The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Coolidge Park Cafe

The search is over.

After an intense and, at times, harrowing survey of every single breakfast-serving establishment in the greater NoHo/Amherst area, after eating sixteen(!) different orders of french toast (plus a handful of repeats, in addition to some recreational french toast consumed in Okla. City and Madison, WI), I am prepared to award the title of The Perfect French Toast to...

Ah ah ah - not so fast. First I need to tell you about my visit to the Coolidge Park Cafe, a visit that damn near queered the pitch.

The Coolidge Park Cafe is part of the Hotel Northampton, a massive 1927 building that looms over NoHo like a slumbering beast. I had never been inside the place but had long admired the audacity of it, the way it crawls right up to the edge of King Street and dwarfs the people below, seeming to say, "You are in Northampton, people, and don't forget it!" It's an appropriately grand structure for a town that likes to see itself as much more than a simple New England village, with sturdy brick and a neo-colonial facade that hint at a sort of old-fashioned luxury within. It looks, in short, very expensive.

If you want to have breakfast at the Coolidge Park Cafe at the Hotel Northampton, you should get there early. The first time Kate and I tried to go, about 10:15 on a Friday morning, they had already stopped serving breakfast at 10:00. So we went back the next morning (time is short: I'm leaving town this Friday, so I really don't have time to monkey around) and tried again. The hotel lobby was traditional but tasteful - there was the black-framed portrait above the fireplace, here were the striped, upholstered chairs - and the cafe was largely empty. I had the impression that the cafe doesn't cater much to people who aren't staying at the hotel - more locals may go to the Wiggins Tavern, a reconstructed 18th-century tavern annexed to the back of the hotel, but it wasn't open during our visit - and I deduced that the current recession must have severely cut down on the number of tourists willing to shell out the however-much it costs to stay there, but I may be wrong about that.

In any event, the lack of people meant we got a good seat - facing a window facing down King Street, even if this also had us facing into the (pre-10am) sun - although it didn't ensure terribly prompt service. When we got the chance to order I asked for the "Texas Size French Toast," despite not having an entirely positive experience of similarly-designated french toasts elsewhere. Sure enough, when the toast arrived it was neither "Texas Size" nor made of "texas toast," the latter being an especially delicious, butter-and-garlic delicacy found in places in and around Texas that would, nevertheless, probably not be very good in french form. Instead, it looked like regular old triangle-cut bread with a sprinking of powdered sugar and a bit of fruit garnish.



But my god was it good. The bread was crisp on the outside and grainy and hearty on the inside. The maple syrup was real and delightful. And the whole thing was overpoweringly, almost scandalously, cinnamony. Reader, if you love cinnamon, I suggest you drop what you're doing right now and get thee to the Hotel Northampton immediately (just be sure to arrive between the hours of 7am and 10am, Eastern Time). If it wasn't nearly 8pm here, I think I'd go back right now.

This french toast was so good, in fact, that it put me in a bit of a pickle. See, I was hoping that it'd be terrible or at least bland or even merely good, so that I could declare a clear winner - that'd be the Lone Wolf - and get on with my life. But it'd been so long since I'd had the Lone Wolf's french toast that I found myself in a state of deep uncertainty. Was the Lone Wolf's french toast as tender and tasty as this one? Had I overestimated the Lone Wolf's french toast because it came after a string of substandard varieties? Was I looking back at the Lone Wolf through rose-colored glasses?

There was only one way to answer these questions: a Toast-Off.

Well, okay, so it wasn't exactly a Toast-Off. I simply decided that I needed to go back to the Lone Wolf and settle things once and for all. And so, early this morning, Kate and I made the long drive over to Amherst - a drive that's actually not that long but that seems endless when you haven't had breakfast yet (as was the case for Kate) or have only had one breakfast and really need a second one (as was the case with me).

When the toast arrived, it was just as I remembered it. Pretty triangles of thickly sliced challah bread artistically arranged in a circular pattern around the plate, dusted with powdered sugar and lightly browned. Actually, it was a bit more lightly browned than my last serving, but one has to allow for the occasional inconsistency when dealing with something as mercurial as french toast. Eating it was like visiting an old friend: all the old elements of enjoyment were still there, and this encouraged lingering and savoring. As before, I found the inside of the toast refreshingly free of mush (even the Coolidge Park's french toast had been a tad mushy, though not, it must be noted, eggy). As before, it held the syrup well and was even a bit chewy. And, as before, it was almost more than I could eat - this is the only french toast of the sixteen that has been almost more than I could eat - but I still managed to power through to the end.

And the verdict? I'm very pleased, after a hard-fought, last-minute battle, to award the title of The Perfect French Toast to the challah french toast at the Lone Wolf in Amherst, MA. Ding ding ding ding!

Coming in at a very close second place: The Coolidge Park Cafe

Third place goes to: Cafe Esselon.

Honorable mentions: The Green Street Cafe, Amanouz Cafe, and the Haymarket.

In the category of Best Diner French Toast: Look Restaurant.

And coming in dead last, in a category all by itself, a french toast that is almost sublime in its awfulness: Kathy's Diner.

Thank you for accompanying me on this journey. It's been fun for me and, I hope, educational for you. And in case you're wondering - yes, I never want to have french toast again.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Sylvester's

Of all the Valley's famous residents, Sylvester Graham is probably the least-remembered and the most intriguing. Most people know at least a little bit about Calvin Coolidge, Sojourner Truth, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson, but very few people know about old Sylvester - or, if they do, they don't know that they do. This is because the graham cracker was named after him. There is some dispute as to whether Sylvester actually invented the graham cracker or if it was simply given his name because it was originally made using the "graham flour" that he helped to popularize in the nineteenth century, but in either case his is a significant contribution to the annals of American food culture for that reason alone.

But that's not why he's intriguing. He's intriguing because he was the first American dietary guru, and because he was among the first to adopt that oh-so-American habit of equating dietary choices with moral choices (anyone who has ever heard a dessert described as "decadent" or "sinful" has Graham to thank). For Graham, good health depended on curbing appetites, whether digestive or sexual, and adhering to a strict, ascetic lifestyle. Meat, he felt, inflamed the stomach as well as the carnal passions, and thus should be avoided entirely (late in life he helped found one of the country's earliest vegetarian societies). For the same reasons condiments were to be shunned, as were tight corsets, feather beds, enriched flour (hence his development of unenriched "graham flour"), and, of course, masturbation (the ill effects of the latter could clearly be seen in outbreaks of acne among adolescents). Many of his prescriptions were, in fact, quite healthful, though often not for the reasons he thought. He promoted regular exercise, for instance, believing that it would prevent nocturnal emissions, and many a modern-day nutritionist would endorse his advocacy of a meat-free diet rich in whole grains, even if they might be a bit more lenient when it came to feather beds.

