Only ONE NJ diner made USA Today’s best diners list? No f’ing way!

Look, I understand when you call yourself USA Today that you have to show you have a national reach. I get it, I do.

But if you’re going to run 20 nominations to have your readers select USA Today’s 10 Best diners, you have to include at least several from New Jersey. Not just one.

Do I really need to explain this?

Despite the diner business model starting to struggle, we are absolutely still the diner capital of the world. More diners here than any other state. Heck, we pretty much invented them.

Jerry O'Mahony revolutionized the dining industry in New Jersey, starting around 1910 in Bayonne. He did so by transitioning from lunch wagons to being a pioneer of prefabricated, stationary, railcar-style diners.

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He set up shop in Elizabeth and became a leading manufacturer of the classic diner cars that were transported to other sites, producing around 2,000 diners from 1917 to 1955.

So how on earth does USA Today pick only ONE New Jersey diner to be nominated for Top 10? It’s preposterous. Churlish.

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The only diner nominated from here was Tops Diner in East Newark.

The choice isn’t wrong. It just isn’t enough. What of the Tick Tock Diner in Clifton? What of the newly acquired Bendix in Hasbrouck Heights?

Are we really going to say a place called Wolfy’s Leesburg Restaurant in Leesburg, Florida, is better than Bendix with its history and prominence in pop culture? They have the audacity to claim Bob’s Grill in Pittsburg, Kansas, is superior to Tick Tock, which has been around since 1948 and credited with inventing disco fries? Get lost.

All I know is if Tops isn’t in the final 10 Best and no Jersey diner makes the list then the world makes no sense at all.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

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