Gunga Diner

Gunga Diner is an Indian restaurant chain.

History[]

New York City[]

Gunga Diner was established by an Indian immigrant who left the country during a famine in the 1960s. Growing to the highest popularity with their delicious food, Gunga Diner established several establishments around the United States of America, including one in New York City. This establishment was notably featured at the corner of 40th and 7th across the Utopia cinema, the offices of the Promethean Cab Company, and the Institute for Extraspatial Studies.

Rorschach told Moloch to put a note in the opposite trashcan outside of the Gunga Diner if he had any information about who was behind Eddie Blake's murder. Somebody later put such a note in the trashcan, luring Rorschach to Moloch's home to be arrested. Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk met for lunch at the Gunga Diner after Laurie was evicted from the Rockefeller Military Research Center.

When Adrian Veidt's Alien Monster was teleported inside the Institute for Extraspatial Studies, the diner was destroyed. Following the attack, the site of the Gunga Diner became the home of a new restaurant called Burgers 'N' Borscht.

Trivia[]

• Gunga Diner's logo is an elephant with a howdah, and it uses a giant balloon in the shape of an elephant for advertisement.
• The name "Gunga Diner" is a literary reference to the 1890 poem "Gunga Din" by Rudyard Kipling. The poem is a rhyming narrative from the point of view of a British soldier, about a native water-bearer (a "bhisti") who saves the soldier's life but dies himself. This poem is perhaps best known for its often-quoted final line: "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din". Like several Kipling poems, it celebrates the virtues of a non-European while simultaneously revealing the racism of a colonial infantryman who views people such as the native water-bearer as "inferior" and belonging to a "lower order". The poem was published as one of the set of martial poems called the Barrack-Room Ballads.
• Burgers 'N' Borscht symbolically demonstrates a move away from isolation and colonialism (as represented by Gunga Diner) and towards globalism and, in particular, smoother relations with the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the 11/2 catastrophe, as borscht is a Ukrainian soup dish.

Behind the Scenes[]

• In a 1987 interview, Alan Moore explained, "It was Dave Gibbons' idea to have Indian restaurants instead of McDonald's, and that made sense because there's a different political situation in this world, there's going to be wars in different places. In our story, some sort of conflict in Asia has caused a massive famine in India, so there's been a massive amount of Indian and Asian refugees teeming into America, and consequently, you've got Indian food catching on, and you've got this stream of Gunga Diners stretching across the country."