Graham emerged during a period of intense reforming zeal in American history, preaching his food gospel (he was, fittingly, a Presbyterian minister) during the 1820s and 1830s, during the so-called Second Great Awakening. Just to the west of here, in the "burned-over district" of upstate New York, Joseph Smith was founding the Latter Day Saints after being visited by the angel Moroni, who showed him golden plates detailing Christ's visits to the ancient Israelite inhabitants of the Americas. Also among Graham's neighbors were the Shakers, who first started getting the shakes around this time; the Fox sisters, whose seances became national sensations; and John Noyes, who founded the utopian commune at Oneida, NY, where residents simultaneously practiced group marriage and discouraged male ejaculation - no mean feat, that, but one of which Graham must surely have approved.

Graham's legacy, apart from the eponymous cracker, is primarily felt today in the breakfast cereal aisle of your local grocery store. James Caleb Jackson, a Graham disciple, developed the first breakfast cereal, called Granula, from his teacher's whole-grain principles. John Harvey Kellogg, brother of W. K. Kellogg (whose signature, found on millions of cereal boxes worldwide, is second only to John Hancock's as the most famous in America), was another Graham follower, and his famous sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan (the setting of T.C. Boyle's book The Road to Wellville and the film of the same name) updated and popularized Graham's teaching in the late 19th century. Kellogg developed his own cereal (the first of which he named Granola, after a court battle deprived him of the name Granula), and he and his brother went on to build a breakfast cereal empire that, over time, came to have only a tenuous connection to Graham's original principles.

It's fitting, therefore, that Graham's Northampton home, where he died in 1851, should now be one of the Valley's most popular brunch destinations. Until very recently the servers' t-shirts said, on the back, "Rain or Shine, There's Always a Line," and it's true, especially on weekends - if you're trying to get into Sylvester's on a sunny Sunday morning, you'd better bring a book and prepare to wait a while. In many ways, however, Graham would be thoroughly appalled by what's become of his former home. Not only does the restaurant serve bread baked with enriched flour (Graham famously clashed with Boston bakers in 1837 over his opposition to their industrially manufactured bread), it also serves coffee and tea (Graham was opposed to all stimulants), as well as meat of every kind. The place might as well be filled with masturbating teenagers in corsets.



Still, it's a pretty good brunch spot, although one sometimes gets the feeling that they're coasting on their reputation. The food is good, but it's not outstanding, and the menu is seldom innovative like it is at, say, the Green Bean or the Lone Wolf. They do, however, offer a range of french toasts - in addition to the usual choice of white or wheat, there is also banana bread, cinnamon raisin, and apple. On a recent visit, in the spirit of Sylvester Graham, I opted for the most whole-grain french toast I could find - the kind made with Oatmeal Sunflower Seed Bread. My expectations were high, given the popularity of the restaurant and the karmic appropriateness of eating this specific variety of french toast in Graham's own house, but I'm afraid it wasn't the transcendent experience I was expecting. Mind you, it was perfectly serviceable french toast - nicely crisp on the outside, a little cinnamony, the scattered sunflower seeds enlivening the task of masticating - but it was eggy and mushy inside, and it lacked powdered sugar. It certainly didn't inflame my passions - which, I suppose, would have suited the original Sylvester just fine.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Look Restaurant

I know, I know. You thought I'd forgotten about this little quest, right? Indeed, you were probably hoping I'd forgotten about it, huh? (I'm looking at you, Dr C.) Well I hate to ruin your morning, but it's just not my way to leave a task undone. Especially when that task involves bread and syrup and eggs and sometimes powdered sugar and cinnamon.

Am I getting tired of french toast? You bet your life I am. But am I going to let that deter me from fighting this fight through to the final round? No, I am not.

The good news for all of you haters out there is that we are, indeed, quickly reaching said final round. According to my calculations, there are only three establishments within the vague geographic range that I've set for myself that I've yet to talk about - one of which I'll dispose of presently, and quite succinctly at that. The other two are Valley institutions that I've been needing to talk about anyway, and then we'll be done. And, as God is my witness, I'll never have to eat french toast again.

The Look Restaurant is itself something of a Valley institution. It's located just north of the entrance to Look Park, named after Frank Newhall Look, whose wife, Fannie, donated the land to the city of Northampton in his honor. Frank was the chief executive of the Prophylactic Brush Company from 1877 to 1911, and, before you all start tittering, you should know that the Prophylactic Brush Company was one of the first (if not the first) mass producers of plastic toothbrushes in the nation. They also made hair brushes and other brushy things. The company was bought by the Lambert Company in 1930, the same year Fannie donated the land for the park to honor her husband, and subsequently became a division of Standard Oil, as most things did at that time. The park itself is one of the loveliest around - there are walking and biking paths, a serene pond surrounded by groves of tall evergreens, a miniature train, and even a small zoo, though if you go there expecting giraffes and elephants you're going to be sorely disappointed (as I was). Similarly, if you go to Look Park without first obtaining a permit for your picnic, you're likely to be chucked into the pond. Ah well - we live in a society, after all, and societies have their rules. More pleasantly, the park also has an amphitheater and a summer concert series, whose performers this year have included Gordon Lightfoot, Joan Baez, and Tom Jones. It's not unusual, if you'll pardon my saying so, to wish you'd actually made it to see Tom Jones.

This is what the Look Park looks (excuse the pun) like:



The best thing about the Look Restaurant, which you spot as you drive along Route 9 past the park, is that, as you pass it, you can say, "Look! Restaurant!" In fact, you can say this every time you pass it, in the same exact way, to the same exact person, and it will always be funny. Trust me.



The least good thing about the Look Restaurant is that the interior looks like a hospital commissary. The pastel colors and fluorescent lights give the place a sickly, washed-out look, and this effect is only slightly overcome by the several pleasant pieces of art that hang on the walls, including one large, framed photograph of a serving of french toast.

