Tom Sawyer Diner, Paramus

98 East Ridgewood Ave.
Paramus, NJ 07652
Cherry Pie, $3.29
Legendary Coffee, $1.49

Lunch was six dollars and thirty one cents at the Lamplighter Inn. That's on Highway 2 near Lewis Fork. That was a tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat, a slice of cherry pie, and a cup of coffee. Damn good food. Diane, if you ever get up this way that cherry pie is worth a stop.

-- FBI Special Agent Dale B. Cooper
Twin Peaks Pilot Episode

It was good. It was Special-Agent-Dale-Bartholomew-Cooper good.

We nearly duplicated that meal. A shrimp salad sandwich on whole wheat, a slice of cherry pie, and a cup of coffee. Add to that one Swiss, lettuce and tomato with a side of fries, and imagine it all on classy, modern, white china against a rich, cherry-wood table. Yum, yum, yum. But don't stop there. The whole scene is brilliantly lit with indirect lighting, and the wait staff is as peppy and pleasing as the cast of a high school musical. They are all costumed in powder-blue, three-button polo tops with an embroidered homage to their "legendary" cup of coffee right over each and every one of their hearts. Jersey Pie has no argument with the descriptor "legendary," as it reads on their menu. It was damn good coffee.

It's always darkest before the dawn. About an hour before we had our first Agent-Cooper-worthy slice of cherry pie we were stuck in a clover-leaf maze composed of on-ramps and u-turns connecting Interstate 80, Highway 46, and Route 23 in a clusterfuck of ins and outs circling Totowa. There was yelling. Google maps, schmoogle maps. While not really pie related, there is a Jersey tie-in here, as the sign that once pointed to Totowa (an important point along our indirect route to Paramus) was lying in the middle of a grassy field on its side just looking pathetic. New Jersey is famous for its illegible traffic signs that come along just past the turn-off they were supposed to indicate. But that was the darkness.

The Tom Sawyer Diner's cherry pie was the dawn. Our waiter presented our one slice to share with an apology for the broken crust, but we were already exclaiming over the explosion of cherries bursting their bounds and tumbling joyously over themselves. Just the right sweetness--not, too. Just the right tartness--bringing the palate to attention. Fruit to matrix ratio--best yet. Crust--if not properly flaky, at least light. Okay, we're holding out for better here. We think there might be a fresher, fruitier, flakier cherry pie out there, but that's only because the Tom Sawyer Diner has given us hope again. And we are sure that the next time the Tom Sawyer serves a slice of pie they will bring a fresh fork to enjoy it with. Cherry pie should never be eaten with a shrimp salad fork.

We asked our waiter if the placemat's claim of baking on the premises were true for this cherry pie. He proudly informed us that they have a small selection of desserts precisely because they do prepare them all, and turn them over every 24 to 48 hours. The Tom Sawyer is committed to customer satisfaction. However, when we expressed our satisfaction to the owner and manager, importantly stating the fact that we are "pie reviewers," he seemed puzzled. What, after all, is it in the cherry pie that merits such careful attention? Like Agent Cooper, Jersey Pie finds itself turning to the Buddhists for clarification.

If you ask the cloud, “How old are you? Can you give me your date of birth?” you can listen deeply and you may hear a reply. You can imagine the cloud being born. Before being born it was the water on the ocean’s surface. Or it was in the river and then it became vapor. It was also the sun because the sun makes the vapor. The wind is there too, helping the water to become a cloud. The cloud does not come from nothing; there has been only a change in form. It is not a birth of something out of nothing.

Sooner or later the cloud will change into rain or snow or ice. If you look deeply into the rain, you can see the cloud. The cloud is not lost; it is transformed into rain, and the rain is transformed into healthy soil and the soil into cherry trees and the cherry trees into blossoms, the blossoms into cherries and then into the cherry pie you eat. Today if you eat a piece of cherry pie, give yourself time to look at the pie and say:

“Hello, cloud! I recognize you.”

--Thich Nhat Hanh

Hope that helps. Reader, if you ever get up to Paramus, that cherry pie is worth a stop.

Candlewyck Diner, East Rutherford

179 Patterson Ave.
East Rutherford, New Jersey, 07073
Cherry Pie, $3.50
Coffee, $1.50

The Candlewyck Diner may have heard that going green is a hot trend. They have a new green! carpet, green! fabric wall covering, green! upholstered seats, and green! window shades. And when the light there catches the patrons just right, they too seem to boast a greenish hue. Or was that an unfortunate reaction to the pie?

