The Weequahic Diner was once owned by the Bauman family, who eventually opened the Claremont, up in Verona on Bloomfield Ave. It went through a lot of changes (including 2 fires,) but was always true to its roots. In later years Morrie Bauman sold it to Mel Schmel (Famous Deli in South Orange) and Harold (Harold's) before it finally moved to route 3 and evenutally went under.

Nope. False alarm. Spoke to neighbors, and they say it's a sandwich/burger/etc/etc place. They've got another one down in Bordentown, here's a link to the menu: http://www.hogbackdeli.com/hogbackmen...
Except for a pork sandwich and some various grilled chicken sandwiches, it looks like your run-of-the-mill deli.

Oh well. Should have known when I saw the sign said "Hogsback Deli and Grill"

Stupid, stupid me (again...) I pass this place every single Wednesday night on my way to play blues in juke-joint less than a mile away from it, and I've never stopped in because it LOOKs like a cheesy, chain buffet. Never did my research, never found out it was an independent...
If anybody can think of a better combo than bbq and blues, I invite suggestions, but I know exactly where I'm going this next Weds night.
Usually I stop at Bill's BBQ, a two-bit shack on Randolph Ave in Carteret on my way to the club; Bill's stuff is okay, but while it's cooked low and slow, I'm not ever sure it saw any smoke. Hopefully the Southern Smokehouse can be its replacement.

Oh boy, I hope so. Summer is almost here and while I'm happy to EAT bbq seven days a week in the summer, I'm only willing to smoke my own two or three times a week...
Thanks for the update. I'll stop by the liquor store today to see if they know anything; they knew well in advance when Pom-Pom was going under...

Going back to a place to give it a second try when the first was less than successful is often a rewarding task. Minor flaws get fixed, the chef has a better night, the staff has fallen into a more focused system... We had promised to take the girls to Naturale Cusina when they were home from college since it seemed (with the original flaws) to be the kind of place they might enjoy. We did so last night, and I left wishing we had gone for family root-canal instead.
The first difference was that we were not the only table. There was a party of four adults and three children in the back, and four tables including us in the front. Five tables seems to be well beyond the tipping point for Naturale Cusina to turn into Barnum and Bailey's Clown Chaos. Our waitress spent the evening going to each table in turn and giving the same speech of apology ("this was entirely my fault - you said 'blah blah blah' but I wrote down 'bleh bleh bleh' so your meal is wrong") and chiming in on conversations at the various tables from the other side of the room, totally uninvited.
The food hasn't improved. Take gorgonzola, spread it on a too-thick piece of italian bread and add two slices of pear, and you have Naturale Cusina's most successful dish. Again there were no herbs or spices, too little salt, no pepper at all; the food relies purely on the marriage of the ingredients, and excepting only a few cases, that marriage is not strong enough to carry the dish unassisted by technique or additions.
We tried some of the same things as before, and some new things. None of the prior-tried items had improved, while there was certainly room for it. Of the new dishes we tried, the ham and cheese tarte was as brilliantly baked in perfect pastry as its spinach and ricotta cousin had been the prior visit, and the filling was just as boring and in need of a redesign. The cream of squash soup needed salt, needed herbs, needed something other than squash and cream. The pizza Musculoso seemed a brilliant idea at first bite - not a pizza at all, but pizza dough with mozzarella, prosciutto, and piled high with baby arugula and shaved parm, drizzled with balsamic vinegar; however after the first slice, the combination that had been refreshing started being too bitter, too unbalanced - it would have made a great salad course but as an entree, it numbed the palate in record time.
I won't comment too much on the service although I could go on for hours - it was absolutely the worst I have ever encountered in 50+ years of dining out. We had to remind the waitress she had taken only our appetizer order and not the entrees; we had a twenty minute wait after the appetizers before she came back to apologize for things taking so long; we had ANOTHER half hour wait before the first entree came out, and the rest of the entrees took an additional 10-15 minutes. This speaks to amateur hour in the kitchen as well as on the floor. Several entrees were wrong, and the sing-song "I'm sorry, this was all my fault" didn't come close to making up for the ineptitude of the kitchen and wait staff.
It is impossible that this restaurant has any interest in serving its customers; it is a hobby, run by a few people with a third-grader's idea of what food should be, who don't learn from their mistakes; it is an affront to restaurants that care - its point of view seems to be "you don't have to know anything to run a restaurant" and its one food-based mantra "Everything Organic" seems to be viewed as a magic elixir that makes all its shortcomings alright.
Frankly, Naturale Cusina is about as far from "Alright" as you can get. We are lucky - this part of Central Jersey seems to be sprouting with new, interesting little restaurants lately, and this one, that certainly is a waste of time and space, will not be seeing us again.