"Aha!" I thought, as I spied this piece of vernacular art. "Any place that has a large, framed photograph of french toast hanging on its walls must have good french toast!"

On examining the photograph further, I noted that the toast in the picture appeared to be coated in lacquer. It was probably supposed to be butter, but this toast was far to glistening to be covered in actual butter, which, as we all know, seeps into french toast fairly quickly and doesn't exactly shimmer in the light of a flashbulb. Or maybe it was laminated. Whatever it was, it was very shiny, and I began to have my doubts.

I was also surprised to find that the Look Restaurant, despite its name, is, in fact, a diner. There's a long counter with stools, behind which the cooks do their thing amidst their cooking equipment, and there were some benches along the walls. The customers were of the sort typically found in the area's diners - elderly folks, families, casually dressed businessmen, the sorts of people Tracy Kidder, in Home Town, describes as natives, and whom I've been less charitably referring to as townies. Indeed, the Look Restaurant plays a considerable role in Kidder's book as the favorite dining establishment of Tommy, the cop who's the principal subject of the book.

That's how I know the Look Restaurant is a Valley institution.

In any case, the folks at the Look were certainly friendly. I had a brief conversation with an older gentleman sitting beside me about the economy (he wasn't optimistic), flipped through the morning's Daily Hampshire Gazette, which someone had kindly left on the counter for me, and noted that most of the folks in there clearly came by quite a bit - they knew the servers, and they knew one another. Indeed, so locals-down-at-the-diner was the place that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a presidential candidate, with entourage, sweep into the place and start shaking hands and taking pictures. If we had been in New Hampshire, I'm pretty sure that would have happened.




As for the french toast, it was not bad. It certainly could have been a lot worse - at least it wasn't coated in poisonous chemicals, like the one on the wall. They offered a choice of white, wheat, cinnamon raisin, or banana bread, as well as real maple syrup for an extra $1.50. I went with the wheat, with the real maple syrup. The slices were nice and thick, cooked just right with a thin, crisp crust on both sides, and the syrup gave it plenty of sweetness to make up for the absence of powdered sugar. In all, it was probably the best diner french toast I've had in the area.

Which isn't saying much, but it is saying something.

Look! French toast!

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Sully's

This quest is really starting to take its toll.

It seemed like a harmless idea several months ago, maybe even a fun idea - to scour the Valley for great french toast and report back to you, the great big world, about what I found. Along the way I'd learn something not only about french toast (with respect to which, I may modestly assert, I'm becoming quite discerning), but also about the place I was living. It would be an excuse to peer into the many nooks and crannies into which the great, diverse masses wander in search of breakfast and coffee and conversation, a way to touch the Valley's soul. I have, it's true, been amply rewarded for my troubles. I have learned much, I have traveled widely, and I have eaten some very good french toast.

But I have also seen shit that would turn you white.

First there was my diner juggernaut, which culminated in that traumatizing visit to Kathy's. Several weeks later, I still wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about the sickly, crusty slime that I ate there. Lately, I'm even finding myself unable to take pleasure in pure, simple things - a child's laughter, a kitten drinking from a bowl of milk, a baby clinging to her mother's shoulder - without a sudden vision of Kathy's french toast flashing before my eyes (and nostrils) and reminding me of the evil of which this world is capable.

Now there's Sully's, a place I had long been dying to visit, enticed as I was by the sign on Route 9 that advertises the place as "The Home of Polish Music." "Polish music!" I thought, "This place must have great french toast! Ooh, I wonder if it's Polish french toast! Whoopee!"

Oh, gentle reader, how wrong I was.

The first thing that strikes you on entering Sully's is the distinct lack of Polish music, or, indeed, of anything that might indicate that Polish music ever has, or ever will be, performed there, much less would make its home there. The menus - blue rectangles of unlaminated construction paper dappled with stains from long-ago meals, stains so severe that they render whole sections of the menu utterly unreadable - contain not a whiff even of Polish food, other than a side of kielbasa that you can order with your meal, if you dare. There is, it's true, a photograph of a local band hanging on one wall, though there is nothing about this photograph to suggest either a) that the band is even remotely Polish, or b) that it has ever played at Sully's.

The next thing that strikes you about Sully's is how old everything is. Not good-old - like, say, Istanbul's Galata neighborhood - but bad-old, like what happened to the cheese you inadvertantly left out on the counter before you went off to Istanbul for a week. Along one wall there hang large, faded yellow banners celebrating the sporting triumphs of the Hopkins Academy soccer and softball teams between the years 1979 and 1983 (said academy, incidentally, has recently been spotted with a "For Sale" sign posted on their roadside marquee). Above the counter there hang photographs of children who are probably nearing retirement age by now. The floor is covered in ratty carpet abundantly splattered with dark stains and covered with large crumbs, some of them approaching crouton size. The menus, as already noted, are in dire need of a good disinfecting. The decor, such as it is, is a hodgepodge of knicknacks of the sort that you usually find in the "free" box after a yard sale, the centerpiece being a large bass - the fish, not the musical instrument - mounted on a plank hanging on the wall and looking for all the world like it's going to escape out the back door.



The setting, then, was less than auspicious, but still we (Kate, the poor dear, was with me) decided to make a go of it. Intrigued by a faded handwritten sign advertising potato pancakes, we ordered some, thinking that this might add a bit of Polish flavor to our breakfast. In the same spirit, I also ordered my french toast with a side of sausage, thinking that it might, in fact, be Polish sausage. Not a bit of it. The sausage was two black hockey pucks of standard breakfast sausage, and the "potato pancakes" were, in fact, hash browns molded halfheartedly into three flat, uneven discs.

And the french toast? It was certainly a notch or two above Kathy's, but that is faint praise indeed. There was no powdered sugar, the syrup was corn syrup, and overall there was little of what might be described as flavor. But that's not necessarily a bad thing - if the ambiance was anything to go by, the less flavor one encounters at Sully's, the better. It could easily have been much, much worse.



And so the search for The Perfect French Toast beats on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into my belly.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Green Street Cafe

Sunday was Mother's Day, and Mother's Day means brunch. And brunch, in my world, means french toast. So it was pretty much a given that I would spend the morning of Mother's Day munching on pan-grilled bread drizzled with syrup. Never mind that my mother is several thousand miles away - I'm sure that if she had been here, she would have wanted to be taken to brunch, and, had that been the case, I would probably have taken her to the Green Street Cafe, which stands about a block from my apartment, just across the street from Smith College.