We rolled into the Candlewyck parking lot about 2:30 on Sunday just as the after-church crowd was sitting down to eat. The Candlewyck was just down the road from the Williams Center Cinema in Rutherford, one of the few places this side of the Hudson where Milk was showing. We were immediately fond of the church crowd. As we perused our menus a large group of well-dressed diners picked apart a cheesecake available at a local bakery. The one who was doing most of the talking said that it was almost as good his mother's. One of their party missed her mussels but was assured by the waiter that her plate had been enhanced by an extra stuffed clam and an extra shrimp. She looked skeptical, but we found it reassuring that in a Rutherford Diner with so much damn green!, at least one patron trusted the seafood. Another woman at their table, the one having hot chocolate instead of a meal, looked the happiest in the whole restaurant.

We needed to eat, so we set our menus down and ordered burgers. We weren't surprised; it was an average diner meal. The veggie burger was expected to be disappointing, because it seems like everyone is serving those frozen-veggies-mushed-together kinds of burgers instead of the multi-grain patties that we prefer. And if this were a turkey burger blog we'd be explaining how the delicate seasoning of this one more than made up for the deadbeat veggie burger. But this, dear reader, is a pie blog. New Jersey, correct your pie!

It seems so very little to ask that a slice of cherry pie should have a minimum of one measly cherry per bite. But this pie could barely be called cherry. Bite after bite of this particularly miserable slice had matrix, but no cherry. Forkful after forkful yielded only refrigerator thickened goo balanced on the brink of our tines, and was rejected - splat! - on the side of the plate. The crust, we admitted, might once, long ago have been flaky, and somehow, miraculously, it did not carry the taste of the refrigerator that had burned the edges of the filling. The occasional cherry was adequate - firm enough and fairly tart, but we had to dissect and probe to find it. By the time we were done the pie plate looked more like an autopsy scene than fodder for a decent pie blog. Yeah, the coffee was alright.

As we picked apart our own dessert a couple we identified as us in forty years was seated at the table behind us. We had the curious feeling of being observed by ourselves from the future. Were we still out here looking for a good piece of cherry pie? (Fade in Twilight Zone theme.) There is a mystical notion that the application of attention is all that is needed to resolve a problem, no matter how deep, no matter how long the problem has been allowed to fester in the shadows of inattention. It remains to be seen whether our future selves represent an acceptance of jersey pie, or a steady determination to right an outrageous wrong, in the PieLight Zone.

Frozen Monkey Cafe, Hoboken

526 Washington Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030
Cherry Pie, $3.95
Coffee, $1.75

It was Valentine's Day, and we had just finished our massages at Ravinder's Day Spa in Hoboken. Walking around semi-dazed and hungry in the brisk afternoon air we wondered where we could get a bite to eat, maybe sample another piece of Jersey pie. And then it occurred to us, didn't our friend, M, say that the Frozen Monkey Cafe offered fantastic pie imported from Little Pie Company in New York? Yes, and we're blocks away.

Oh, really? Little Pie Company Pie? Really? Really?! Well, not any more. Jersey Pie learned that The Little Pie Company raised their pie prices making it untenable for a frozen monkey to carry them across the mighty Hudson. And we thought we had the pie scoop of the millennium. Bendix Diner Outshines the Little Pie Company! "Read all about it!" Not so fast there Jersey Pie. That's no Little Pie Company pie.

Well, thank goodness it wasn't. We have heard wonderful things about Little Pie Company pies. This slice of pie fell far short of our admittedly amateur expectations. But, first the good news. We definitely saw our first flake at the Frozen Monkey Cafe, and it wasn't our waitress. While we would not describe the crust as a proper flaky pastry, it did have some flakiness to it. The cherries were tasty, and the matrix was not overly coagulated. And the pie was served with a delightful side spritz of whipped cream, an unexpected delight. Both the caf and the decaf were acceptable cups of joe to boot.

The Frozen Monkey Cafe is aching to be cool. We should know, having put in many years striving in this very same endeavor. It has a crazy mash-up of styles - with a Victorian tin ceiling and furnishings from the 50s and 60s to 70's era dinnerware and a bar with kitschy bamboo tiki details. The clientèle is young(ish) and informal too, which probably explains why we had to ask for sugar and didn't get napkins or water. Ah, so what. After our relaxing couples massage do you think we were lookin' for a fight?

Now the bad news. Did we find New Jersey's best piece of cherry pie at the Frozen Monkey? Really? Really! No. We did not.

Tops Diner, Harrison

500 Passaic Avenue
Harrison, New Jersey 07029
Mini Pie $2.95
Coffee $2.00

Blog fodder. We thought we coined this term in the parking lot of Tops Diner. "Well, at least it was blog fodder." Ha ha ha ha ha. "Blog fodder" turns out not to be an original contribution, but we feel that if we maintain our focus on the strikingly mediocre blog topic of New Jersey's diner cherry pies we will keep up a competitive distance from possible encroachers. If the competition heats up too much, look for our future blog: Jersey Corn on the Cob.

