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Morning luxury! Fried potatoes that come on the side of egg dishes are the supreme ideal of hash-house home fries, lacing the air with alluring Parfum de Spud. They sizzle in a pile on the grill, where they are pushed around, stacked, and restacked. A few pieces stick to the griddle and get brittle. Some chunks develop a leathery skin over creamy insides; still others are as squishy as white bread. Because potatoes are a Downeast crop, Mainers tend to pay them serious attention. “Sometimes our potatoes are from Canada,” proprietor Joely Sparks confessed. “But the Maine ones are best. We boil and cut them every day. And we cook them in a butter-margarine mix. No oil.”

As is Portland custom, when you order an egg dish, the choice of toasts to go with it includes not only white, rye, and whole wheat, but also Italian toast. Buttered and grilled, it’s a tender slice of comfort food. When we ordered our chili-cheese omelet and hesitated about what kind of toast to have with it, the waitress explained to us, “You will be having Italian toast. I don’t know why, but Italian toast goes with that. It’s the only choice.” In addition to good toast, Marcy’s offers fresh-baked muffins every morning.

Moody’s Diner

1885 Atlantic Highway (Route 1)

207–832–7785

Waldoboro, ME

BLD | $

Percy Moody started Moody’s Diner west of Duckpuddle Pond, in Waldoboro, Maine, in the early 1930s so the people spending $1.50 per night to stay in his cabins on old Route 1 would have a place to eat. His son Alvah recalls windows being covered with black gauze during World War II to prevent sighting by enemy airplanes. That was when the diner was an open-all-night waystation for truckers hauling fish out of Rockland or Belfast who used to stop for pie and coffee at two in the morning.

Although it has grown over the decades, it remains a place where hidebound ritual reigns. Alvah Moody delights in telling of the time the family was expanding the diner and considered replacing the severe straight-back wood booths with modern seating. “Everyone complained,” he says. “Even the carpenters who were going to make the booths complained. So we had them make new ones exactly like the old.”

Moody’s is no longer open around the clock, but it remains one of the top spots along the coast route for predawn breakfast. When the doors open at 4:30, morning muffins have been out of the oven long enough that you can pull one apart without searing fingertips; through the cloud of steam that erupts, a constellation of blueberries glistens in each fluffy half. “It’s a good thing you came on Thursday,” advises waitress Cheryl Durkee when we occupy a booth. “I think the girl who comes in today makes the best cinnamon rolls. They’re the tallest.” Cheryl also warns that the 1.36-ounce jug of maple syrup that costs $1.50 is enough for only two pancakes, so anyone who gets a stack of three should consider purchase of a second jug.

Thrift is a pillar of traditional New England cooking and a big part of Moody’s echt-Maine character. This is not the place you come to splurge on a full-bore shore dinner or a $12 lobster roll; in fact the restaurant’s 208-page cookbook, What’s Cooking at Moody’s Diner, doesn’t contain a single recipe for lobster. But it does offer “mock lobster bake” made with haddock fillets. Haddock, which costs less than just about any other edible fish, has been served with egg sauce every Friday for as long as any of the Moody family can remember. (At last count, over two dozen Moodys worked in the restaurant and at the motel and cabins just up the hill.)

The menu is a primer of Northeast diner fare: meat loaf and mashed potatoes; hot turkey sandwiches; a panoply of chowders, stews, and soups; red flannel hash; baked beans with brown bread; and a fabulous selection of pies, including a legendary walnut pie that is actually a gloss on Southern-style pecan pie but, as Alvah Moody proudly notes, “not sickening sweet.”

Nunan’s Lobster Hut

9 Mills Rd.

207–967–4362

Kennebunkport, ME

D (summer only) | $$

The best thing about Nunan’s Lobster Hut,