No restaurant should ever need excuses, but there are a couple of things you need to know before you write off a place.
First is Sandy. My wife, father-in-law and I went in Friday night (the first night they were open since the storm) and the place was crazy-mobbed, they were working on generator power and had no ability to take credit cards, earlier they had all their food thrown out because it was without refrigeration for 4 days, had nothing except the makings of pizza they had bought that day plus some wings and fries they had bought frozen. There were people lined out out the door - many people had gone out for dinner, having no electricity themselves, but the diner had an hour wait, the other places within a mile were in the same shape, and anything going towards Princeton on 571 had no electricty. Lots of people who never tied this place before tried it out of desparation, on probably the most challanging night it had ever had.
Second issue is a personality issue: Giovanni (of Villa Barone), the one you describe with "hair product" is leaving to open his own place [again]. Mike, the one with the tatoos, who is the pizza-genius, is the owner, who having bought into the "we could do great dinners here," spent a zillion dollars he didn't have building a full-service kitchen and provisioning it (with stuff that had to be thrown out on Friday.) Now Giovanni is jumping ship, Mike is in the hole for the dinner-experiment, and the fact that there's no actual bloodshed going on behind the counter is a tribute to man's basic goodness or a ton of valium.
As I said at the start, no restaurant should ever need excuses, but given that all this has happened in three months since they opened, and the storm and the desertion of the dinner chef happened in a five-day period, perhaps it might be wise to stay away for a few weeks, and then try it again. As you said, the pizza is rather amazing.

A very unusual kind of place. Had dinner there tonight. Sunday (they open 4-9) and when we arrived at 6:30 we were the only table. When we left at 8:00 we were still the only table. This is a point-of-view place with two groups of ideas. The first is all-natural (they're pleased to tell you they serve no Coke or Pepsi but have a complete list of natural beverages) with the same side-notes as I remember from places in Woodstock during the early 70's: great space simply dressed; great music played quiety; some handmade signs and some children's artwork... The second is the interesting one: someone (or several someones) has [have] a great sense of flavor pairings and have decided that the rule is that two or three great ingredients, with virtually no embellishment, define a dish. This is painting in primary colors. When it succeeds, it's fresh and pure. It succeeds admirably in the pear and gorganzolla brushetta - two flavors that work brilliantly together (we had that combo along with walnuts in our salad that was even better.) It succeeds less well in the marscapone and mushroom and caramelized onion bruschetta - the marscapone was too delicate to balance the other flavors. It didn't succeed in the traditional bruschetta - although the balsamic was very nice, bruschetta needs some herbs to help marry the flavors; at its best it's a combined flavor, not a dish where the components need to stand on their own. The tarta (outstanding crust) with spinich and ricotta was very nice, very fresh, but just a bit boring. Some herbs, some spices, SOMETHING might have helped, but that's not the focus here; the ingredients are.
The pizza was a mixed success. I somewhat stacked the deck, by piling on the toppings: a Margherita but with bufala mozz (which adds more moisture,) sausage, caramelized onions (which also add moisture) and roasted garlic. The pie was, not unexpectedly, limp. Judging from the bottom, there was some room to crisp the crust a bit more and cook off some of the moisture, but they didn't. Give them credit for the fact that they piled as much of each topping on as if it was the only topping I ordered, but frankly I would have cut back a bit on each to give the pie less to have to handle. I ordered the traditional crust but they also have whole wheat, gluten-free and multi-grain to choose from.
For dessert, we tried the pear sorbet (homemade.) It was not a success on several levels. First, although sorbet (unlike "sherbet") usually includes no dairy, it's churned, not shaved. Make an ice and simply shave it and you've got granita or italian ice. The big difference in the process is that sherbet is richer (the dairy) and smooth, and sorbet is equally smooth. You don't get ice crystals in sorbet. You do at Naturale Cucina. The second problem is that pear, even more so than peach, is a very difficult fruit to extract enough concentration of flavor to make a sorbet, or sherbet or ice cream. When I make peach ice cream, I not only use a peck of peaches to boil down and down to make a quart of ice cream, but put pieces of peach into the ice cream to help bring out the flavor. Pear is so much more delicate and subtle than peach that I have no idea how many whole fruits would have to go into a quart of ice cream. Certainly you'd need less in a sorbet where you don't have the dairy to overcome, but the sorbet here was so faint in flavor as to be tasteless.
The big plus here is the viewpoint that the ingredients speak for themselves and pairing certain flavors can open your eyes to an entirely new way of looking at a particular food. The big drawback here is the viewpoint that the ingredients speak for themselves - sometimes they need some help in terms of herbs, spices, and a certain amount of professional experience that would avoid amateur-like mistakes.
All-in-all, we'll be back; not to critque the food, but to enjoy those things on the menu that work brilliantly given the restaurant's viewpoint. When our kids stop home from college, we'll take them to Naturale Cucina - I'm sure they'll love it. We want to try more of the salads with some interesting combinations of flavors.
This is not (yet) a rousing culinary success, but there's enough good going on to hope that as time goes on (they've only been open since Memorial Day) they'll find their stride and do some rather remarkable things. It's a place, even now, to try if you're on the lookout for a place that's not like every other new restaurant opening up.

