Severance is a mystery satire about corporate work cultures, centered on the omnipresent (and cult-like) company of Lumon run by the Eagan family. Select Lumon employees — like Adam Scott’s Mark and Britt Lower’s Helly — undergo a procedure known as “severance,” which splits them into two selves: an office self (“innies”) and a real-world self (“outies”). The restaurant Pip’s takes its name from a member of the Eagan family, Phillip “Pip” Eagan. But the name also works as a play on performance improvement plans (aka PIPS), formal documentation given to employees to course-correct at work.
And that’s where Phoenicia Diner stepped in. Before the Emmy-winning series premiered, Courtney Malsatzki, the restaurant’s director of operations, received an email saying that a new Apple TV program was interested in filming at the diner and asked if they could visit. She agreed, and it happened to be Ben Stiller, the executive producer and director for Severance. He visited the diner with another person involved with Severance, and they sat in the same booth that would later be used on the show. “They spent a few hours there and they were just like mapping scenes,” Malsatzki says. “So I was immediately like, ‘I think they’re filming here.’”
At the time, Malsatzki couldn’t talk about what was happening until the trailer aired, but keeping the secret was tricky. The restaurant had to close down for filming and the exterior and interior changes were obvious. “We had so many emails,” she tells Eater, especially when the temporary Pip’s sign was put up. “I was getting 100 emails a day — ‘I can’t believe you closed;’ ‘What are you thinking?’ — hate emails, sad emails, just everything.”
Once the first trailer aired in January 2022, “it was a huge stress release,” she says. “Not only was it cool to see how they made it look and see somewhere you love on the big TV, it was also like, ‘Okay, everybody knows. Thank god.’” The resulting scene shows Mark dining at the restaurant because he got a gift card from Lumon to make up for a work injury.
For the second season of Severance, Phoenicia Diner returns as Pip’s. This time, it serves as the setting for a scene where Mark and his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) have an important discussion at a booth along the window while drinking mugs of hot coffee. At the same time, a Lumon henchman lingers at the counter, spying on them.
Severance turns the throwback charm of Phoenicia Diner’s on itself, making the diner, a place that’s universally comforting and familiar, into a more insidious backdrop in a town that threatens to turn people into mindless cogs.