So it was in honor of both of our absent mothers that Kate and I ventured out yesterday morning, timing our visit to coincide with the opening of the cafe at 10am, reasoning, not without reason, that the place would quickly fill up with people who had made the same Mother's Day plans as we did, albeit accompanied by their actual mothers.

Sure enough, when we walked through the door the jolly, white-haired, ponytailed man that greeted us said to Kate, "Well you don't look old enough to be a mother!" Which is not strictly true - a woman in her late 20s, no matter how youthful looking, could certainly be a mother (indeed, back home it's practically required) - but I suppose he may have meant that she didn't look old enough to be my mother, which is certainly true. Though I'd humbly submit that my actual mother doesn't look old enough to be mother, either. But that's neither here nor there.

As it happened, the cafe wasn't very busy, although a steady stream of families did file in while we dined. This gave us an opportunity to contemplate the most striking feature of the Green Street Cafe, a vibrant mural that takes up an entire wall along the cafe's west side. The mural, called "Last Staff Supper at Green Street Cafe," is modeled on Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and depicts a group of people - cafe employees and owners - gathered around a Christ-ish figure holding a blueprint. Here are some photos I took; better ones are here.



The artist, Jeff Mack, painted it to raise awareness of the long-festering dispute between the cafe and its landlady, Smith College. It's a classic town-gown quarrel: the college, which owns the cafe as well as most of the surrounding neighborhood, is building a new engineering building that's disrupting business and threatens eventually to obliterate the block of buildings in which the cafe sits. The cafe's parking lot has been closed for nearly two years due to the construction, as has its outdoor patio, and this, say the owners, has cost the cafe some 75% of its business. The mural was painted almost three years ago, when the dispute began, but things are only now starting to get settled - in March the cafe owners filed a lawsuit, and in April a judge found in favor of the college. Smith promises to look after the interests of the neighborhood, but the cafe's lease runs out in 2012, after which the Green Street Cafe could well cease to exist.

Which would be a shame, because it's a very friendly place that serves some very wonderful food. They grow a lot of their food in their own gardens and buy most of the rest locally - the menu said that they have a "Locavore Rating" of 4 out of 5, which sounded pretty good to us ("locavore," I believe, is Spanish for "crazy eater") - and the menu changes often to reflect whatever food is in season.

And the french toast, I'm happy to report, was wonderful. It may just be that, after my recent diner experiences, anything that didn't taste like mushy-egg-burp would inevitably taste magically delicious, but I'm pretty sure most objective observers would agree with me. The bread was a sort of chewy sourdough, light and crispy and (for the most part) not too gooey, the syrup was not only real but also warm, which is an innovation of which I heartily approve, and the overall taste was sweet and flavorful. My principal complaint is that there wasn't enough of it, and, for that reason, the Lone Wolf retains the lead. But the Green Street Cafe easily takes it place among the runners-up, sharing a spot with the Esselon Cafe and Haymarket as a purveyor of Almost-Perfect French Toast.



This prompts me to suggest to the owners of the cafe what seems, to me, a fairly obvious solution to their dispute with Smith: drop the lawsuits and instead invite the college administration over for some free french toast. Call it the "We Love Smith College French Toast Gala," get someone like Rachel Maddow or Judith Butler to come give a keynote address, and they'll be all, "Wrecking ball? What wrecking ball? Here's a lease until 2062!"

Seriously, y'all. Try it. Just try not to drizzle syrup on that lease.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Diner Roundup

Good golly but I'm getting tired of diners. I've told you before about how I once romanticized diners as remnants of a vanishing America only to slowly realize that, whatever their charms, their food is usually pretty bad. Well, over the past couple of weeks, as I've visited a few more diners in the Valley, I've come to a further realization: although they may seem quirky and authentic compared to the soul-sucking sameness of the national franchises, diners can be quite boring and predictable when compared to each other.

Imagine a world without fast-food restaurants and casual dining chains. Are you imagining it? No? Maybe this will help: imagine a world before fast-food restaurants and casual dining chains. Okay? What year is it? Like, 1948 or something, right? Now imagine you're driving across the country, or maybe it's your lunch hour at your construction job and you want a cheap, quick meal. Where are you gonna go? What's that? Yup - you're gonna go to a diner. But which diner? That's right - the closest one. And do you know why you're gonna go to the closest one? Because it doesn't friggin matter which diner you go to! They're all the same: same atmosphere (a counter with some stools, a lot of chrome, maybe a larger dining room off to the side), same food (competently produced breakfast items, greasy burgers, some baked goods, watery coffee), same service (surly waitresses who look like they were born there), same customers. Okay, maybe there'll be a bit of variation - a daily special here, an exceptionally good peanut butter pie there - but it's 1948, how much uniformity do you expect?

My point? Diners aren't antidotes to the crushing conformity of the contemporary American dining scene, they're the cause of it. They are the grandparents of all the McDonaldses and Applebeeses and Joe's Crabshackses that are currently ruining our landscape, poisoning our groundwater, and perverting our children. They were the ones who first gave us a taste for the cheap, filling meal and the no-frills, no-surprises menu. They taught us - or they taught our grandparents, who then taught our parents, who then taught us - to treat food like a car treats gasoline, as something that's necessary to keep the engine from knocking and the wheels turning, but not something to be enjoyed. "Food is fuel," says the roadside diner, "perch on a stool, fill 'er up, and head off to where it was you were going." This, of course, is a lie, but we believed it - or our grandparents did - and now look what we're stuck with.

That said, a lie told by a crusty old-timer is always more interesting than a lie told by a youthful, corporate fast-talker, so diners remain superior to their progeny. But they're liars all the same, and we would all do well to bear that in mind.

I'm going to run quickly through the three diners I've hit over the past few weeks in the search for The Perfect French Toast. I was never expecting to find TPFT in these places, and I wasn't really expecting any of these meals to be that memorable - turns out, I was right about the french toast, but only partly right about the memorable bit. This, as you will see, is not a good thing. In what follows I'll be focusing on the differences between these diners, but these are pretty minor variations within the overall uniformity of the diner experience.

