For about a week last December, a diner in Carle Place went by a name its owners never picked. Two letters on the neon sign out front, a T and an M, quit glowing, and what remained was a word no sign shop would print on purpose. Thomas’s Ham ‘N’ Eggery, which Greater Long Island says first opened in 1946, became the subject of a viral photo, and the newspaper wrote up the whole episode on December 24, 2025.
The riff that traveled best came from a commenter on the paper’s Facebook post, and it was about the hour rather than the word. That commenter set the misnamed diner at closing time for the bars, the stretch of night when a glowing sign matters most. Nothing in the coverage says Thomas’s keeps overnight hours, and the joke never needed it to. Readers grasped the picture at once: a lit sign in the dark, a counter still serving, a place built for people with nowhere better to be at 2 a.m.
The newspaper’s post, where those comments gathered, is embedded here.
Co-owner Pete Dafnos, who runs the place with partner Alec Reyes, told the paper the regulars found it funny: “Our customers thought it was hilarious.” One customer printed the photo of the broken sign in black and white, framed it, and handed it over as a Christmas gift. American Neon Sign Company of Bay Shore restored the lettering on a Monday afternoon, and the owners have mulled merchandise without settling on anything.
A picture of a sign after dark landed so hard for a reason. The thing it summons, the all-night diner, has been slipping off the Long Island map for years.
When Nobody Owned a Key
A generation ago, the front door of a Long Island diner was mostly decoration. In a May 2025 report from Patch, owners described counters that ran around the clock for so long that locking up became a forgotten skill. A few said they had no key at all. Peter Tsadilas, who runs the Golden Globe Diner in Huntington, told Patch that a friend’s Majestic Diner in Westbury went more than seventeen years without closing, until the staff went looking for keys and couldn’t produce them. Gus Tsiorvas heard a similar story when he took over the Embassy Diner in Bethpage in April 2022, because the previous owner wasn’t sure he still had a set.
Each anecdote holds a small joke and a large fact. A business that never shuts needs no lock, and a business that suddenly does need one has changed its habits.
A 2014 LongIsland.com roundup shows how broad the overnight map once looked. It named eleven diners that kept the lights on around the clock: the Candlelight Diner in Commack, the Lake Grove Diner, the Empress Diner in East Meadow, the Millennium Diner in Smithtown, the Hauppauge Palace Diner, the Holbrook Diner, the Carousel Diner in West Islip, the California Diner in Patchogue, the Broadway Diner in Hicksville, the Majestic Diner in Westbury, and a Denny’s in Centereach. The Smithtown entry has its own profile in the Millennium Diner story.
That list is nearly twelve years old, and nothing reviewed for this post confirms how many of those eleven still stay open overnight. Treat it as a snapshot of an older night, not a guide to tonight.
A Partial Roll Call of Closures
Patch named recent casualties on both sides of the county line: the Lynbrook Diner, Sunny’s Riverhead Diner & Grill, the Plainview Diner, the Baldwin Coach Diner, Huntington’s Golden Coach Diner, the Lindencrest Diner in Lindenhurst, the Lantern Diner in West Hempstead, the Hampton Bays Diner, the Seven Seas Diner in Great Neck, the Park City Diner in New Hyde Park, and the Franklin Square Diner. Many had served their towns for close to fifty years. One had been open for ninety.
The report doesn’t say how many of those places ran overnight, and shutting a diner for good differs from trimming its hours. The more telling detail concerns the hours themselves. According to the owners Patch interviewed, plenty of formerly 24/7 diners now keep overnight service for weekends only, and newer diners often close before midnight.
For a closer look at what a single closure does to a neighborhood, see what happens when a neighborhood diner closes.
What Three A.M. Costs
A 24-hour kitchen works like a lighthouse: the lamp burns and the bills arrive whether or not a single ship passes. Owners in Patch’s reporting pointed to a stack of pressures rather than one villain, and their accounts line up like this.
| Pressure | What owners reported |
|---|---|
| Rent | Kevin Denis, who founded Professor’s Cafe in Kings Park, said his monthly rent rose from $1,500 to $6,800 before he retired in summer 2024. Dennis Pavlatos, who owns the properties under both of his diners, said he wouldn’t be in business if he had to pay rent. |
| Menu prices | Denis recalled a $1.45 breakfast when he opened in the early 1980s and a tab above $15 by the time he left. He said repeated price hikes drive customers away. |
| Labor | Tsiorvas said overnight shifts are the hardest to staff, since few people want to work at 3, 4 or 5 in the morning. |
| Competition | Owners pointed to bars that now serve food late and to delivery apps that bring dinner to the couch. |
| Habits | Pavlatos said that after 10 p.m. hardly anyone goes out. Tsadilas said his own generation used to head to diners until 3 a.m. |
| Overhead | Pavlatos called a diner a very expensive operation, thanks to long hours and a large menu. |
Tsadilas summed up the result in one line to Patch:
“Now, you’d be hard pressed to find a diner that’s open 24 hours.”