Dabuscos, at least in this incarnation, is not going to be the dinner place I had hoped. The pizza is still excellent and the standard sandwiches are fast approaching that same standard, but dinner at a level on a par with the better restaurants of the area is now out of the question in the forseeable future.

I've been in three times since my last write-up and two of the three times the chef didn't know for whom he was cooking. Each time there was a different set of problems. For the two times I can review, the first was a problem with ingrediants: I had veal Saltembocca and while the veal was seasoned perfectly and cooked perfectly, it started out as pretty ordinary commercial veal and while you can dress it up, it's always a bit chewy and the meat itself bland. It doesn't belong in a $21 dinner entree, but would be fine in a lunch sandwich. The beautiful puffed up "bread" concoction that Giovanni had whipped up for us a few weeks ago was replaced with Italian bread in olive oil, herbs and shaved parm. The bread was outrageously good (it's brought in daily from Brooklyn and is what they now use for their sandwiches) and I didn't mind the substitution. The salad was full of surprises (extremely sweet grape tomatoes, Kalamata olives, capers) and was perfectly dressed in a clean balsamic. The service was finally good - Nicole, the new waitress actually knew what she was doing. I had high hopes.
Went in late last week and it was a disaster. Nicole was gone. Her replacement had just been fired. Service was a disaster. Worse yet, the food was fodder. The bread itself was still the best I've had in NJ. The salad had been simplified and the balsamic replaced with a lemon and oil blend that did nothing for it but drown it - heavily over-dressed. My wife had chicken Francaise that was slightly undercooked and lacking in intensity of flavor. I had "Cappelini with Jumbo Crab Meat" that had no flavor and virtually no crab (and what crab there was was certainly not "Jumbo" anything.)
I have since found out that the boys are going to have a parting of the ways. Giovanni intends to go back down to Robbinsville to open a new place to compete against his old one; his head isn't in the game here at all anymore and he's apparently given up on getting the variety or quality of ingredients he wanted here. Mike is the realist - I'm assuming that at the tiny volume they're doing, stocking what Giovanni wanted would bankrupt a very profitable pizza business.
I'll continue following both of them - Mike because the pizza really IS that good, and perhaps he'll find a chef who can do dinners within certain constraints; John, because he is very talented and capable of hiddy acts of god in the kitchen, but may not have the consistancy he once brought to Villa Barone. Time will tell.

Have been in twice so far, once for lunch (pizza and wings) and once for a tasting dinner of small plates. Mixed results, but will definitely go back to see if the kinks get ironed out. Enough potential that it's worth the 35 minute ride.

Tried the Joey's Paisano pizza (sausage, caramelized onions, roasted peppers, smoked mozz) and found the crust "curious" - chewy and a little gritty - I thought that perhaps they added a little cornmeal as many grilled pizzas do, but Chef Mike says no (he was actually thinking of trying that), it's all 00 flour and any crunch came from the grill. Nicely done - somebody knows how much salt mozz needs to bring out the flavor, and both the onions and peppers are done in-house, extremely slowly, showing very full rounded flavors. The sausage wasn't terribly special, but overall this is a pie I'd happily eat again. The wings (buffalo and blue this time) were done to absolute perfection. Wings are harder to do than they would seem - get them crispy enough (with no batter or breading to help) while still leaving the chicken juicy is a feat, and they pull it off nicely here. My companion was disappointed in the heat level (too light for his taste) but there's a "grim reaper" version that he'll try next time.

