There was a restaurant I remember on U.S. 22 in North Plainfield, New Jersey. I mention Route 22 a lot; we shopped and had dinner along there a lot when I was a kid, and it was one of the first places I wrote about and photographed way back in 2017, when I was starting out as a writer and just discovering urbanism.
It’s always a bit of a strange feeling to drive down that corridor; it’s like returning to an origin point. These days, there isn’t all that much left from the American roadside heyday, but there are still a few bits and pieces, and I still like to make that drive when I visit New Jersey.
The restaurant I remember was a seafood restaurant called Fin and Claw, in an old diner building. We passed it many times; my dad ate there once coming home late from work. We never went as a family; I guess it was just okay. It had a fire at one point, and reopened, but by 2007 it was boarded up, and it was demolished and replaced by a bank not long after.
That makes this a rare “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” entry for a building that is no longer standing, but I find the story it tells interesting enough to feature it anyway.
I tried looking this restaurant up on Google, and…nothing. All the results are for a different Fin and Claw Restaurant, in Washington Township, New Jersey. There is nothing about this restaurant that was in North Plainfield, and the two are not related.
And it was Fin and Claw—not Fin & Claw. But for the heck of it, I tried googling “Fin & Claw,” and I found one result: a barebones entry on the diner history and documentation site Dinerville, identifying “Fin & Claw” as the old Carousel Diner; manufacturer unknown.
As far as I can tell, that is all that exists on the direct, searchable internet about this restaurant, which was open for several years on one of New Jersey’s major commercial highway stretches. I find that notable in and of itself; the internet is very, very far from being a general repository of everything that has happened or been recorded somewhere.
However, the Carousel Diner clue pulled up this postcard, for sale on eBay at the time of this writing:
That’s even older than Fin and Claw, yet it exists on the internet. But only because someone is selling the postcard on an e-commerce site! The randomness and serendipity in what gets recorded and what doesn’t is kind of humbling and disquieting. It’s possible there’s no other image of this restaurant still extant, and that it wouldn’t be possible to know what it looked like without this one guy with a vintage postcard. It makes you wonder how much simply never was recorded at all.
Here is Fin and Claw in 2007, the only time it was captured on Google Maps, because that is the earliest year the street-level imagery goes back to:
You can see it’s the same sign as the Carousel!
That is about all you could do with Google searches. One way to unearth obscure local information like this is to ask on Facebook groups, like an “I grew up in North Plainfield” group. Another way, which I’ve written about a lot since I got a newspapers.com subscription, is searching for newspaper ads or articles. If you had a busy local or regional paper in the relevant area, and it has been digitized, and its digitized archives are on a newspaper service—all ifs—then you can often trace a building and/or business all the way back either to its construction/opening or to the “mists of time.”1
Sometimes a particular person—and nobody else—will have documented one of these bits of local histories. Once again New Jersey-based historian Greg Gillette, who I am sure uses archival material for these histories, has assembled a brief but comprehensive history of the diner:
The $200,000 Golden Dream Diner-Restaurant opened on the westbound side of Route 22 in North Plainfield in 1965. It was located east of the Wilson Avenue intersection, across the highway from the North Plainfield High School athletic fields. Around 1968, the Siliverdis brothers purchased it and renamed it West End Diner. They sold the diner in 1973, after which it operated under various names, including Renaissance Diner, Midnight Diner, and the Carousel Diner. Around 1999, the proprietor of Bridgewater’s Time to Eat Diner acquired the business and renamed it Time to Eat Diner, Too. In more recent years, it was a seafood place and a doggie daycare. Today, there is a bank on the site.
So that’s the basic outline: a mid-1960s opening, and a series of basically similar diners under different owners, ending with an attempt at a refresh into a seafood restaurant, and then the end of an era. (I don’t recall the doggie daycare, but it might have been that too!)
A full descent through the newspaper archives reveals this history. But more interestingly, it tells a whole condensed story about America, about the roadside landscape, and about the immigrant experience.
I found these articles by basically searching each name of the establishment until I found a reference to its previous name, which can often be done all the way to the beginning, or simply to where the paper trail ends. This corridor is extensively documented, mostly thanks to the Plainfield Courier-News, which featured a great deal of granular local coverage over the years.
I’m going to start in the middle of the timeline, with Carousel, because the same person was involved in it from that period to—I think—the end. And then we’ll look at the period before Carousel.
In late 1991, we have a review of the Carousel Diner: “The Carousel diner is a friendly home away from home.” Here is the head chef Christopher Mitchel. Despite the typically massive diner menu, Mitchel is quoted as saying, “I’ll make anything they want, if we’ve got the ingredients.”
This article also mentions the former names of Midnight Diner and before that Renaissance Diner—names which can now be searched to further complete the timeline.
Mitchell offered, in 1991, a one-and-a-quarter-pound lobster with soup, salad, potato, and vegetable, for $11.95. We’ll come back to this later.
In 1999 the Carousel Diner became the “Time to Eat Too Diner,” a second location of the Time to Eat Diner on the Somerville Circle. It apparently had a unique aesthetic which it shared with the original location: “With its plants and a variety of clocks, customers enjoy the familiar relaxed atmosphere.” It’s identified as “once the location of the Carousel Diner.”
From the article: “‘There was a need for good food in this town, and when the place became available, we bought it,’ said owner Chris Mitchel.’” Apparently Mitchel was asked by customers at the original location to buy the second one, which he eventually did. The food options in North Plainfield in the 1990s really must have been minimal.
Time to Eat Too had real chefs, a fairly sophisticated menu, and served relatively high-end coffee from Lacas Coffee, a Philadelphia- and now New Jersey-based company founded by Greek immigrants.
