Diners of New Jersey

     Even diner aficionados have shied away from trying to sort out the complexity of Jersey diners. There are too many of them -hundreds- they're too big, they're too new, they're ever-changing, the roads are too complicated and filled with Jersey drivers, and it is too hard to understand what anybody is saying. Jersey writer Peter Genovese provided a great portrayal in his 1996 book, Jersey Diner, highlighting some of the Garden State greats. For Diners of New Jersey I am actively tracking down every prefabricated restaurant in the state. They are being mapped, photographed, and examined for exterior style, interior design, and locational context. Diner owners are being interviewed, and New Jersey diner manufacturers are being researched. And no doubt, plenty of diner food and coffee is being consumed. This great pile of obsessively studied diner data will then be woven into a well-illustrated narrative explaining how the diner has come to be in New Jersey, and how New Jersey has come to be in a restaurant form that has diffused well beyond the state's borders. This, or I'll die trying.

     Hit kpatrick@iup.edu if you want to write to me about your Jersey diner experience, tell me your diner history, discuss diner manufacturers, or just talk Jersey diner. If I don't respond in a timely fashion, you can find me in New Jersey, second traffic circle to the left. Look for the neon sign that says, 'DINER.' I'll be at the counter.

     More radical in its appearance, the Late-modern Glass Box diner uses copious amounts of dark or reflective glass sometimes with granite facing, and frequently trimmed in stainless steel. Although very different in appearance, the glass box diner reaches back before the Environmental period to a time when diner styles referenced modern, even futuristic, imagery. The idea is the same, the perception of the future is different. The glass box diner, like the Galloway in Pomona, conveys ultra-modern sleekness in a cosmopolitan world heading for the cybernetic future brought on by the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. Although Late-modern diners continue to be built or reflected in remodelings today, their popularity has been eclipsed by the Postmodern retro-diner. This is a reinterpretation of the classic stainless steel diners of the 1950s. The materials are similar, but not the same, recombined in a way that evokes the past while still projecting the idea that the restaurant is up-to-date. Just recently, the Crystal Diner in Toms River got a retro-diner remodel.

     In New Jersey, however, nothing stays new for long, and there are no design restrictions (for better or for worse). As with Brick's Rainbow Diner, There is an emerging trend to meld Late-modern sophistication with a Postmodern reinterpretation of neoclassicism. Whaaa? The result can be a large, dark-glass, or granite-faced diner trimmed in stainless and neon with an oversized foyer sporting Grecian columns. Now that's Jersey!