Dinner was more of a mixed bag. My wife and I split several small plates. The spinach salad with goat cheese which was wonderfully dressed, nicely balanced and very fresh. The Rosemary-Garlic wings were as well cooked as the lunch batch, but neither the rosemary or garlic was intense enough to make them interesting or at all memorable. The nola shrimp were adequate, but could have used more intensity of flavor, but the grits that accompanied them were the high point of the night - buttery, creamy, full of flavor. The fried meatballs were the most interesting dish of the night - there was a component to the taste that I absolutely couldn't identify and was not sure that I liked. They were crisp outside, silky inside (perhaps brisket in the mix?) and extremely strongly flavored, but I'm going back to try them again, alone, before I give up and ask Chef what the taste is I can't identify.

All-in-all, a very interesting place. I'm not sure the chef and the owners are on exactly the same page when it comes to the direction the place will go (the owners seem more "Jersey Shore" [the TV show, not the locale] and the chef more classical; with hope that the chef will prevail, I'll keep trying and posting from this place.

I wonder if the month between Angelina's review (I agree with her a vast majority of the time) and mine marked a "growing pains" period for the restaurant. I still think there's vast room for improvement, but this is not a "write-it-off" kind of place - they're trying so much for so many things that success would mean an extreme home-run. I'll give that kind of place a visit every month, each time hoping that everything will come together.

Pizza is kind of a big category. Gotta split this one. Absolutely-Real-Deal Brooklyn-style: Dabuscos East Windsor; General: Santillo's in Elizabeth.

Burger: Since Don's Drive-In on South Orange Ave in Livingston closed 20 years ago, I've been searching for anything that comes close, with no success.

The objection isn't to "lack of spiciness" but rather "lack of spices and herbs and salt" etc

I'm in the same boat as you - I'm from NY/NJ, but my wife's family has had family cottages in Madison for almost a hundred years, and when we go up to our cottage, SHE's the native (every summer from birth until her mid-twenties.) She has also noticed this trend, and if it were in every restaurant, I'd agree it's regional, but some places are absolutely wonderful (e.g. Bouchee, Elizabeth's, of course LPC, which we go to every time we're up) but those are places that cater to foodies, not to older people with too much money...
We went to Home last night - haven't been there since it changed over; nice, not remarkable; a little expensive for what you get ($100 for 2 with a glass of wine each - split appetizer, a burger and sp & meatballs which the waitress insisted I try since it's the chef's specialty) and again, I'm not sure the chef know how to handle seasoning. I mean, it's nice you have fresh basil, but to put it and grated parm, as the only flavorings, in every dish we ordered?
If your goal is comfort food like LPC or the like, then there are a lot of flavors, but they're all mellow, all work together, and all create a harmony that in no way would be considered "spicy" - however, if you tone down flavors to not offend the masses, then I don't want to eat there... why bother? I can do much better myself....

I’m posting this in the SNE section because I haven’t observed the phenomenon anywhere other than the CT shoreline; however I’m sure that if it exists here, it probably exists elsewhere.

About 10 years ago, my wife and I found a wonderful Cajun and Creole place out in Westbrook. The food had passion, was perfectly cooked, and was true to its heritage. Cajun, like American BBQ, some south American cuisines, some Asian cuisines, is a tightrope act where heat is necessary, but can’t be allowed to overpower the food – any idiot can make a 10-alarm chili, where your mouth catches fire during the first bite and gets more intense from there… the trick in all these styles is to balance the heat so that you don’t realize how spicy the food is until you find yourself sweating. The chef/owner, if memory serves, had worked at Buckingham Palace; had been executive chef to a cruise line (an English Robert Irvine!) and had “retired” to build a business of his own, cooking the food he was passionate about. We resolved to make it one of our first stops the next summer when we were back up at the cottage. One thing led to another and it wasn’t until August of the following year that we got back. The food had changed dramatically. Preparation was still impeccable; the ingredients were still top shelf; what was missing was the heat. It was “toned-down” to the point where it was virtually non-existent.

