21 | South Street Diner — Where the Count Gets Explained

The team takes the new recruit to a diner and lays it out over coffee: the count is not cheating, the signals are simple, the discipline is everything. That scene was shot at the South Street Diner, on the corner of Kneeland and South Streets at the edge of Boston's Chinatown, and the place has barely changed.

It is a real diner in the strict sense — a prefabricated 1947 car, chrome and glass block, wedged under a brick building with an enormous neon coffee cup bolted to the roof. It is open 24 hours, and its busiest stretch is between one and four in the morning, when the bars empty and cab drivers, nurses and students end up on the same eight stools. The booths are small enough that a conversation about card counting would be perfectly audible three feet away, which is why the scene works: it is a terrible place to keep a secret, and they keep one anyway.

Go late. Sit at the counter, order eggs, and watch the neon cup throw red across the wet street outside. Nobody there will look twice at what you are talking about.