Tops Diner, located at the tri-corner of Kearny, Harrison, and East Newark, is very popular on a Friday night. Diners willing to make the 25 minute wait were packed tight into the small hostess station at the entrance. Sitting, as we were, at a table facing the doors, we felt like cheap scarves at a discount retailer at 4 am on black Friday. Happy to say we weren't trampled. You will note in the price of their decent cup of coffee a certain willingness to take advantage of their popularity. No diner, even in the second millennium, should have the gall to charge 2 dollars for a cup of coffee.

Realizing we may be hard pressed to find cherry pie at a local eatery every week we began to think about pies in general. Hereafter it shouldn't surprise you if we dissect other pies. Turns out Tops did have cherry pie, but we'd recently seen the movie Waitress (she works at a pie diner), so we decided to try a dinner pie: Chicken Pot. Interesting. Did we note an exotic touch of curry? And then there was the crust...

We are learning a lot about crust. From the beginning we were put off by the crusts of all the pies we encountered. We were expecting flaky crusts but found always dense, heavy, shiny packages for our cherries. We feel vindicated by this sentence from ABOUT FORMING A COVERED FRUIT PIE in the venerable Joy: Crusts for covered fruit pies must (emphasis ours) be made with a flaky pastry dough. (Grandmother's flaky pastry dough recipe can be found in the comments of the Malibu Diner post.) Flaky. Pastry. Dough. For weeks we have known we have not been eating flakes. Come to find out, we have not been eating pastry! For anyone in the dark as we were, who might have taken their definition of "pastry" deductively from what they had found in a "pastry shop," pastry, by definition, is flaky. There are other crusts. There are other doughs, to be sure. But pastry crust is flaky, and cherry pies are meant to be made with pastry crusts. More on the dinner pie's crust in a minute.

Tops Diner serves a cherry mini pie. It has a pretty lattice top, the first we have encountered. We believe we are eating a "shortbread crust," a crust well suited to a cream pie. OK - it was not a flaky pastry crust, but Tops crust gets our blue ribbon. It is fresh, toothsome, and if not flaky, at least it is crumbly. And it is topped with a dusting of powdered sugar, which we like better than the egg white glaze.

We would advise eating the crust and asking for your check. Because all the merits of the crust are more than made up for by the shortcomings of the filling. The cherries are flavorless, not overly sweet, but also lacking in tartness. We spooned a shiny, gelatinous hillock of artificially flavored and colored filling matrix onto the side of our plate. Blech. Pure blog fodder. One might try sneaking some Bendix cherry pie filling into a Tops crust, but we think we would sooner return to the Bendix diner for their still shining example of cherry pie.

As for the dinner pie. The chicken pot pie. The crust. Wait for it.... Flaky, puff pastry. Would have preferred a denser, more hearty... well, you see the irony.

Bendix Diner, Hasbrouck Heights

Rte 17 and Williams Road
Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey
Pie, $2.90
Coffee, $1.60

The Bendix Diner has the best cherry pie we have tasted so far. Sweet, tart, ruby red cherries, and a crust that settles once and for all that this dense, heavy pastry is a style, not some disregard for good taste. Now it is certain that we are not eating the same pie again and again. This pie showed handiwork: uneven fork tine impressions, and irregularities in the thickness of the crust. It almost seemed as if the rolling pin method had been eschewed for hand shaping. This crust, though there was too much of it for our taste, and too much of it to finish, tasted like good, familiar ingredients: flour, shortening, salt. A neon sign that was not fired up for our afternoon visit, declared "good coffee." We had no argument with the sign.

The Bendix Diner was manufactured in 1947 by Master Diners in Pequannock, New Jersey. We are sure it has been cleaned since then, but suspect it boasts original flooring, stools, displays, and dispensers. On this wintry, inaugural Tuesday, snow is melting off the roof and dripping onto towels lining the interior windowsills. There was a friendly diner banter underway, half in English, half in Espanol, among the blue collar clientèle, and at one odd moment someone behind us started doing an impression of a pig, and an overweight man with an eczematous neck, sitting alone in a booth across the diner, began replying with his own pig impression. We don't know whether the two knew each other.

Our Miss America experience taught us to call ahead for pie. The Brownstone Diner, Frozen Monkey Cafe, Carlos Bakery, Red Hawk Diner, and Tops Diner are not serving cherry pie today. (The Red Hawk Diner's recorded message announces that the only thing on the menu today is an egg salad sandwich.) The friendly woman who picked up the phone at Bendix Diner answered yes they have cherry pie in a tone that seemed to say, silly, of course we have cherry pie. We asked if it was good, again, she said yes. And Jersey Pie agrees.

