Collingswood Diner

 

The Collingswood Diner is not my favorite diner, although I wish it could be. I feel like it’s a diner that I had to have been a part of growing up, and to suddenly enter as an outsider, I feel disconnected, and unaware of what’s ‘usual and customary’ here.

Collingswood Diner

Our waitress was kind and attentive enough, but had unkempt hair and makeup, with a distinctive ring around the collar on her white polo accented with a festive “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” pin. (We visited a few days before Christmas.) As she poured our coffee, I can definitely say it detracted from my appetite a little, although I tried to see past it.

This is not a shiny, new diner. It is large, kind of dark and impressing from the outside, located at a major intersection that connects to a highway, so getting into the actual parking lot can be a little daunting if you haven’t done it before. However, I am a fan of having diner at this part of time, simply because I think it’s as nice cross-section of diner-enthusiasts of all socio-economic ranges, since you get populations from the major towns nearby. Inside, there is a friendly, multi-cultural atmosphere- tables full, and big group tables of work buddies hanging out.

An Excess of Powders

My French toast was well intended, but overall not that delicious. I appreciated the extra cinnamon they sprinkled on top (quite liberally) because it gave an extra pop of flavor that can be missing from mass produced breakfast breads. However, because of this generous cinnamon, and the cold (and NOT plentiful) butter that was provided, my butter stuck to the cinnamon and to my knife, and not to my toast! As happens with French toast when it’s too thick- very little of the egg can even hope to get all the way through, so I felt as if I was eating a kind of bland cake. After dolling it up with the works, it was decent, but kind of disappointing.

Darn Good Omelet

As Chi worked her way through her French toast, I picked through my western omelet. It is my favorite of the omelet and I'm very pleased that the Collingswood Diner had one of their top chefs on the line that morning. One of the easiest tasks that diners can't get right is cooking an egg all the way through. I've had omelets, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, and poached eggs where In the middle is slimy, clear, raw egg. Too me, that's unacceptable. Collingswood Diner cooked the egg in the omelet perfectly. There was plenty of diced ham, onion, and green bell pepper. It was a great omelet. There was one small problem, and that was with the cheese. Cheese in an omelet costs extra, but I ordered it anyway. The slices of American were concentrated to one half of the omelet making it very globular and gooey on one side and flat and a little dry on the other. However, I'm not going to let concentrated cheese sully this omelet's good name.

The home fries were a bit on the lacking side. I'm starting to think I'm become more of a hash-brown  type of guy. There's more of an opportunity for crispiness and fluffy potato to live in harmony with hash-browns. These home fries met the same fate as other establishment's home fries. They weren't cooked enough twice. They weren't cooked down to an appropriate level of softness and then when they got to the grill or frying pan, they weren't cooked to the right level of crispy. This leaves the diner with kind of hot, kind of raw potatoes.