2022_09_New_Jersey_Monthly

PHOTOGRAPH: JOHN EMERSON
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Filmmaker Anthony
Scalia says he spent
his whole life driving
past the venerable
Bendix Diner—an oldfashioned,
stainless steel fixture
on the median between Route 17
North and South in Hasbrouck
Heights—and never pulled over.
“It was just something you kind
of pass because it looks a little rundown,”
the Lodi native, 29, admits.
But late one night in 2016, Scalia
was hungry. It was 3 am, and nothing
else was open. The Bendix, fluorescent
lights glowing, beckoned.
From his table, Scalia watched
his waiter deftly work, noticing that
the man was not making the usual
COUNTER POINTS
“Some people come
here as lovebirds,
some to forget a loved
one,” says Bendix
Diner manager John
Diakakis.
It’s ‘Cheers With Food’
John Diakakis, who is legally blind, manages the homey—and lovably
homely—Bendix Diner, turning 75 this year. By Jennifer Finn
eye contact. Scalia wondered: Could
he be blind?
“As soon as [my] straw hit the
bottom of the cup, he came over and
refilled it,” Scalia recalls, sitting at
a corner booth at the Bendix. “I’d
never had that happen before…. And
then I just found the most incredible
story hiding in plain sight.”
Scalia had stumbled upon what
he realized would make a riveting
documentary: John Diakakis, a
blind, single father of three boys,
had been working here at his family’s
diner for decades. Oh, my God,
Scalia remembers thinking. How
has nobody tapped into this yet?
Scalia would spend three years
filming Diakakis and his sons—
EAT + DRINK
Tony, Dimitri and Michael—for
what would become Bendix: Site
Unseen. It’s one of two documentaries
on Diakakis that premiered
at the New Jersey International
Film Festival in June, coinciding
with the diner’s 75th anniversary
this year. (The other film, Stephen
Michael Simon’s Bacon ’n’ Laces,
named for the extensive sneaker
collection Diakakis amassed with
his eldest son, Tony, was featured
on the New Yorker’s website, too.)
“You have a chip on your shoulder,”
says Diakakis, who was born
legally blind. “You want to prove
something.” From his earliest days
in the diner, “even my mom would
say, ‘Oh, you can’t do this.’”
Now 55, Diakakis began working
at the Bendix—which his father,
Tony, purchased in 1985—in the
’90s. He’d graduated from Ithaca
College with a degree in psychology
and was pursuing stand-up comedy,
centering routines on his blindness.
Tony suggested he work the register
to earn extra cash.
Relying on his heightened nonvisual
senses, Diakakis started
teaching himself server duties—
listening, for example, to the symphony
of sounds a mug makes as
it fills with coffee. (He’s burned
himself once or twice, but to this
day has never, he boasts, spilled on
a customer.)
“The cooks would turn around
and say, even to my parents… ‘Wow,
John is better and more attentive
[than the other waitstaff ],’” he says.
Not everyone was immediately
accepting. “People would come in
trashed in the overnight [shifts]
and be like, ‘What are you, stupid?’”
he recalls.
But as a former college wrestler
with a lifelong competitive streak—
and a mouth that could rival Tony
Soprano’s—Diakakis never cowered.
“So, I’m like, ‘What, you have
a problem with me being f ’ing
blind?’...And the reality sinks in.
Then,” he muses, “I go from being
the stupidest guy to being the most
amazing human being.”
Despite his blindness, Diakakis
managed to obtain residential cus-
SEPTEMBER 2022 NEW JERSEY MONTHLY 123