I was trained in classic French – all the mother sauces, the old “if you’re afraid of butter, use cream,” etc. It wasn’t until about five years ago that my brother-in-law took me aside and said “for a guy who does great BBQ, your fancy cooking really lacks some zip – it sometimes puts me to sleep…” He was absolutely right, and I’ve changed my basic style completely in those five years, using more acid, using fresh wine at the end to kick up the wine that reduced for hours before adding it to the sauce, using just a touch of heat in dishes that wouldn’t normally see anything hotter than black pepper…. Heat then, isn’t just a matter of taste, but in some styles of cooking it’s the wake-up for the myriad flavors involved in the dish itself.

We spoke to the chef that disappointing night, and he freely admitted that he had pulled the spice from his food to accommodate what he called “an older clientele.” He offered more than 20 different “hot sauces” to add to the food if you wished, but of course that’s no substitute for cooking with three different types of hot pepper – the subtlety is gone. We never went back, but I see from the web that ten years later the restaurant is still there and still going strong, so the chef certainly knew his customers.

It wasn’t until the last two nights, however, that I began to wonder if this is a trend, particularly in up-scale restaurants in areas with a high percentage of relatively wealthy older people, like the CT shoreline. Friday night we went to Café Routier in Westbrook. We had always passed the place and resolved to try it; reviews were great and the only negative I read anywhere was a diatribe against places that catered to “the silver-haired brigade.” At the time, I thought that was funny.

We had heard that to really get the feel of the place, one should try the “small plates” and tapas, so we made a meal of a couple of appetizers plus six small shared plates. We tried beef and seafood and a couple of the current regional specialties. Not a single dish had any “wow” factor to it. There was no heat, no acid, not enough salt; in short, there was nothing to kick the flavors up, to wake up one’s palate, to shout “hey, how about THAT!” I’ve written here before about places that are successes despite lacking wow-factor, but those are places like Bar Bouchee and Elizabeth’s where the goal is French comfort food and the degree of success is measured by harmony of flavors and that inner smile that says “if I had a French grandmother, this is how I’d eat all the time…” In the case of Café Routier, there was just no seasoning, period. Beautiful room, lovely location, food to snooze by, and at $150 for two people, I was hoping for more than a nap.

We are 60 years old and were probably the second youngest table in either dining room; everyone else was early seventies, and seemed to be regulars. They all seemed to enjoy their food, but at no other table we could see did anyone seem to be really TASTING the food, or discussing it, or treating it like anything more than something to occupy their hands while they caught up on the week’s events.

Almost as disappointing was our trip to Assaggio in Branford last night. Again, the venue was beautiful, and in this case, the service was virtually perfect (Routier’s wait-staff was good, but the buss-people thought they were mini-waiters and intruded constantly, taking things that weren’t finished and leaving things that were.) At Assagio, the service was good despite having a waitress who was on her first night. Training there is good – the one thing that Christina didn’t do was recite the specials (she called someone else over for that) but the actual dinner service was almost perfect. Not so, however, for the mechanics of the restaurant, nor for the food itself.

Ordering should not remind one of a Marx Brothers movie. Where half-bottles are available, we usually order a red and a white to start. At Assaggio, there were perhaps 10 whites and 8 reds available in half bottles. Five minutes after placing our order, we were told that they were out of the red we wanted. I made a second choice. Five minutes later, the sommelier was at our table explaining that, unbelievable as it was, our second choice was the OTHER red they were out of… this would have been less noteworthy, if it were not for the fact that I let the staff decide what my entrée would be – I asked for whatever they were most proud of. In this case it was a blue crab dish with tomato and herbs. Ten minutes later, the maitre d’ was at our table, explaining that the entrée couldn’t be made; they had run out of crab sauce….

Back to the subject of food with no discernable taste: the crab cakes were the soft, creamy variety but had no crust – all the crunch came from the raw celery. The salad was an over-dressed, soggy mess. Neither of us had more than a bite of it (it takes a certain kind of disregard to serve walnuts that have gotten mushy, sitting in the dressing for too long.) Veal Saltimbocca was served over a bowl of pasta and liquid, with whole sage leaves as the only discernable seasoning. The clam special was served in an overly thickened sauce with little taste. The duck confit spring roll was soggy, but the duck itself had the most assertive flavor of the evening. We let them decide on our dessert, and what appeared was a seven-layer chocolate cake – the highlight of the evening. It wasn’t too sweet and aside from the fact that I would have liked a stronger chocolate flavor (do the sour-cream trick or do the espresso trick) it was fine. The coffee must have been coffee because it wasn’t tea, but it was so weak it was hard to tell.