Here they are, in ascending order of disgustingness:

---

The Route 9 Diner


I always forget about this place, probably because it blends in so well with the parking-lot sea that surrounds it. It's a new building masquerading as an old one, but not very convincingly, and all the exterior chrome (or chrome-like plastic) isn't exactly inviting, nor, to my eye, is the stars-and-stripes motif that dominates the place. When I popped in this morning the place was empty except for several groups of hungover college students boasting about last night's kegger. The waitresses were abrupt and sullen, there was neon track lighting running around the dining room (where I was seated, though not by choice), lots of air conditioning, a rotating pie case, and individual jukeboxes at some of the tables.

I was surprised, however, to see a variety of french-toast options. Theirs is a challah french toast, a phenomenon to which I'm becoming quite accustomed, and it was offered with all sorts of bells and whistles, if I wanted them: walnuts, bananas, strawberries, etc. I refrained, of course, and ordered it straight, no chaser. I noted that my waitress, who hardly looked at me, didn't offer me real maple syrup, as another waitress did at a table nearby, and when my plate arrived I was depressed to find two plastic containers of restaurant-supply maple-flavored corn syrup, alongside plastic containers of butter. The bread itself was crisp on the outside and not too mushy on the inside, a passable effort at gourmet french toast in a decidedly non-gourmet establishment, and I left feeling well-fed but considerably beaten down by the neon shininess, the serving-staff sullenness, and the fratboy gossipiness. I won't be back.



---

The Bluebonnet Diner


The first time I tried to eat here, way back in the fall, it was Sunday and they were closed. The second time I tried, it was also Sunday and they were closed. Beginning to detect a pattern, but utterly failing to understand why a diner would close on Sundays, I tried again during a weekday, and they were open. Whatever I had at the time was fine, but completely uninteresting.

The Bluebonnet is certainly a much more attractive place than the Route 9. It's an old-style dining-car diner, and on the outside it advertises "Broasted Chicken" - which is a way of preparing chicken about which I must confess complete ignorance. Instead of looking into the matter further, however, I've simply been pretending that the sign says "Breasted Chicken" and having myself a good, juvenile chuckle whenever I drive past.

Inside, the place looks like any old diner, although it is worth noting that the dining room off to the side does sport a miniature toy train that chugs along below the ceiling. The customers are mostly old, mostly overweight, and mostly in sweatshirts. The waitresses are surly but not sullen, which suits me fine. They also have individual jukeboxes at the tables, a "Donut & Pastry" case on the counter full of shrinkwrapped donuts and muffins, and a clock on the wall that says "Worcester Diners." (Well, what it really says is "tick-tock, tick-tock.")




When I ordered the "thick-style" french toast listed on the menu, the waitress said, "They put some powdered sugar on the french toast, if that's okay," giving me the impression that other customers had complained about this wild culinary innovation (although looking around me, I couldn't imagine that this could be so). I told her that of course it was okay. Sure enough, when the toast came out it was dusted with powdered sugar, and it even came with real maple syrup, but the fun stopped there. The bread was cold and chewy, flavorless apart from the syrup and sugar, and much the same could be said of the side of bacon I got with it.



"Bleck," I said, and got up to pay my bill.

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Kathy's Diner


I really want to like Kathy's. According to the info on the back of the menu, a diner has been on this spot since 1923, although I'd guess the current building dates to the 1930s. It's been known by many different names - the Amos Diner, Mac's Diner, Jim's Diner, the Miss Northampton Diner, the White Castle Diner, the Red Lion Diner - and the current owner, Kathy, has been working there since she was a teenager. Kathy can still be seen behind the counter most days, presiding over the sizzling grill with the assistance of a larger, younger fellow whom I can only assume is her son or grandson. They're both friendly, know their regulars, love the Red Sox, and usually run the place all by themselves, with no additional waiting or cooking staff. It's also cheap - really cheap, like $3-for-french-toast-cheap.

Unfortunately, that's about $3 too many.

Part of the problem is that, while charming from the outside, Kathy's is kind of disgusting on the inside. The counter and tables are frequently crummy and greasy, several windows are broken and taped over with plastic, and the whole space behind the counter really needs a good dusting. But most of the problem has to do with the food, which is - not to put too fine a point on it - gross. Really gross. Almost inedibly gross. Almost vomiting-on-my-shoes gross.

Really, really gross.

The french toast I got, which was served alongside a plastic bottle of Vermont Maid corn syrup (no effort being made to hide its humble origins), appeared to have been made from a standard loaf of white Wonder Bread. It was thin as a communion wafer, but it still managed to do something that I've never experienced before, nor would have thought possible. The outside of the bread was crispy, like toast should be, but once I bit into it the two sides slid apart to reveal a slimy, eggy interior that had the consistency of custard. It was a bit like eating cow tongue, which is similarly rough on the outside and slimy on the inside, but at least with cow tongue you know why it's gross. And remember: thin as a communion wafer. This was, and remains, a complete mystery to me, defying all the laws of chemistry and physics of which I'm aware (which, I'll admit, don't add up to very many).

But this was nothing compared to what happened when I bit into the last slice. The other slices may have been wretched, but at least they were still recognizable as french toast. This last slice, though, had clearly gotten too much egg batter on it - I don't even want to think about how this worked - and so was almost more egg than bread, which made it a bit like eating a fried egg that had attached itself, parasite-like, onto a soggy piece of Wonder Bread. This might have been okay, or at least slightly less gag-inducing, if I'd been expecting a meal of eggs-on-toast, but I wasn't, and, what's more, it didn't taste like eggs-on-toast so much as it tasted like what might happen if someone next to you was eating eggs-on-toast and then burped in your direction. And you simultaneously had your mouth full of slimey mush.

When I started this quest, I had no idea that I was endangering my life. Now I know better, and will proceed with all due caution in the future.

Also in the future: much as I'll continue to wish her well, I do believe I will not be returning to Kathy's Diner.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Esselon Cafe

I knew this would happen eventually.

It's been about a month and a half since I initiated my search for The Perfect French Toast, during which time I've had eight different french toasts (nine, if you count the Memphis French Toast in Oklahoma City) and reported the experiences to you as diligently and entertainingly as I could. And now the inevitable has begun to happen: I'm running out of ways to write about french toast. This is not at all the same as saying that I'm growing tired of french toast - quite the contrary! - but it is to say that there are only so many adjectives you can use to describe french toast, only so many variables you can isolate in how it's prepared and presented, only so many hyperbolic superlatives you can employ before your readers start to grow testy and suspicious.

