The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Miss Flo Diner

Florence, as you know, is a city in Italy. Michelangelo and Dante lived there and did some of their best work there. The Medicis had a palace and lots of shiny things there. The skyline is dominated by a gigantic domed cathedral, the streets buzz with hundreds of motor scooters, and the cafes serve some of the best ice cream and sandwiches (but not, to my knowledge, ice-cream sandwiches) in the world. If you go there, however, be prepared to share the city's quite compressed spaces with thousands of other tourists who've come looking for the same Renaissancey magic that you have. Because of the overwhelming presence of these tourists, you will have a hard time locating said magic.

For those of you looking for something off the beaten path, might I recommend another destination? It doesn't have a cathedral, no famous poets or artists call it home, and there's a distinct lack - perhaps even a total absence - of buzzing motor scooters, but it does have a pizza parlor, where you can enjoy authentic Italian cuisine; a coffee shop, that (surely) serves Italian-style espresso and lattes; an ice cream (aka, American gelato) shop called Friendly's (motto: "Where Ice Cream Makes the Meal"); and a vegan cafe called Cafe Evolution, two words which are the same, more or less, in Italian and English.

I'm speaking, of course, of Florence, Massachuessts, a village of Northampton (don't ask me how these screwy municipal boundaries work - I don't make the rules, I just abide by them) that also happens to be home of one of the most striking diners in all of New England: the Miss Florence Diner, known colloquially as the Miss Flo.



Good luck finding something like that in Italy.

Now, I'll not repeat myself on the general topic of diners. Suffice it to say that what I like about the Miss Flo has more to do with the ambience than the food. If any of my Boston readers are familiar with the Rosebud Diner in Somerville, you've got a pretty good idea of what the Miss Flo looks like, on the inside at least, as I'm pretty sure they were made by the same people. It's a dining-car style diner, which means that before it was tied to the earth with bricks and mortar it was, in principle, portable. Eating inside of it - even after the considerable remodeling that's gone on since the place was established in 1941 - one is reminded of what once made diners so revolutionary, the vaulted ceilings and streamlined chromework evoking an era in which mobility, speed, and cheapness in dining were all quite novel and, consequently, exciting.



When I visited the other day, most of my fellow patrons were old enough to remember when the Miss Flo was, indeed, at the forefront of dining technology. Which is to say, they were really old. Cracking open the menu, I noticed that the type of french toast served at the Miss Flo is called Texas French Toast. This confirmed my slowly building suspicion that french toast, like pizza and hot dogs, is subject to regional variations - never mind that I have never seen Texas French Toast in Texas itself, nor, for that matter, have I ever had Memphis French Toast in Memphis. Have you ever had plain old (i.e., non-French) Texas Toast? It's served quite often in Oklahoma and is a sort of garlic-and-butter extravaganza of lightly toasted white bread cut very, very thick but somehow also managing to be light as air. I couldn't wait to see what this might be like once it had been frenchified by the Miss Flo's chefs. I was also delighted to see that whoever had typed up the menu was clearly so excited by this particular item that he/she got a little carried away with the "p" key. Here's what it said, verbatim:

A true delicacy! Three one-inch thick slices of bread hand-dipped, toppped with cinnampn and sugar and grilled to golden perfection.

This was promising indeed, as was the motto I spotted emblazoned across the back of my server's t-shirt: "Ain't No Finer Diner." While Tammy Wynette sang "Stand By Your Man" on the radio and elderly couples filed in from church, I ordered my Texas French Toast in full confidence that this would be a memorable experience.

That confidence, I am sorry to report, was somewhat misplaced. The toast was indeed cinnampny and sugary, there were indeed three slices of bread, each sliced once again for presentation's sake (making for a total of six slices, if my math is correct), and there may well have been some sugar involved, but the meal as a whole was pretty uninteresting. It was, I suppose, pretty much your standard french toast: not too mushy, not too fancy, perfectly serviceable on the whole, but very, very far from perfect. And it was very far from what I know actual Texas Toast to be. Take a look and you'll see what I mean:



Yeah, that's what I said.

T-shirt mottoes notwithstanding, then, it's a reasonable certainty that there are, in fact, finer diners than the Miss Flo, at least when it comes to french toast. Nevertheless, I'll bet it's a good sight better than what you'd find at any comparable diner in the other Florence. The Italians are great at lots of things, but they really don't know squat about french toast.