Don’t Waste Your Time at the Tick Tock Diner

Tick Tock Diner
281 Allwood Rd.
Clifton, NJ

A good old fashioned New Jersey diner is one of the few redeeming qualities of this state that essentially serves as nothing more than a smog-belching highway between New York and Philadelphia.

If you are looking for something with a bit more local flavor than the Roy Rogers at the New Jersey Turnpike rest stop, you usually don’t have to search too long to find a Garden State roadside diner.

Some say the whole diner thing was invented right here in the swamps of Jersey.

The Tick Tock Diner in Clifton is a historic and quintessential version. Opened in 1948, Tick Tock was dishing out American comfort food long before Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives were cool (let alone had their own TV show).

But the Tick Tock has left its humble roots far behind. This sprawling joint is not sprouting wheels and going mobile any time soon.

Expanded, scrubbed and polished many times over, the Tick Tock Diner has gone Hollywood. Granite lunch counter, polished chrome everywhere and gourmet seafood dishes have pushed aside any sense of 1940s roadside nostalgia.

That’s okay. I kind of like the whole gourmet comfort food craze. I mean, what’s not to like about lobster and Gouda mac & cheese?

In my many years of perusing menus, I’ve learned that any unusual, quirky item with a funny name is good bet.

That’s why the Tick Tock Diner’s “Happy Waitress” caught my eye.

Unfortunately, it turns out, the “Happy Waitress” isn’t the least bit unusual or quirky.

And forget gourmet.

Try two slices of toasted Wonder Bread, each topped with a single slice of boring American Kraft cheese singles, thin tomato slices and some strips of very ordinary bacon.

I have no idea why they call it the “Happy Waitress”. “Happy Cook” is more like it, since they charge ten bucks for the simplest to assemble item on the menu.

I paid a buck or two more for onion rings instead of fries. Thick and crunchy, they were by far the highlight of the dish.

The beer selection consisted of five varieties of uninteresting mass produced bottles.

But, then again, most diners – even the “gourmet” variety – aren’t known for their wide assortment of microbrews.

The Tick Tock Diner is very proud of its desserts, prominently displaying the massive homemade specimens in a glass case next to the front door and behind the lunch counter.

Peanut butter pie being one of Tick Tock’s specialties, I couldn’t resist capping off my meal with a slice.

With a high peanut butter to chocolate ratio, this version of one of my favorite pies was good – but not great.

I mean, there’s no such thing as bad peanut butter pie, but I’ve had much better at diners and cafes down South.

And that pretty much summarizes my evaluation of the Tick Tock Diner.

The place is a notch above the Turnpike rest stop but with all its six decades of history and nostalgia carefully scrubbed and polished away, the food alone isn’t enough to recommend the Tick Tock Diner.

Keep on driving.

Rating: Wouldn’t Wear Shirt If You Paid Me.

Egg-cellent

Beth's Café
7311 Aurora Avenue North
Seattle, WA

Hours: 24 hours
Alcohol: None
Cuisine: Diner Food, Especially Omelets

Suit603 is a charter member of the Clean Plate Club.

Leftovers just aren't as good, and it's another thing to carry through security.

And it’s just a waste of money to leave it on the plate.

But I thought I might need a doggy bag when I found out that omelets at Beth’s Café were as big as they are.

You see, the *small* ones are made with six eggs and come with a huge heap of hash browns that are all you can eat (meaning, you can get more) -- the large ones are made with a full twelve eggs and are served on a metal plate that would usually hold a medium pizza.

Some groups split them three ways, though some brave souls were trying to eat ‘em alone even though, as the menu says, there's no prize for finishing the twelve egg omelet aside from pride at a job well done.

Apparently Man v. Food couldn’t finish one, though that’s not really surprising, since that guy’s kind of the Derek Jeter of the big-eating world: all fame, no performance.

I felt pretty lucky to run into the place when all I’d searched for was a 24-hour diner that wasn’t Denny’s to grab a late dinner at after a long day of meetings.

The menu’s really simple, and it seems like the main things people order are the omelets and then milkshakes.

I thought about getting eggs over easy for a moment, but at the end of the day, a Suit orders the specialty of the house, unless that involves green vegetables.

So I ordered the six egg “full house” omelet with ham, American cheese and mushrooms.

As I waited for my meal, I looked at the walls, which were absolutely covered with crayon drawings left by patrons. Evidently at year’s end, the staff votes on its ten favorite, which get put in a place of honor for the next year.

And it was a wait for food, and I found out why on the way out: this place suffers from a serious lack of grill space, given what they do.

A 12-egg omelet takes up literally half of their grill, while the hash browns take up the other half, meaning that if you get behind a few of those, you’re automatically going to have to wait 15-20 minutes for breakfast food, which is just way too long.

If I were the owner, I’d at least double the size of the grill -- their hung-over clientele probably isn’t moving all that fast anyway (the place was voted the best place in Seattle to cure a hangover), but a diner still needs to turn out food reasonably fast for the occasional late-night road warrior looking for a quick bite.

But when my food came, it was worth the wait. The chunks of ham in there are clearly from a real ham that they make themselves, and the egg’s fluffy enough that you know that they beat the eggs themselves (well, if you don’t see ‘em doing it on your way in).

But a problem with the sheer size of these omelets is that large parts of them don’t have any filling in them at all. I don’t know if there’s something they could do with sprinkling the fillings out more instead of dumping them in the middle on the grill (this would probably mess up putting the omelet together), but the reason you order an omelet is to get fillings + eggs in every bite, and this omelet didn’t deliver.

But that wasn’t such a problem that I didn’t finish the omelet -- no, this was far too tasty to let it slip, and I even finished my hash browns too: kind of hard not to have at least most of them, since they’re right under the omelet.

Somehow, I managed to get through the whole omelet and didn’t even feel that full at the end, so I decided to order a piece of their friendship bread that I saw a couple other patrons eating.

It was definitely worth it: still warm, with the cinnamon sugar on top tasting just about perfect.

By this time, the bar crowd was starting to file in, and service was much, much slower. I had to flag down a waiter to get a refill on a drink (it took a solid five minutes), and I was disappointed that they didn’t even offer me seconds on hash browns.

Not that I would have taken ‘em, but given that they're allegedly “all you can eat,” I was a little disappointed.

So I sat for a little bit and then went to pay -- again a belabored process because the people in front of me were trying to figure out split tickets, but I left happy, even if my 9 AM the next morning was half an hour closer than I really wanted it to be.

Summing it up, this is definitely a place I’m happy to have gone to, and one I’d go back to again if I’m famished and have time on my hands in Seattle.

But only under those two conditions.

Rating: Would Wear a Free Shirt