MenuPages

8:36pm, New York NY Dear Diary, Would you please pick up your phone Empire Diner? My wife and I have been calling you since 11:00 am (literally) and we still haven't gotten through. All we want are some bloody eggs and yours are the best in this part of town, although you do charge for your omelettes as if we were all portfolio managers at billion dollar hedge funds. Get off your high horse, actually make a delivery, pick up your phone and realize this is Chelsea, NYC, not Greenwich, CT. But please don't change the recipe for your eggs and fries. Looking forward to possibly placing an order soon, and thanks for listening diary. Love always, Omelettes for Dinner

We live near Empire Diner and have both eaten in the restaurant and ordered for delivery on multiple occasions. The food is generally good, but service is reliably bad. Our delivery orders are usually mixed-up or have missing or wrong items. Not recommended.

Great food, great atmosphere, great value. What more could you ask for? Oh, great service too!! This diner is Diner-mite!

My four year old and I had a great rootbeer float this weekend at Empire and now he keeps telling me "I have a good idea lets get a rootbeer float." Most restaurants are kid tolerant not kid friendly but the Empire staff was very warm, friendly and accomadating!! We'll be back!

Great food, impeccable service When you are in the mood for a little of "Old New York" this is the place to go. My favorite foods are Pigs in Blankets, the Empire Burger Parade which offer you a taste of many different burgers and the cherry on top are the old fashion malts and egg creams. Nice value, the ambiance is nice and Empire has a relaxed atmosphere. Friendly service, food comes out hot and fast. Plus you never know who you might see while dinning there. If you are in the mood for good food, great service, and a little "Star Gazing" this is the place to be.

As a long-time patron of the Empire Diner, I, for one, am glad to see the owners are sprucing up the joint! That black bathoom carried the theme of the place and was really cool, but it was looking a tad frayed around the edges the new WC has a cleaner, homier feel to it and while neater, is far from what you'd find in an Omaha mall. The current menu is pretty much the same with a couple additions that make my vegetarian daughter happy and some new and interesting burgers to satisfy my carnivore son. The nights we have eaten there we saw many of the same gay/straight, white/black, cool/square crowd. The ratios ebb and flow, but the crowd is still fun to watch and listen to. Tourism has changed some of the lunch crowd, but the City is welcoming to all types. I miss the piano players, too, but the recorded music is mostly hipper and younger. We've met the owners and they are the same folks who've been running it for several years. Oh yeah, we found those catchy phrases on the back of the menu. A lot of things are the same, most of the new stuff is better. The place is a business, not a museum, and we Boomers are no longer the center of the universe.

I have been frequenting the Empire for many years and there is no other place like it in Manhattan...until NOW! My husband and I popped in for a late dinner (around 10) and immediately noticed some changes. The menu for one...there used to be these wonderful catchy phrases which always made us smile...no matter how many times we read them. GONE! The bathroom..painted black and befit the place. GONE! clientele...hip mostly gay but straights hip too.GONE! Piano player..fabulous and so unusual..GONE! Music...always cutting edge. GONE! Brittany Spears and some other boring L.I. jazz playing. This place is turning into a mall diner in anywhere USA. If this continues I know we won't be back, and neither will all our friends who we turned on to this place 15 years ago. VERY DEPRESSING...Must have some new corporate or extremely boring owners. Get with the picture...this is NYC, not Omaha!!!!