It is also becoming clear to me that I'm using this french toast quest as a narrative crutch. (I just did a quick Google search and confirmed that I am the only person on the internet ever to have written those words.) That's a roundabout way of saying that it's making me lazy. Back before this whole thing started, I'd spend many of my waking hours on the alert for something to blog about - several times a week I'd come across something and think, "Ooh! I must blog about that!" and then proceed either to do just that, or to forget about it as soon as I got home. Lately, though, I've been retracting my antennae, blithely and inattentively moving through life in the smug assurance that the next blog post would probably be about french toast, as would the one after that, and the one after that. Sure, I've interspersed some non-toast posts in amongst the others, but just think of all the fantastic, earth-shattering things I've experienced and decided not to blog about, or, worse, failed to experience altogether, so wrapped up have I been in this french toast thing. The mind boggles! (bloggles?)

Does all this mean I'm abandoning the search for TPFT before it's reached its natural end? Absolutely not! Does it mean I've accepted that the best french toast I've had so far - the challah french toast at the Lone Wolf - is, indeed, the perfect french toast? Not on your life! Does it mean I simply don't have a lot to say about my most recent french toast excursion and have decided to pad this post with some verbose, slightly tongue-in-cheek introspection? You might be onto something there.

The Esselon Cafe sits out on my favorite, love-to-hate-it highway: Route 9, between NoHo and Amherst. It's in a standalone building on the Hadley Common, a pleasant ribbon of land that cuts perpendicularly across the highway and is lined with modest but stately old homes whose leafy trees look stunning in autumn and will probably look quite pretty in the spring, if spring ever arrives. The cafe itself is a family-friendly place that looks like an antique, slightly overgrown Starbucks (you order at the counter, the servers are hemmed in on all sides by hulking and hopelessly complex coffee-making contraptions, the color palate is all muted, soothing earth tones). They've got a covered porch with tables and chairs, an uncovered porch with a few picnic tables and a hammock out on the lawn, and a carved (or possibly cast-iron) ceiling that reminds me of the ornate ceiling at the Crown Liquor Saloon in Belfast, a gorgeous early-Victorian pub that's owned by the National Trust and whose west-facing windows have the misfortune of facing the Europa Hotel, at one time the most-bombed hotel in Europe. I didn't have my great big camera with me, so I was forced to use my BlackBerry instead - these pictures aren't great, but you'll get the idea:





Esselon's french toast, like that at the Lone Wolf and the Green Bean, is made with challah bread, and it can be ordered with fruit or without. Kate was with me and, as we had done at Amanouz, she ordered the fruit while I did my Gandhi imitation and went for the bare-bones version. It came out all covered in powdered sugar and served with real maple syrup - hers with strawberries and blueberries on top, mine with a single red strawberry and a green mint leaf. Both of them were tasty and sweet, and, though the bread was just the slightest bit chewy, they easily entered the top ranks of french toast in the Valley, if not quite coming up to the level of near-perfection achieved by the Lone Wolf.

And that, as they say, is that.

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.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Green Bean

Before I tell you about my latest french toast (mis)adventure, I've got a couple of items that I need to mention. First, it has come to my attention that sometime in the late 1970s a British band called Streetband recorded what may be the only, and is certainly the best, song about toast. It is not specifically about french toast, and, indeed, some of the song's percussion would have been completely impossible if it had been about french toast, but it still deserves a mention here.

Watch this and you'll see why. You'll also grin, giggle, and wonder how you've made it this long without this song in your life. That's a promise.



You're welcome.

The other thing I need to tell you also pertains to toast, naturally, and to french toast, specifically. Earlier this week I was in Oklahoma, and while there I went with my father to a restaurant called the Classen Grill. The Classen Grill is an OKC staple, one of the city's few non-chain restaurants that manages both to draw a loyal clientele and to produce some pretty tasty food. I'd been there several times before, usually to try one of their southwestern-inflected brunch items, but this time my french-toast antennae, in prime toast-finding condition, called my attention to a menu item called "Memphis French Toast." As someone who's about to move to Tennessee and who, moreover, hadn't yet considered the possibility that there might be regional variations in the manner french toast is prepared, I was intrigued. What if I were to go to Memphis soon and unexpectedly find myself forced to eat french toast? Would I be prepared? I already knew that I'd fare well if ever I got myself into a similar predicament in the Mediterranean, but in Memphis? I simply had no idea.

So of course I ordered it.

It's a good thing that I've been limiting my search for The Perfect French Toast to the restaurants in and around the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, because otherwise the Classen Grill's Memphis French Toast would have presented me with quite a dilemma. This is not because it is, in fact, TPFT - it's very good, but it's not perfect. What it is, rather, is The World's Most Ridiculous French Toast. Or at least I'm pretty sure it is. If I'd discovered it in Massachusetts I might have been forced to open up an entirely new category and scour the Valley for other potentially ridiculous french toasts. As it is, I'm under no such obligation, and thank god for that.

Unfortunately, I failed to take a photograph of this meal, so you'll just have to trust me. Memphis French Toast, apparently, is this: two large slices of thick white bread, dipped in a cinnamon batter and grilled. One of the slices is topped with banana slices, honey, and peanut butter, then the other slice is placed on top of it - like a french toast sandwich. The whole is then sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with maple syrup, butter, and a compulsory side of bacon.

It was deadly.

No, I'm serious. It was deadly.

It was also enough to get me excited about moving to Tennessee again (I've been afflicted with a bad case of ambivalence lately), assuming, of course, that they really do eat their french toast like this in Memphis. It's only like two hours from Nashville, which means this question can be pretty easily answered, once I've recovered sufficiently.

But anyway, on to the main object of this post, about which I actually plan to say very little.


The Green Bean

The Green Bean is a relatively new establishment that has quickly become one of the most popular brunch spots in NoHo. They serve locally grown, organic food in creative ways to ethically-minded diners, most of whom live on the gown side of the town-gown divide. I've been there quite a few times - it's one of the places I've spotted Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis - and always had a pleasant experience. The servers are friendly, the food is yummy, and they let you get your own coffee by choosing from an array of second-hand porcelain mugs that hang from an iron tree above the coffee pots. On this visit, I chose a souvenir mug from Gene and Jen's wedding, and event that took place in January of 2008 and which, presumably, was long enough ago for at least one of their guests to decide he/she could safely donate their souvenir mug to the Green Bean. The mug made me wonder how things were going with Gene and Jen, people whom I've never met but who have adorable taste in animals, and whom I therefore liked immediately. I hope they're doing well.



