My father, Samuel Parker, had opened this place when he was twenty-five, a young man with more determination than capital. He’d run it with the same stubborn consistency for five decades until a sudden, massive heart attack took him from me six months ago. He’d died right there in the kitchen, collapsing mid-stir over a pot of the very stew I was now staring at.

I’d inherited the diner along with his dying words, gasped out as the paramedics worked on him. “Promise me… you won’t change the menu, Austin. Not one dish. People need things they can count on.”