Jigger's Diner

Jigger's ancestry goes back to an East Greenwich lunch cart adjoining a small restaurant called Lindy's, opened in 1917 by Vilgot "Jigger" Lindberg. Business was good enough that Jigger replaced the lunch cart with a new diner in 1929; and about 1950 the old diner was replaced with a beautiful blue enamel hash house that became a mid-century town fixture. Food fashions changed and business finally sputtered to a halt in the 1980s, at which point the diner became a resale clothing shop, then a storage facility for the paint and wallpaper shop next door. When the derelict building came up for sale at the end of the decade, it was bought on a whim by Carol Shriner, a Brown University biochemist with no experience in either the restaurant trade nor vintage diner archeology.