Again, there was no heat, no acid, no garlic, no assertive flavors in anything we ate except the duck. I’m afraid that this is on purpose – it’s “let’s not offend anyone” food with the flavors dialed down because 30-year-old chefs think that’s what 60+ year old customers want. I hope I’m wrong. With baby boomers in their sixties and seventies now, I would hate to think that formerly good restaurants would start serving $150 pabulum because they think that’s what old people like. It’s almost offensive to have a restaurant decide for me that my poor old heart and palate can’t take strong flavors; that’s not cooking; it’s pandering.

Just in case you're interested, Giovanni Barone is back in business, cooking at D'Abuscos Pisseria E Cucina, a strip mall, Brooklyn-style pizzaria in the Shop Rite shopping mall up in East Windsor on Rt. 130. His head is back in the game. They're trying out the dinner menu now, and should be doing regular dinners in 10 days or so. There's a thread on the new place, but it talks mainly about the pizza side of the business.

Some hang-ups in getting dinner going, but I'm told to expect them to start in the next 10 days. Tonight Giovianni cooked a tasting menu for my wife and me. I'm not going to review the meal because #1, I don't review if the chef knows who he's cooking for (I can't rave over food if you're not going to get the same food I did) and #2, much of what he cooked will probably not be on the regular menu.
With that out of the way, let me clear up something that needed follow up. In a previous post I said "Listening to him talk, he brings the same passion to the dinner menu that Mike brings to the pizza" about Giovanni, but I had yet to taste his cooking (I never made it to his Villa Barone in Robbinsville, although I had heard good things,) so I had no idea if he had the chops to go with the talk. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy..... working with a limited pantry and all the "wrong" pots and pans, the technique is killer. It's always the little things that tell: to what degree of "doneness" the shrimp and calamari are cooked, how well the roast potatoes are cooked, whether you can taste each ingredient in a dish... Giovanni has had fifteen years in the area perfecting his craft, and his technique is flawless. Listening to him describe each dish was almost as good as eating it - his passion is currently out of control in his excitement over opening the dinner part of the business - if you can, once things settle in, ask to "speak to the chef" when you dine there - for a foodie, he's better than a floor show.

Yeah, you and I hoped the same for Pom-Pom, but look what happened there...

This is a precarious situation - Mike makes great pizza. Giovanni has great credentials and talks great food but I haven't eaten his stuff yet. Away at the summer place for another week, so I'll miss the opening, but G promises me a tasting dinner when I return; I'll surely take him up on it, but will also have someone else go in, order us a dinner to my specs, and then come in AFTER the food is on the table, before I'll post a review. If you get there for a full dinner before I do, PLEASE post and let us know what to expect.

Tried Bar Bouchee (new name, same place) tonight for the first time (didn't make it up last September because the cottage battled the hurricane and lost...) Did a cross-tasting of many of the appetizers and was at first disappointed; nothing grabbed me and said "I am the dish you need to come back for" but after about the fourth one, a pattern appeared. At first, I thought the food lacked passion and strived for minimalistic perfection, but by dish four, it became apparent that the focus was comfort food, with the goal being harmony. I could taste the escargot, not garlic and butter as in so many places. I could taste the freshness and brine of the mussels, and the sauce was a high-test mussel-juice, not ten herbs, butter, garlic and lemon. The tartar was almost exactly the CIA recipe circa 1990 (I make it often and know the drill) except it lacked the CIA's "dash of crushed red pepper" and "dash of paprika" (discussion with the exec chef after the tasting notes confirmed these differences.) The duck confit was not earth-shattering, but very, very good.
In all cases, everything was cooked to absolute perfection, but lacked the "wow" factor; I now think that's by design - this is French comfort food; delicious; cooked so that you can taste the main ingredient, not the accoutrements; simple so that each dish holds together with no jagged edges, no flaws, no off-notes.
Philosophy question: Is it necessarily less successful if you design something that cannot achieve unique stardom, in order to create something that gets a consistent 90% rating for a homespun (if you're from Paris) comfort memory?
I usually vote for "take the risk" (I'm a Leffist) but this is so reminiscent of Soltner's style in the heyday of Lutece that I'm tempted to put an asterisk into its rating based on "smile-factor."

Agreed that the tomatoes make all the difference - that's how D'Abruscos gets away with not adding sugar and still getting the Sege taste. At home (sinice I don't need a gallon of tomatoes) I use Gustarosso San Marzanos - sometimes (not always) available online at zingermans.com - nice thing is that when they happen to be in stock, I'll order a dozen or more cans and by the time I'm down to the last one, they come back in stock for a week or two...

