasn’t attracting the younger crowds that it needed to survive.

Giberson and Anderson kept the restaurant’s original decor, with its mahogany booths, pink-marble countertops and stainless-steel sunburst. But they updated the menu to include contemporary vegetarian and seafood dishes, as well as American regional foods and ethnic dishes from around the world.

Traditional crowd-pleasers like chicken pot pie and corned beef hash now share the menu with eclectic fare such as lamb shanks braised in red wine, salmon steamed in black tea and duck glazed with a Mojito sauce made from lime, rum, sugar and mint.

“It was slow going in the beginning,” Giberson recalled. “The old customers would come in and see some of those things on the specials and just shake their heads. But gradually, it caught on. Word got around, and we started to attract a new clientele and a younger crowd, which was what we were aiming for.”

Fieri said the A1 is probably the most nostalgic of all of the diners he visited. Nostalgia is also a big part of the Red Arrow’s charm. The diner looks much like it did when it opened in 1922. The handful of booths tucked off to the side are usually taken, so customers line up along a wall and wait for a stool to clear at the counter. Crowded and noisy, it’s the kind of place where conversation must compete with the sound of clinking silverware.

Open 24/seven, the Red Arrow has become legendary in New Hampshire for its traditional homemade fare, such as steak and eggs, burgers, meatloaf and deep-fried chicken livers.

“If you ask somebody in Manchester where the Red Arrow is and they don’t know, then they’re not from Manchester,” said owner Carol Sheehan, who bought the restaurant two decades ago.

It’s not hard to understand why places like the Red Arrow continue to thrive, Fieri said.

The grub may be basic at times, he said, “but sometimes basic is just what the doctor ordered.”

Originally published online here: http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070506/ENCORE01/70505014/-1/encore