The Fay-West Diner on Pittsburgh Street has only one booth that wobbles — third from the window — and Marty Pokol, who has owned the place for going on twenty-two years, refuses to fix it. “Regulars call it theirs,” he told me one morning, refilling my coffee without being asked. “I fix it, somebody loses their spot.” That’s about all you need to know to understand how this place works.
I first found Fay-West a few years back when I was covering a city council meeting that ran long and I needed breakfast at half past ten on a Wednesday. Marty was behind the counter himself, the way he usually is in the morning, moving between the flat-top and the coffee station with the practiced efficiency of someone who stopped having to think about it decades ago. He grew up two miles from here. His mother used to bring him in as a kid, before the previous owner had even considered selling. “I didn’t buy it to get rich,” he said. “I bought it because I didn’t want to watch somebody else run it into the ground.”
That instinct shows in the food. The menu at Fay-West is not ambitious, and it doesn’t pretend to be. You come for eggs done the right way, scrapple when they have it, corned beef hash that’s actually crispy and not some gray mush out of a can. The home fries are fried in a cast-iron griddle section Marty keeps seasoned himself. Biscuits come out around seven and they go fast — real biscuits, not the kind that arrive in a vacuum bag from a Sysco truck.
Lunch runs toward diner standbys: hot roast beef sandwiches, a weekly soup that changes by whatever Marty feels like making, and a hamburger that hasn’t changed in price as much as it probably should have. The clientele at lunch is a cross-section of Uniontown that you don’t always see in the same room: contractors and county workers, retired miners, a table of women from one of the churches on Union Street who come in every Thursday without fail.
Marty’s daughter works the counter on weekends, and she has his same unhurried manner — the kind of service that feels attentive without hovering. The space itself is narrow and bright in the mornings, with a counter that seats about eight and a dining room that probably fits forty if you’re not fussy. It’s clean in the way that old diners can be clean, meaning the floors show their age but the kitchen doesn’t.
I asked Marty once if he ever thought about updating things — a new sign, maybe a Facebook page, some weekend specials. He considered it seriously, which I appreciated. “I did a chalkboard for a while,” he said. “Mushroom Swiss burger. People kept asking if it was new. It wasn’t new. I’d made it for fifteen years.” The chalkboard is gone. The mushroom Swiss is still on the menu.
Breakfast runs about six to nine dollars depending on what you order. Lunch tops out around twelve. Cash is preferred but they take cards now. Parking is street parking on Pittsburgh, which is usually fine before eight in the morning and again after the lunch rush clears. If you go on a Saturday and get there after nine, expect a short wait. That wobbling booth might be open.
