Food Notes: 12/3

Disco fries, nanopasta, egg creams, the best of everything 2024, and more

Dec 04, 2024

Over Thanksgiving weekend I was back at my parents’ house in New Jersey. We did what everyone in New Jersey does and headed to the local diner like we did in high school. I of course ordered two New Jersey delicacies, a Taylor Ham, egg and cheese sandwich and disco fries.

Disco fries are not poutine, the Canadian French fry and cheese curd dish, though the two are similar. Disco fries typically are topped with mozzarella cheese, but they can be topped with slices of yellow Kraft singles. Poutine and disco fries both originate, most likely, from the mid-century around 1950s, but this might actually just be an example of convergent evolution.

Tracing the origins of actual disco fries leads down a lot of different rabbit holes, urban legends, and myth building. One of the most common myths I’ve heard points to the Tick Tock diner just off Route 3 in Clifton, New Jersey. Route 3 links suburban north Jersey with New York City by way of the Lincoln Tunnel, and the rumor is late night partiers (drunks) driving out of the city would stop at the all-night diner and order the disco fries.

In one version of this story, people are coming from disco dance halls in the 1970s, but some myths claim the dish was introduced as early as the 1940s. The last time I looked into this, I found an article where a guy named Andrew called into NJ 101.5 claiming to have invented them in the 1970s. I’m obviously skeptical, Andrew.

Looking back thought, the connection to Italian American cuisine is hard to dismiss. If the first place to serve it was the Tick Tock Diner, its worth noting that Clifton is home to many Italian immigrants, including both sides of my mother’s family. Mozzarella cheese was just becoming popular in the post war period because of pizza — but a diner that has a War and Peace-length menu, as most New Jersey diners do, is more likely to have mozzarella on hand for recipes like veal parm and lasagna. Seriously, what kind of north Jersey diner doesn’t do at least a halfway decent chicken parm? That’s like a diner not having matzo ball soup.

Anyway, my parents had the toddler for the night. They gifted us tickets to the local community theater and afterward we headed to the Pompton Queen. This was literally flashbacks to high school when I was in drama club and after every show we would head out to the very same diner. Back then the diner operated 24/7.

The Queen is one of the best diners in the state. In high school, this was a frequent destination when either the local diner next to the high school was closed, or just feeling too close to people we knew. One of my regular companions was my friend, Oussama, who would drink tea with honey (he had to make a special request), and I would often order lemon meringue pie, a huge slice four inches tall with thick yellow curd and even thicker meringue (This pie has since been discontinued). The waitress probably loved us spending about $7 for an hour or two, but we did tip well.

Disco fries are available in a narrow area from New Jersey to southern Connecticut, (inclusive of some areas of New York City). I’ve ordered them off-menu from diners along the I-95 corridor south of New Haven, but the disco fry zone is slightly smaller than the Pizza Belt, an area twice defined as roughly Trenton to northern Connecticut.

I don’t get the chance to eat diner disco fries very often, so when I do,

you can bet I order them. This weekend’s disco fries? They were at least as good as I remember.

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