Moose and Cake Mix: Inside The Alaskan Diet
Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio
Milk Street Radio
4.2 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
Photographer Riley Arthur reports on a New York City icon: the old-fashioned diner. She goes beyond the club sandwiches and coffee to reveal the mob meetings, FBI stings and dramatic family moments that happen within a diner’s walls. Then, author Julia O’Malley provides a true taste of Alaskan cuisine, where stolen peaches, fresh caught salmon and boxed chocolate cake all are served at the same table. Plus, Adam Gopnik travels back in time to visit the New York restaurant scene of the 1980s.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Mill Street Radio from PRX, and I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. |
| 0:08.0 | Travel to Alaska, you'll be sure to find salmon and moose on the menu. |
| 0:14.0 | But what if you just want a piece of fruit? |
| 0:16.0 | I mean, when I was a kid, we used to meet a guy in an alley and get peaches from him. If there's one ingredient, you need to cook in Alaska, it's resourcefulness. And it makes people good cooks. It's like, how bad do you want to eat jambalaya? Like, how bad do you want to do that? Okay, well, let's make it. A survival guide to Alaskan cooking that's coming up later in the show. But first, it's |
| 0:39.2 | my interview with photographer Riley Arthur. For the last decade, Riley has chosen a very |
| 0:44.4 | specific subject for her photos, New York City diners. Riley, welcome to Milk Street. |
| 0:51.9 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:03.8 | You've said whenever there's a diner in a scene, in a movie or TV, in the New York City area, you can name it within 30 seconds. |
| 1:05.6 | Are you going to test me? |
| 1:13.8 | Well, it'd be hard to do on radio, but that's quite a boast. But how many diners are there? Let's start with that. What's the number? Okay. So to answer that question, I have to go back a little bit. |
| 1:18.9 | We have to define what a diner is. So the 20th century definition of a diner is a modular, prefabricated, |
| 1:26.9 | factory-built structure that's built in pieces, |
| 1:29.6 | and, you know, it would come with dishes and accruciman and everything that you'd purchase |
| 1:34.2 | from a diner manufacturing company. That's the textbook definition. So there are some |
| 1:38.9 | historians that would say that a storefront diner or modern diner are not technically |
| 1:43.6 | diners, I include |
| 1:45.3 | them. So by my sort of definition, there are currently 348 diners left in New York City. |
| 1:53.5 | What else is iconically associated with diners? I always think about the pie display or the |
| 1:59.6 | doughnuts under glass. I think of a counter |
| 2:04.3 | with someone behind a counter. Do diners always have counters? Is that a requirement for a diner? |
| 2:10.5 | Yeah, a diner always has counter seating. It would include breakfast, lunch, and dinner, long hours, if not 24 hours, where you could order breakfast all day long, typically booths. |
| 2:22.5 | And, you know, the other thing about a diner is the atmosphere. |
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