on the cheap

Blue Plate Express Real Pizza Koreana Vici

When we head to a diner, we brace ourselves for lardy, buttery, drippy, delicious food. It’s a decadent Sunday-morning treat you trick yourself into believing doesn’t actually count.

But Watertown’s Deluxe Town Diner is far from typical. Soy milk sits next to meat loaf, which rushes past loose tea on its way to the old-school soda fountain. Sure, butter’s close at hand, but so are yucca fritters ($4.50) and gingery soy sauce to dip them in.

And even though the diner does it up for Sunday brunch, lunch and dinner aren’t left to languish. On a recent rainy evening, under the soft glow of the white Christmas lights that decorate the authentic railroad car, the owner schmoozed, delivering dishes and making jokes with him about how she was eating all his food. But how could she help herself? They dueled over the enormous Cobb salad ($7.95), which mixed crispy fresh lettuce, grape tomatoes, blue cheese, fresh avocado, chicken, and bacon. Then he had the chicken pot pie ($8.50), which was actually more like a chowder. Two gentle, fluffy buttermilk muffins floated in a soup bowl, sheltering generous lumps of soft mashed potatoes to sop up the soupy mix of thick sauce, chicken, and tomatoes. The deluxe grilled-beef burger ($5.95) was graced with a side of slick fries were neither crispy nor soggy, but just right.

And what’s a diner without dessert plucked from one of the pie cases on the counter? A warm slice of pecan pie ($3.50) provided a fittingly decadent counterpoint to its healthful predecessors — it was buttery, drippy, and delicious.