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Sunday, June 15, 2008

Sunday Diner Blogging
Posted by Jill | 8:24 AM
Last night, with the weather looking threatening, Mr. Brilliant and I changed our plans to have his delayed birthday celebration dinner at the Porter House, an Irish pub that has the nicest outdoor seating in Bergen County, and go to Jack's Cafe instead.

Jack's is an interesting place. It's an old railroad car-style diner that's had trouble keeping a tenant for as long as we've lived in the area. It was a well-reviewed breakfast-and-lunch place called Susan's for a while, and a Chock Full O'Nuts (yes, really) for a while, and now it's Jack's Cafe.

Bergen County restaurants have a very personal relationship with their customers, and for all that there's often high turnover, loyalty runs deep. If a chef goes to another restaurant, the clientele often follows. If a place has been there for decades, and a competing place opens up, the original usually wins that battle. For example, if you opened a thin-crust pizza bar on Franklin Turnpike in Mahwah, you'd be going up against the venerable Kinchley's, and it wouldn't matter how good your pizza was, you would get your ass kicked. Because you don't mess with the Kinchley's. The comings and goings of northern New Jersey restaurants are chronicled in Second Helpings, the food blog of the Bergen Record newspaper.

Chris D'Eletto used to own the adorable Backstreet Cafe, a little place hidden away on a side street in Westwood, NJ now doing business as the Harmony Tea Room. Backstreet had a small-but-loyal clientele that was ready and waiting for D'Eletto to open up again, this time in a more prime location. Jack's is kind of an acquired taste, because two people can easily rack up a $100 check, which seems like a lot in a place that still looks like a diner and where your food is served by a kid in a T-shirt. But the food is fantastic, and the homemade desserts LOOK fantastic, though after a half-plate of blackened tilapia over sesame noodles with steamed vegetables (Mr. B. ate the other half, since it was far too much for me), the thought of homemade carrot cake, or apple pie, or strawberry cheesecake, was more than I could handle.

That Jack's seems to be succeeding may be as much due to the New Jersey fondness for diners as it is to the food. Diners have always fascinated me, mostly because I wonder how any eatery can possibly dish up as many different things as you can get in a diner. Of course, most diners don't do anything other than breakfast particularly well, but the good ones do a decent, reliable burger or sandwich or danish-and-coffee. There are exceptions, such as the State Line Family Restaurant in Tappan, New York, which is the rare case of a diner with upscale pretentions that appears to be owned by Latinos instead of Greeks, and where your lunch special chicken cheesesteak is as likely to come with yucca fries and garlic dipping oil as french fries -- if you can even eat it after a cup of the best split pea soup on the face of the earth.

But the diner is as much a part of New Jersey lore as The Sopranos, which may be why so many scenes were shot in them. One of our favorite waste-of-time shows is Guy Fieri's Drive-ins, Diners and Dives on the Food Network, a show that recently profiled both the Tick-Tock Diner, a frequent Sopranos filming site, and the famous White Manna Hamburgers in Hackensack -- a place that is reputed to have great hamburgers, but which resembles a White Castle too much for me to even try, traumatized as I was by the aftermath of a visit to the White Castle on Elmora Avenue in Elizabeth, circa 1967. Here's Guy doing reconnaissance with the owners of the Jefferson Diner in Lake Hopatcong:





...and at the Brownstone Diner in Jersey City:





When you watch this show, you become aware of why so much Lipitor is sold in this country. But sometimes, watching those drippy, loosely-packed burgers, dripping with soft cheese, fried onions, lettuce, tomato, ketchup and pickle relish, makes you willing to sell your soul to Satan just to have one. Of course, now the beef is about to become scarce and may be riddled with E Coli and the lettuce and tomatoes may be contaminated with salmonella, so someday the old footage from this show will be the closest any American gets to a cheeseburger anymore.

The good old-fashioned New Jersey diner seems to be enjoying a renaissance of late. The Forum in Paramus, which had the best cheesecake on the face of the earth, has gone out of business after trying to hard to turn itself into a fine dining restaurant, with lots of wood carving and fancy food names, and still keep counter service, at least the trend of the 1990's to put false facades on diners to make them look less, well, dinerish, seems to be falling by the wayside. A new diner just opening on Route 303 in Blauvelt, New York, may not be made from an old railroad car, but it's built to look like one. I wonder if it has boomerang formica booth tables.

Why Jack's seems to be succeeding despite its use of sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, brie, and other menu items associated with the latte-and-Volvo set is anyone's guess. I think it's because D'Eletto is confident enough in the quality of his food to say loudly and clearly, "Hey...you can't eat the atmosphere."

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5 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
The Forum closed!? No fucking way!!

I hope the Red Oak Diner right on the Fort Lee-Englewood Cliffs border is still there!
6/15/08, 11:49 AM  
Blogger Jill said...
Way! But the Red Oak Diner is still there. :)
6/15/08, 1:45 PM  
Blogger Bob said...
I don't think the typical diner does breakfast all that well. A diner that serves a memorable breakfast probably does a lot of food well. But Denny's does a better American high fat breakfast than most diners. It's what the owner likes to eat that matters, which is of course why Greek diners often have some decent Greek food on the menu. & also who makes their pastries.
6/15/08, 2:01 PM  
Blogger Jill said...
I've never found that Greek food in Greek diners is all that good. Give me the stuff dished out at A Taste of Greece in Oradell or at Greek Village in Northvale any day.
6/15/08, 7:07 PM  
Blogger Larry said...
Most diners were not made from train cars. Diners are generally factory-built (prefabricated), sectionalized buildings. The ones from 1920 thru 1950 had a railroad inspired design.
Larry Cultrera, Diner Hotline
7/1/08, 12:43 PM  
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