Peter Tsadilas, Golden Globe Diner, Huntington, quoted by Patch, May 28, 2025
Patch’s owners also noted a gap in expectations. Younger customers, they said, are more likely to stay home with video games or visit friends than to go out dancing, which shrinks the crowd that once made a 3 a.m. omelet profitable.
The Count, Coast to Coast
The squeeze isn’t a Long Island invention, and the numbers say so. Fox News Digital, summarizing Yelp’s 2025 industry report on August 21, 2026, reported that the number of U.S. restaurants offering 24-hour service fell 11 percent between January 2020 and January 2025. Los Angeles lost 29 percent of its all-night restaurants and Las Vegas lost 9 percent, while a few places added them: Baltimore (14 percent), Salt Lake City (25 percent) and Key West (33 percent).
Closer to home, Patch relayed a New York Times analysis of Yelp data showing that New York City lost 13 percent of its 500-plus round-the-clock restaurants between February 2020 and February 2024.
One caution applies to every figure above: they count restaurants of all kinds, not diners alone, and no Long Island-specific tally turned up in the reporting reviewed. As for causes, Yelp pointed to labor shortages and shifting customer behavior, including younger Americans drinking less. Fox also relayed a Food & Wine suggestion that the pandemic’s lingering effects and GLP-1 weight-loss drugs play a part.
The Ones Still Leaving a Light On
Survivors in the reporting tend to share a trait: they shrank the night instead of surrendering it. As of Patch’s May 2025 report, the Embassy Diner in Bethpage stayed open around the clock only on Fridays and Saturdays, so call ahead before counting on it.
Others changed the menu. Alyson Kanaras co-founded Whiskey Down Diner in Farmingdale in 2019 with her siblings, whose father had founded the Olympic Diner in Deer Park in 1980. The newer place runs a smaller menu with seasonal rotations, brunch and cocktails, and Kanaras told Patch that other operators have started copying the approach. Pavlatos, meanwhile, said his Infinity Diner in West Babylon picked up customers when nearby diners closed.
The most dramatic comeback in the reporting comes from New Hampshire. Fox says the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, which opened in 1922, now runs four locations around the clock. During the pandemic its owners closed the overnight shift at three of the four, and it took a few years to restore 24/7 service everywhere. Co-owner Amanda Wihby recalled that when the governor ordered the diner shut, “we didn’t have keys.”
That line could have come from any of the Long Island owners. It lands as a kind of proof of life: a place that had gone years without locking up had to learn how to do it, and then learn how to stop.
Finding an Open Counter at 3 A.M.
No verified, current directory of Long Island’s overnight diners turned up while researching this post, and the one list found dates to 2014. That leaves the old method as the best one. A few habits help:
- Phone first. Hours posted online can trail what the kitchen actually does.
- Ask about the specific night. Weekend-only overnight service is common among the owners Patch interviewed.
- Treat any list older than a year as a lead, not a promise.
For the other end of the clock, how a diner at the Ronkonkoma station lives on train time shows what a counter built around the morning rush looks like, and a diner owner’s guide to the 2 A.M. silence looks at the night from behind the counter.
The sign in Carle Place is whole again, and its letters read the way the owners intended. The keys are another matter. Somewhere in the back office of a diner that once ran around the clock, a ring of them probably sits unused, and every owner who dusts one off is placing a small bet that the all-night counter has a decade left in it.
This is for informational purposes only — consult a licensed attorney or financial advisor for your specific situation.
Sources
- Meet the diner owners behind Long Island’s unexpected viral neon glitch, Greater Long Island, Dec. 24, 2025
- Greater Long Island Facebook post on the sign (embedded above)
- Diner industry on Long Island is dying as owners cite changing landscape, Patch, May 28, 2025
- The 24-hour American diner is vanishing, Fox News Digital, Aug. 21, 2026
- 24-Hour Diners on Long Island, LongIsland.com, Dec. 27, 2014
