The once-popular Scranton diner remains closed as its owners fight with each other in court…
If you lived in Scranton long enough, you ended up at Chick’s Diner.
Didn’t matter who you were — college kid with a hangover, trucker looking for a bottomless cup of coffee, or a nurse just getting off a night shift — everyone wound up at that stainless-steel railcar on Moosic Street eventually.
It wasn’t fancy. Never tried to be. It didn’t need to. The sign out front told you all you had to know: Open 24 hours. Breakfast served all day. Inside, it was all Formica and chrome, the air thick with the smell of bacon grease and burned coffee — that good kind of burn that somehow feels like home.
You’d slide into a booth with torn red vinyl seats, order without even opening the menu. Maybe you went for the ham steak, half an inch thick and crackling at the edges, or the kielbasa and eggs, the local favorite that came out hot enough to fog your glasses. Maybe you ordered one of those homemade pies, the kind of thing your grandmother used to make — the Graham Cracker Cream Pie people still talk about like it was an act of God.
It was the kind of place where the waitress had been there longer than you’d been alive. She’d call you “hon,” top off your cup before you even asked, and if you stayed long enough, you’d see half the town wander through — the cops, the third-shift workers, the lost, the lonely, the dreamers.
Everyone was equal at Chick’s.
Fighting it out in court…
But the griddle’s gone cold. The neon flickers over empty booths. And what’s left of Chick’s is tied up in paperwork.
After decades of frying eggs and flipping pancakes, the diner’s future is being decided in a courtroom instead of behind the counter. One co-owner says the other won’t move forward — won’t sell, won’t fix, won’t agree — while the world outside moves on. A new Wawa is rising down the road, all polished efficiency and corporate glow, and suddenly that little patch of Scranton asphalt is worth more to developers than to dreamers.
The lawsuit’s a familiar song: deadlock, frustration, and a building that’s falling apart while the lawyers argue. The soul of a small city’s memory, turning into a line item on someone’s balance sheet.
The kind of place you don’t forget…
The Internet is still full of Chick’s Diner reviews. Digital memories of a beloved Scranton hotspot that is, for now, just a slowly decomposing shell.
But scroll through those old reviews — you can practically taste it. People talk about those pancakes like they were magic, about the hash browns that came crisp and golden, spilling off the plate, about how the coffee was “better than what you make at home.”
Yeah, sometimes the floor was sticky. The booths were cracked. The bathroom door didn’t always close right. Nobody cared. It was the imperfections that made it real.
One guy remembered getting a slice of pie after a long shift — said the waitress brought it with a smile and a “you look like you need this.” Another said he stopped in every morning before work for scrambled eggs, rye toast, and coffee strong enough to put hair on your chest.
People didn’t just eat there. They belonged there.
If you were sitting at the counter, you might strike up a conversation with a stranger — someone you’d never meet anywhere else. You’d talk about nothing and everything: the weather, the Penguins, how the city was changing. And you’d both feel, for a moment, like you were part of something.
That’s what Chick’s was. Not just a diner. A refuge.
What comes next?
Now, it’s a question mark.
Maybe the court forces a sale, and Chick’s becomes another gas station. Maybe someone buys it, restores it, and brings the griddle back to life. Maybe it sits, rusting, another casualty of progress.
Scranton’s full of ghosts like that — the places that built its backbone but couldn’t survive its reinvention. Places where you can still smell the grease and hear the chatter if you stand outside long enough.
But maybe, just maybe, someone out there still gets it. Someone who remembers that the best meals aren’t the prettiest, that community doesn’t happen in drive-thrus, and that coffee tastes better when it’s poured by someone who knows your name.
A toast to an iconic NEPA institution…
So here’s to Chick’s Diner — the late-night confessional, the working man’s kitchen, the place that asked for nothing but your appetite and gave you back a piece of yourself.
A little worn. A little tired. But still standing.
Maybe it’s gone. Hopefully it’s not. But if you ever sat there under those buzzing lights, fork in hand, coffee in reach, you know — you felt — what it meant.
And you’ll never forget it.
