What's in a Name? The Gourmet Diner

Suppose you open a restaurant (30 years this year), and you call your place "The Gourmet Diner."  How do you distinguish yourself?

The physical structure is pretty easy.  You said you were a diner, so you set up like a diner.  Diner-looking building, counters, '50s style furnishings, you can see into the kitchen through the passthrough where the wait staff clot and try to dance around each other, and you play oldies and some nice and unintrusive classic rock.  You use typical diner-style tableware, and you're good.

But what about the menu?  Suppose your breakfast menu looks suspiciously like everyone else's breakfast menu.  The same dishes, same choices, and same prices.  If you call yourself "gourmet," you would be expected to make the dishes, even if they are described like everyone else's, somehow better, right?   Would a menu section called "Benedict," and featuring three kinds of eggs Benedict (regular, spinach, and something else) be enough to fulfill your apparently self-appointed mission?  The food should taste better, or be more interesting, or present features that are unexpected, no?  The homefried potatoes should have some unusual ingredients, or different spices.  And you wouldn't want them to be what seem almost like mashed potato-like food, simply fried, would you?  Wouldn't you serve bread you baked yourself, or bought from an artisan-style baker?  You wouldn't use factory-sliced bread out of a plastic wrapper, exactly like the loaves they sell in the commercial bread section at Publix, would you?  And wouldn't you at least apply some interesting garnish or something?

Oh, here's where you shine: the coffee.  Everyone loves "gourmet coffee."  People pay extra to get Starbucks, or Pete's in other parts of the country (or Publix), or any of a number of other places.  There's Cafe Don Pablo near Miami Gardens.  Wonderful coffee they roast themselves.  You'd serve that, right?  You wouldn't possibly, being "The Gourmet Diner," serve plain old coffee exactly like what is served at Bagels and Company or almost any other source of nondescript joe.  Would you?

I'll tell you what would happen if you fell down on every part of the job of living up to your name.  Your breakfast customer wouldn't come back for breakfast again, and he would assume there's probably no compelling reason to try you for lunch or dinner, either.