Do you know how to recognize a great diner, hon? A great diner is a place where a tired trucker sits down to a meal consisting of black coffee and a plate of french fries doused with gravy. He dumps ketchup over the gravy, stirs the whole mess with a fry, and eats with a half-lonesome, half-blissful air. It's a place where the local volunteer fire department troops in, sweaty and soot-stained in their red suspenders and baggy yellow pants, and wolfs down something hot and solid between alarms. A great diner has great servers (the kind who tell you what not to order), variety, good food, affordable prices, and fabulous pie. And it leaves you with the feeling that you have entered a time warp. You get all this and more--pink-and-blue vinyl booths, Elvis and the Platters on the wall-mounted CD jukebox, Time and Life covers of Richard Nixon over the bathrooms--at the Star Light Diner, a small silver box by the side of the road in Essex. Try the chocolate Coke. Don't be afraid to order the crab cake--it's better than most you've had this summer, and you can get it for half the price you'd expect to pay. And for dessert, remember these three words: banana cream pie.

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