Scrambled and scattered at Diner

This Atlantic Station restaurant is ostensibly Ron Eyester’s improvement on the classic American diner. Yet the menu — which runs the gamut from your basic short stack of pancakes or waffles to fried chicken to stuffed grape leaves to lobster cakes to calf liver and onions to cheeseburgers to roast salmon to milkshakes — is so confused and unintelligible in its intentions that you can’t get a handle on it.

Hypothetically, if you got sufficiently sloshed, wandered in the front door of Diner, and mumbled out an order for a platter of disco fries and spicy fried chicken and grits, you might be pleased. You probably wouldn’t notice that the brown gravy is too salty and that the melted mozzarella, while generous, has a plastic quality that keeps it from sticking to the fries. You might even like the ludicrous dousing of slightly spicy butter sauce that covers the fried chicken. You’d be lighter in the pocketbook, but somewhat sobered by the grease.

Me? I’d rather just go to Waffle House.