Unfortunately, the mug was about as good as it got on this visit. I'd had the Green Bean's 8-Grain French Toast before - in fact, it was one of the things that inspired me to go on this quest - but I'd never had their Challah French Toast, which I was intent to try after my transcendent experience of the same item over at the Lone Wolf. Kate joined me in ordering the Challah French Toast that morning at the Green Bean, and when it came out it looked promising enough - a little floppy, perhaps, and not nearly as glamorous as what the Lone Wolf was serving, but it was thick and it had powdered sugar and I was pretty sure everything was going to be fine.



It was not. The bread wasn't just floppy, it was soggy. Eggy and mushy and lacking in flavor, it was like the Lone Wolf's evil twin. Kate agreed, and we beat a hasty retreat just as soon as we'd eaten all we could (just because french toast is bad doesn't mean it shouldn't be thoroughly eaten).

If I, Streetband-like, should ever feel moved to write a song about the Green Bean's french toast, I'm pretty sure it would be a dirge.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Lone Wolf

I think I may have found it.

The Lone Wolf in Amherst is what you might call an incongruous restaurant. Or, better, a restaurant at war with itself. In many ways it's a typical Valley crunchy-brunchy cafe. They do the tofu thing, the vegan thing, and the locavore thing, and they make a point of fancying up traditional dishes with all sorts of creative ingredients, many of them deriving from root vegetables. But the ambience is strikingly at odds with the menu. For one thing, and for reasons that I can't begin to fathom, the decor tends toward the Southwestern-kitschy end of the decor spectrum. I overheard one lady on my recent visit remark that it reminded her of Arizona. Maybe so, if by Arizona she meant a gift shop in the Tucson airport. It's not that I object to the introduction of a bit of Southwestern color to this lily-white bastion of old New England, but there's nothing distinctly Southwestern about the menu. And that seems odd to me.

The other odd thing is that the place is almost always packed with large groups of sweatpantsed college students, instead of the expected Subaru-station-wagon-driving, New-Yorker-subscribing, NPR-contributing, beard-sporting, pipe-smoking, left-wing, middle-aged, middle-class diners that normally flock to places like this. The waitstaff, too, consists largely of sullen college students who are more interested in flirting with one another than with bringing you (and by you I mean me) a timely coffee refill. This shouldn't be too surprising, given that Amherst - home not only to Amherst College but also to the gigantic UMass campus - is stuffed to the gills with students for nine months of the year, and their presence is much more marked than it is in NoHo - with its tiny population of Smithies - which has become my frame of reference for these things. But still, it seems a bit strange.

All that aside, I have never had a meal at the Lone Wolf that wasn't outstanding, or at least very, very close to outstanding. So I was expecting to be impressed by their challah french toast (the only french toast on the menu), but I wasn't expecting what happened to happen. What happened was this:



Do you know challah bread? You don't? Well, you should. Go get some right now - I'll wait.

No, hold on, don't go. I've got a better idea: stop reading this immediately and go book a flight or hop a train or start the car, wherever you are, and meet me at the Lone Wolf by the time it opens tomorrow morning so we can have their challah french toast together. According to the menu, the bread - large and chunky but very, very light and spongy - is dipped in a cinnamon-vanilla sauce before cooking, and, while I didn't taste much obvious cinnamon or vanilla in it, I suspect that these ingredients exert some subliminal influence on the wonderfulness that unfolds when you bite into it. While cooking, the the bread develops a crisp outer skin that cracks, like the thinnest of creme-brulee crusts, under your teeth. And overall, it maintains its spongy consistency throughout, gleefully welcoming the (what I'm pretty sure is real) maple syrup and melty butter like long lost friends, sitting them down, making them comfortable, getting them a cup of tea. And the best part? The part that made me weep with joy right there at the table, while my waiter tried to impress one of the waitresses with his knowledge of Japanese cinema and a nearby table frat boys started hurling spitwads at a hand-painted kokopelli figurine? It was dusted with powdered sugar. Yes, for only the second time since I started this search (the other one being at Amanouz a few days earlier) I encountered french toast in its natural, bespeckled state, and it was glorious.

My only complaint - and this was entirely unexpected, I assure you - is that it was almost too much for me to eat. I soldiered through to the end, mind you, but I don't mind admitting that it nearly got the best of me, and I was forced to take a few breaks before completing it entirely. Which meant that the last piece was pretty cold, which was a shame.

I intend to keep searching, of course - to stop now would be a disservice to all of you who've traveled with me this far. But I would advise you to take a good, long look at the photograph above, for it may very well be The Perfect French Toast.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Amanouz Cafe

Have you ever heard of Mediterranean french toast? Yeah, I hadn't either - until I spotted it on the menu at Amanouz Cafe a while back. Amanouz is a lovely little Moroccan place in NoHo notable for its wonderful selection of soups, sandwiches, and omelets (yes, omelets). I was there buying some I-don't-remember-what (something falafely, probably) the other week when I noticed that they served this thing called Mediterranean french toast, which, according to the chalkboard menu, is served with cinnamon and honey and is also available with strawberries or blueberries. I took note of this intriguing item and waited for an opportunity to investigate further.

That opportunity arose this weekend when Kate and I found ourselves up and about before anybody else in town had begun to shake of their Saturday sleepies. We hightailed it to Amanouz, anxious to get a seat before the deluge began - weekend brunch is always a busy time in the Valley - and were pleased to find plenty of open tables in the tiny cafe. Giddy with anticipation, we strolled right up to the counter and ordered some french toast. And I mean we ordered the hell out of it. I managed to stick to my (gradually wavering) determination to avoid unfair french-toast extravagance by getting mine sans fruit, and Kate ordered hers with strawberries, thereby ensuring that I could still get a glimpse of extravagance, if only to know what I was missing. It's no exaggeration when I tell you that at this moment I felt a little like Gandhi, who reputedly made a point of sleeping beside multiple naked young women, well into his old age, as a way of testing and affirming his chastity. That morning, as I refused the temptation of fresh fruit in the name of scientific inquiry, I was the Gandhi of french toast.

And so, orders placed, we took a seat and looked around.



When the food arrived Kate could hardly contain her excitement, though I remained cool as a Mahatma.



