One holiday down, two to go. With the holiday season finally upon us, it's time to break out the cheery smiles and the bonhomie, time to brush off that forced good cheer. Time to eat too much, drink too much, and generally try to bury your sorrows under blankets of carbs and fat and whatever cheap wine they're serving at the company holiday party this year. Perhaps you're already burned out? Barely a week into the season is the omnipresent Christmas music starting to sound a bit shrill? After the remains of the pumpkin pie had been whisked away and the turkey platter packed back up for another year, were you already wishing for a return to the familiar, looking for a little bit of everyday reason amid the drive to do and consume? Are you already craving somewhere, in a word, normal? Then let me suggest a visit to the South Wedge Diner on Clinton Avenue.

On a recent Sunday morning, searching for the sort of breakfast that only a solid diner can provide, we found our way to the South Wedge Diner and took our place in a quick-moving line of people waiting for tables. The counter and every table and booth were full, the waitresses little more than blurs streaking across the dining room bearing gargantuan plates full of potatoes and eggs and near-boiling cups of strong, black coffee. Apart from two swags of red garland criss-crossing the room and a couple of red paper Chinese lamps - testimony to the restaurant's split identity as a provider of both solid American diner fare and reasonable Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese food - the dining room is almost spartan. It's a bare stage set furnished with mauve booths and black chairs on which a thousand little dramas are played out or at least talked about every day. We barely had time to take it all in before we were seated and our waitress appeared, order pad at the ready.

A word about breakfast service is in order. As mentioned, on a Sunday morning the South Wedge Diner is absolutely packed. When we sat down I was prepared for service both perfunctory and slow. The opposite was true. Not only was coffee on the table before my caffeine-starved brain could articulate my need, but our waitress also noticed my 7-year-old dining companion chowing down on a packet of strawberry jam and produced a plate of warm and freshly buttered toast out of thin air.

In some ways, South Wedge is the sort of diner in which you could order your breakfast without ever looking at the menu. You'd be just fine ordering up a couple of eggs over medium with a side of spicy-savory sausage, and a heap of tender, well-seasoned home fries with a satisfying quantity of those crunchy browned bits that elevate home fries from good to great. But then you'd miss out on the diner's new takes on breakfast and brunch standards.

My wife, given to experimentation and fond of hollandaise, settled on a variation on eggs in a basket that included bacon and a generous pool of creamy sauce ($7.95). The eggs, cooked in a circular window cut into slices of thick Texas toast, were a study in primary yellow and snowy white against the tawny toast, the sauce adding just the right balance of acid and cream and the bacon giving a welcome savory edge. I found myself snagging dollops of hollandaise with bits of homefries throughout the meal.

My sausage gravy and biscuits were equally good, the gravy peppery and meaty, full of chunks of loose sausage enriched with both red pepper and a bit of what tasted like fennel seed ($7.95). The biscuits, flaky and dense, made a great sponge and sop, but I found myself wishing that I had another one to slather with jam and butter and use in lieu of a knife to push bits of bread and meat onto my fork.

A few days later I returned to the South Wedge Diner for lunch, craving comfort food. The lunch menu is an eclectic mix of diner classics and updates along with Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese specialties. I stuck to the familiar, ordering a turkey reuben and fries ($7.50, plus $1 for fries instead of chips). I was expecting that the fries would be the typical crinkle-cuts that seem to be the spuds of choice for so many diners and hots stands in the area, but these were much better: freshly cut and clearly blanched in hot oil before being crisped golden brown, tossed in salt and heaped on my plate. Too hot to touch, but too tasty to leave alone, I kept searing my fingertips throughout my lunch. The turkey reuben was a model of its kind. Although the bread was thicker and squishier than I would have liked, it had good flavor, fried up nicely, and was sturdy enough to stand up to the hefty amount of turkey, sauerkraut, and cheese piled on it. I was prepared for "turkey" cut from some food-service lozenge of meat, but the thick slices of breast meat piled on my sandwich looked and tasted like they'd been cut from a freshly cooked bird - juicy, meaty, and a bit sweet in their own right, a nice companion for salty sauerkraut and Thousand Island dressing.

The one thing that a good diner like the South Wedge can do is bring you back to earth, and there's no other diner dish that does that better than an open-faced meatloaf sandwich slathered in brown gravy and served over bread with a sphere of mashed potatoes on the side ($7.50). At South Wedge, the meatloaf is loose rather than dense, studded with bits of green pepper and onion, and seasoned with little more than pepper and salt. The tiny dish of finely sliced and lightly dressed cole slaw served with it will allow you to tell yourself that you had your veggies for lunch while you slip into a delicious, gravy-covered carbohydrate coma - just what the doctor ordered to beat those holiday blues.

To find South Wedge Diner in City Newspaper's online Restaurant Guide - including a map, user reviews, and more - click here.

South Wedge Diner

880 S. Clinton Ave.

(585) 271-3190, southwedgediner.com

Monday-Saturday 7 a.m.-9 p.m., Sunday 7 a.m.-3 p.m.