Another review/write-up from 1999 includes a fascinating quote from Mitchel, who was a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America: “I’m part of the new generation of Greek diner owners.” I think he meant that he had a higher view of the diner as a restaurant, with a more refined menu and better overall quality.
You see this phenomenon with immigrant groups and their cuisines all the time: the quest to elevate or innovate in a way that does something more interesting (and profitable) with familiar cuisine. The specialty pizza boom versus the old-school pizza parlor with the standard topping list is a good example. You’re seeing one little hyper-specific example, captured in that 1999 article, of a universal process and sentiment.
I was reading about another restaurant, a kind of “fast food with a modern twist” concept, also from the 1990s, and one of their partners came from an old-school German meat shop closer in to the city. Same kind of thing.
But Mitchel was not new to the diner scene. In fact, we saw his photo above, from 1991, when he ran the Carousel kitchen! “Mitchel cooked at this North Plainfield location when it was the Carousel Diner, right before opening his Somerville diner. He left the partnership of the Carousel Diner in North Plainfield and opened Time to Eat with partner Henry Rybak, who also opened the North Plainfield establishment with Mitchel.”
The menu is worth spending a little time on: A combo of a 16-ounce sirloin steak and two stuffed shrimp was $14.95; believe it or not that is basically double with inflation, $29.66 today. A broiled stuffed lobster tail, seafood fra diavolo with lobster, shrimp and scallop linguine, and broiled veal chops sat in the same price range. Of course much of the menu was cheaper than that.
On the one hand, you aren’t going to find lobster dishes for $29 nowadays. On the other hand, that seems pricey for a diner in 1999. How much does this tell us about how we remember restaurant prices from years or decades ago, and how we feel about inflation today? I’m not sure.
Time to Eat Too didn’t last long, despite reviewing well and looking pretty nice. In 2002 it was converted to Fin and Claw, the final restaurant at the site. Only a few months into opening, there was a fire in the basement—I wonder what the basement consisted of, and what it was used for?—though this didn’t damage the building much.
Here’s an ad for Fin and Claw, not long after it opened. That lobster dinner is $21.32 in today’s dollars—now that strikes me as an unusually good deal, though maybe it was a kind of grand-opening special.2
It also sounds suspiciously like the Carousel’s one-and-a-quarter-pound lobster with soup, salad, potato, and vegetable, for $11.95. So we don’t get soup and salad anymore, but it’s 45 cents cheaper 11 years later, without counting inflation.
First, how is it possible that this lobster dinner cost less in 2002 than in 1991? Second, Mitchel, who one of the Carousel Diner reviews says once owned a seafood restaurant, was probably the owner of Fin and Claw as well, which he likely converted from the Time to Eat Too concept.
Fin and Claw never got a proper review or write-up, so I don’t think its owner was ever recorded in a newspaper article. This is why reading and documenting all of this in concert is worth more than the sum of its parts; it’s doing history.
Now Mitchel’s involvement appears to have begun in 1991, so everything before that is a different period which I’ll give you now. Directly before Carousel, it was the Midnight Diner.
The Midnight Diner name only goes back to 1991—in February of that year there was a hiring ad for the “new Midnight Diner.” Most of the hits for that name, in fact, are recurrences of this ad across newspaper issues. It opened in early March of 1991, converted from the Renaissance Diner; owner, Evan Carzis (along with other Greek-American partners, and a different chef with a fine background; this one studied at New York’s French Culinary Institute).
But other than ads and crime reports, Midnight Diner is not mentioned much, never fully reviewed, and by November 1991 is already the Carousel. That didn’t last long!
The earliest reference to the preceding Renaissance Diner is November 1980, for a hiring ad ahead of the grand opening. The first reference that is not a hiring ad is a strange July 1981 story about two long-separated sisters, one of whom was spotted at the Renaissance Diner. The story says this happened three years ago—before the Renaissance Diner existed. Local papers often also miss small details.
Most of the hits for Renaissance are also ads. In 1987, its operators, brothers Peter and Sergio Scrollini, along with two other partners, proposed a two-story, 71-room hotel adjacent to the diner, which the plan also called for modernizing and enlarging. This never happened.
In late 1990, when the Renaissance closed for remodeling into the short-lived Midnight, the owners were identified as Effie Carzis and her husband. That must be Evan Carzis, the owner of Midnight. So Renaissance in its final couple of years and Midnight were also the same owners, as Time to Eat Too and Fin and Claw probably were.
However, using this method of finding the previous iteration from an article on the new iteration, this is where paper trail ends. Nothing much was ever written about the Renaissance Diner, so no article said anything about what preceded it.
We have Greg Gillette’s summary, however, and he says it began life as Golden Dream.
Now, to convey the whole history of this little building would take up too much space. So next week, we’re going to do a part two, including some looking into an apparent contradiction in the timeline, based on contradictory newspaper articles.
And now I want to go sit in a diner at midnight.
Related Reading:
One building/restaurant I researched this way, which I plan to write up later, was traceable, as far as I could tell, to a residential address back in the early 20th century. Some buildings are too old or unremarkable to have ever had their origin recorded. In some cases, even county records may be missing or inaccurate.
Lobsters nowadays are routinely at least $15 or $16 per pound for the small guys; today, a lobster that size with a potato and side would almost certainly cost a consumer more than the inflation-adjusted price just in ingredients.
Pretty much every time we go to a diner, my wife admonishes me not to order pasta.
I wouldn't go as far as to call it a white whale, but since you are discussing Route 22, I thought I'd bring it up and make a request...
My father and uncle worked at a fruit stand on Route 22 called the Melon King back in the 1950s. I have casually looked for a photo of it a few times, but not much since my father died.
My brother and I as well as our cousins heard about "working at the Melon King for 25 cents an hour" many times from our fathers. It might have an interesting story as its surely been through several iterations if you ever come across it.