A few weeks ago I had lunch at Bub & Grandma’s, the Eagle Rock bakery-cafe whose whole identity is built on what the owner calls “diner nostalgia.” Around the same time I kept seeing coverage of the line at Max & Helen’s, the new Larchmont diner from Phil Rosenthal and Nancy Silverton. People waited eight hours for a waffle when it opened, and there’s still a line. It’s named after Rosenthal’s late parents, Max and Helen. Most of the people in that line couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. They don’t know who Max and Helen were. They just know the feeling the place gives off.
Researchers have a name for this — “borrowed nostalgia.” Roughly two-thirds of Gen Z report genuine nostalgic attachment to eras that predate them entirely. It shows up in vintage band t-shirts for bands nobody’s heard live, in diners built to look a hundred years old and opened last November, in a whole aesthetic language of analog film, Y2K graphics, early-2000s cartoons — built entirely out of borrowed time.