Now, I can't say with certainty that what I'm about to tell you is true of all Mediterranean french toast, or if it's only true of the type served at Amanouz, but here's what I learned that day about this unusual culinary item:

1) Unlike almost every other french toast I've had in New England so far, it's served with a sprinkling of powdered sugar. This, of course, is the way french toast is supposed to be served, so score one for the Mediterraneans for getting this one right.

2) It's served with honey instead of maple syrup. Let me repeat: no syrup, only honey. On reflection, this makes sense, since there aren't that many maple trees along the Mediterranean - at least not along the Mediterranean coast of France, which is the area to which I'm assuming this french toast is indigenous.

3) It's really frigging good. The bread is a sort of sourdough, similar to that used by the Haymarket, which is strong enough to withstand the battering and grilling and honey-drizzling, but substantial enough to temper the overwhelming sweetness of the honey and powdered sugar. That said, it's still very sweet. Imagine a Pop Tart. Now imagine a whole wheat bagel. The difference between those two? That's the difference between Mediterranean french toast and regular old french toast, especially the boring sort that you'll find at places like Stables.

4) As good as it is sans fruit, it's even better with fresh strawberries, of the sort Kate (mostly) had on hers. I know this because I maybe had a bite or two. I know, I know: some french toast Gandhi I turned out to be. But don't judge me too harshly - surely the old man didn't keep his hands to himself all the time.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Whately Diner

Until last year I had quite the thing for diners. I never saw any growing up - Oklahoma was never really diner country, even in the heyday of diners, and anything of that sort had been obliterated by fast-food franchises and multi-lane expressways by the time I achieved sentience - so when I moved east I was surprised to find quite a number of them still going strong. I loved them for their authenticity, or what I imagined to be their authenticity. I was charmed by the old-fashioned design of the things, especially the dining-car diners, with their hand-lettered signs and sleek lines and all that chrome. I romanticized the patrons as true, salt-of-the-earth Americans who came to a diner as much for fellowship as for food, persisting in a type of neighborliness that had disappeared from the rest of the country around the time we stopped walking and began sealing ourselves up in steel-and-glass boxes instead. More than anything, I admired the modesty of diners, their defiant corniness in the face of so much fluorescent, national-chain bombast.

And then I moved to Philadelphia.

Now New Jersey, as anyone knows who's spent any time there, is the epicenter of diner culture. The three biggest dining-car manufacturers were once based there, and what new diner construction still goes on these days is almost exclusively carried on there. Philly, of course, is not in New Jersey, but in many ways it's a sort of cultural annex of the Garden State, which sprawls there just across the river, and the city has many, many diners both within its limits and in the surrounding counties. I spent a lot of time in these diners - many of them, it must be said, not of the quaint dining-car variety, but of the glitzy, mega-diner variety (what I called, without much regard to accuracy, "Las Vegas diners") - and as the romantic gauze began to slip from my eyes, I began to realize something as profound as it was troubling: diner food sucks. This may be because diners tend to have vast menus, offering everything from spaghetti-and-meatballs to waffles, and the quality of the food declines as the expertise of the chefs becomes correspondingly diluted. It may be because the patrons - those salt-of-the-earth embodiments of a vanishing America - are the very same people who, on other days, can be found stuffing their corpulent faces at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets or filling up on Saltburgers at the local Cracker Barrel. It may be any combination of things, but the fact is that I have almost never had a memorable diner meal - or at least not one that was memorable for the food.

It took some time for me to come to this realization, but once I had it I began, if not exactly avoiding diners, then at least ratcheting down my expectations considerably. So this morning when I went to the Whately Diner (known officially, if unappetizingly, as the Fillin' Station Diner, but no one here calls it by that name - Whately is the name of the town), I did so more for the sake of crossing another breakfast place off my list than with any great tummy-rumbling excitement. I had been there before, though not for the french toast, and remembered it principally for its unattractive location beside a gas station (hence its official name) and a parking lot filled with eighteen-wheelers fresh off I-91. And sure enough, when I walked in the door the few customers I saw munching away at the counter bore the distinct odor of diesel fuel. A glance at their copious beards and bellies confirmed that these were indeed brethren of the sacred order of the big rig.



I settled into a booth in the corner, ordered my coffee, and waited to order the only type of french toast on the menu: "french toast with bacon or sausage." I decided on sausage. And then I waited. And waited. The two middle-aged waitresses were chatting away about some acquaintance's heart condition, and then about some other piece of local gossip, and, when I finally strolled up to the counter to ask if I could order, they looked genuinely alarmed. And then, when they saw that I simply wanted to place my order and wasn't going to cause them any physical harm, they apologized. Profusely.

"I'm so sorry! I thought you got him!" (looking sternly at her counterpart)

"I thought I had, too! I was up here at the register and completely forgot!" (looking sternly toward heaven)

"We both apologize!"

"It's okay, really, it's fine," I said. "Really, really, it's okay."

While I waited I flipped through the mini-jukebox with which my booth, like all the others, was equipped. Alan Jackson. Charlie Daniels. Lynard Skynard. Eagles Greatest Hits. NOW That's What I Call Music! vol. 19. Grammy Nominees 2003.

Fortunately, my food arrived before I managed to dig out the 50 cents required to play a song (they'd clearly expedited my order to make up for the earlier lapse), and, famished by now, I tucked in with abandon. And maybe this was just my grateful tummy telling me so, but it was really tasty. The butter came in little plastic-and-aluminum cubes, the syrup had to be squeezed from a plastic bottle like ketchup, and the bread was just plain - if rather thick - white bread, but it all worked deliciously. The bread was nice and spongy, the syrup (plastic bottle or not) was nice and sweet, and the sausage tasted like breakfast sausage should - that is, like no other sort of sausage you'll ever have in any other context.



When I went to the register to pay, the waitresses were engaged in a heated discussion about food coloring.

"What makes green? Blue and yellow?"

"Yeah, but just use a little bit of blue, otherwise it'll look too dark."

Oh yeah. Today was St Patrick's Day.

"Are you trying to find something you can turn green?" I said, as I handed over my check.

"Yeah."

"Green eggs and ham?" I suggested.

"We tried that a few years ago. It doesn't look too appealing. Maybe we could do mash potatoes. We did that a while back. HEY GEORGE! Can we do green mash potatoes? What? Why not? What about for just some customers? Aw, c'mon!"

"Thanks," I said, and stepped out to the car.

And then I began getting excited about diners again, if only a little.