Miss America Diner, Jersey City

322 West Side Ave
Jersey City, NJ 07305
Pie, $2.60
Coffee, $.90

We admit to a fondness for diners and a presumption that they're the natural starting point for the pie and coffee experience. But we don't admit to being experts on either. We're learning as we go here. We chose the Miss America Diner for her name. The Miss America is a delightful, historical, streamline diner with dining room extensions, and rather than describe it, we refer you to the website of Alan Wolfson, a local sculptor who has immortalized the Miss America in his finely detailed replica.

We took the light rail from Hoboken to the end of the West Side Avenue line and walked 2 blocks south to the Miss America, accompanied by friends from the city. The Miss America was built in the 1950s by the Jerry O'Mahony Company of Elizabeth, New Jersey. It is a proper diner in the sense that it is a mobile, prefab jobbie. And, in fact, Jerry O'Mahony, originally of Bayonne, New Jersey, is credited with inventing the diner, bringing together inspirations from the "lunch wagon" and railroad diner cars. Visit Diner News and History for more on... diner news and history.

The atmosphere was warm and we were satisfied with our respectable soups, sandwiches and fries. The requisite pickle and slaw was acceptable, the slaw in humorously tiny paper condiment cups. At pie time our waitress was receptive, allowing us to ask the question that had begun to lurk back in the recesses of our pie mind. You see, it had dawned on us that in this corporate, industrial time we might always be eating the same pie. Maybe New Jersey had one pie distributer doling out widget pies to all the Jersey City diners? If this were the case would Jersey Pie die an early death? How many blog entries can be written about one pie? She answered that most Jersey diners are getting their pies from local bakeries. Hm. Something to look into.

And then ... They didn't have cherry pie. None. They "occasionally get it." We had wondered about the general interest in cherry pies and asked our waitress about it. She laughed a little and confirmed that cherry pie is not popular, not much interest in it at the Miss America. (If you are among those who are scratching their heads at the proposition of a blog devoted to cherry pie, you might enjoy the rant against cherry pie linked here.)

After considerable deliberation, we decided to try a slice of the apple pie and order a piece of chocolate layer cake in addition. We are glad that we tried the apple, partly because the apple pie was relatively tasty, but also because it occasioned some general pie crust conversation with our gourmand guest, the author of Urban Gastronomy. A person of very generous spirit, she drew on her experience in Illinois to offer a positive possibility for this crusty part of our pie puzzle. She reminded us that pizza lovers are sometimes put off by the crusts of Chicago pies due to regional peculiarities, and suggested that this crust could be consistent with New Jersey expectations while evading the expectations of our motley crew, with origins in the South, Pacific Northwest, and Midwest. At any rate, the "local bakeries" may be made to answer for their crust.

While we can't claim that the pie tasters were really happy with the pie, the fourth of our party did seem quite happy with her cake. The coffee was good enough for diner brew, and we noted that it was offered at the most reasonable price. Where will all this lead us? Heaven knows.

River View Diner, North Bergen

River View Diner
7850 River Road
North Bergen, NJ 07047
Cherry Pie, $3.20
Coffee, $1.45

We had the inevitable conversation yesterday. With all the pie disappointments, would we expand our horizons to improve our chances of getting a great slice of pie? Would we buy cherry pies from reputable bakeries and eat them at home with a cup of our freshly ground brew? Would we take the PATH to New York City and try our luck across state lines? No... and No. We still believe a New Jersey resident ought to be able to stay in state and enjoy a truly satisfying slice of pie and a cup of joe.

And so, we found ourselves at the River View Diner in North Bergen. Our table did not have a river view, it had a view of the parking lot. Maybe the dining room has river views, but we were at a booth, and it seems the kitchen is located on the river side. Hmm... In another sense, our table did have a river view. You see, the tabletop was a custom made laminate with a panoramic photo of the Hudson River and Manhattan skyline surrounded by inlays of advertisements for local businesses: unwanted hair removal, divorce lawyers, oxygen tanks - these kinds of things. Now these advertisements on paper place-mats are expected at Jersey diners, but literally laying them into the table takes the cake (pie?)! In fairness, at least it's an eco-friendly approach, but I wish I'd had a choice about looking at that model's armpit.

Ah, the pie. Relative to the other slices of pie we have sampled, the River View offers only a half-slice at an inflated price. Still, this pie was mostly pleasing. The cherries were flavorful, juicy. They managed to stand out sufficiently against the very gelatinous matrix. We even said aloud, "don't cherries just taste good?!" And tonight was our first dramatic encounter with the dreaded cherry pit. (No one was injured.) Still, the same incomprehensible crust - shiny on top, bready, with that refrigerator taste. At least the bottom crust was not soggy, whatever else it was. Our server didn't offer to warm our pie up, and perhaps this was the key to our success this evening. The decaf was a bit thin but not off-putting, and the waitress offered to refill our cups even though we were only there for pie. We're really not so hard to please, but our search for cherry pie must go on until we find a truly outstanding piece.