Based on the Jake/Scott posts (who would have thought that Somerset was the new Flatbush when it came to pizza!) I drove up there today to try the two side-by-side.

I went into each (they're only 3 [very long] blocks apart) and ordered two slices each of grandma to go. I tasted them side by side, made my notes, and only then went back into each place to ask some quesitons. Here are my notes, and some info based on the subsequent discussions.
LoDuca - perhaps the prettiest grandma I've ever seen. A commercial "brick oven" with higher off-the-deck temperatures than a metal box, they're able to subtly brown the cheese as it bubbles up, leaving a beautiful texture. The crust is real Brooklyn grandma - it's not a Sege crust (thick and bready) nor is it a normal "thin-crust" shaped in a square, but rather has more crumb than a thin-crust, but is brilliantly light, with tiny air pockets all over the place. Later discussion uncovered that this is the same LoDuca that's in Flatbush - the old man stays in Brooklyn, but his son alternates which store he's at; I had asked how they managed that crust with Jersey water and the answer was that they don't - the crust is pure Brooklyn. Don't know if they bring over the crust or just the water (didn't think to ask until I was back down near Great Adventure) but in either case, it's memorable.
Piazza Orsillo looks, by comparison, like a strip-mall pizza place. There are no "Brooklyn Specials" (those slightly over-sized round pies with everything from lasagna to the kitchen sink) and I didn't see a regular Sicilian pie available, but the grandma was there, along with a dozen normal rounds, and as Jake says, the grandma is what you go there for. The pie wasn't as "artisanal-looking" as the LoDuca pie, and the crust was more like a square-shaped standard crust, but the toppings made this today's big treat. No, I don't mean sausage or pepperoni, etc - I ate each pie without additional toppings, wanting to taste what the pizza-maker had in mind. I mean the sauce, cheese, and in this case, thin slices of garlic. I had thought the garlic might be roasted before being put on the pie, it was so sweetly caramalized, but the owner said he just put them on in a little oil and let the deck do the work. The cheese had more flavor than LoDuca's but the killer was the sauce. It's an old-fashioned southern sauce (yes, there's a bit of added sugar in it) and it dominated the pie and the day. If you judge your pizza by the crust, you can’t beat LoDuca, but everything taken together, Orsillo is the one I’d go back to for compete flavor.

Getting back to the original thread, I still maintain that an "L&B" style pie is more than just a good Brooklyn grandma. The place in East Windsor I cite below from another thread on this board makes both a "grandma" (their standard version includes caramalized onions) and an L&B-style grandma (sauce on top, slightly sweeter) which doesn't use or need the added sugar that Orsillo uses, since the tomato blend is different than their normal sauce, which is how I remember L&BSG doing it years ago.

All-in-all both places were worth the 45-minute drive, but Orsillo's is the one I'd go back to first.

D'Abuscos, which just opened in East Windsor.
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/861197
They call one of their many square pies an "L & B" and it has that same interesting sweetness that I remember from L&B years ago.

Well, the dinner menu is set (not at the printer's yet, so things could change,) the kitchen won't be really ready for a couple more weeks, and John still insists that a big part of the attraction will be the specials based on what looked really good that day from the purveyor or an outside source, but here's a quick overview of where they're headed:

First, it's a little rough to figure out from the current version of the menu's layout what's designed to be the kind of "take-out dinners" that most of the pizza joints that call themselves "restaurants" offer and what' designed to attract a more serious diner. The obligitory Chicken and Veal dishes are there (parm, marsala, Franchaise and piccatta) as well as the pasta "dinner" staples (Lasagna, baked ziti, eggplant parm, rigatoni in vodka sauce, and stuffed shells.) The appetizers also include the needed stand-bys ( mussles, fried calamari, caprese) but I don't know that I'd dismiss these "everywhere" dishes too quickly. Today, as usual, I let Mike decide what kind of a slice to give me, and he gave me this amazing white pie with garlic-asparagus - two things of note: first, I thought the asparagus had to be blanched - there was absolutely NONE of that "green taste" to it, but apparently the 550+ degree deck took care of it during cooking the pizza, and second, the riccotta was of a kind I haven't tasted in quite a while - extremely creamy, with some real body to it. That isn't in style anymore (everyone looks for riccotta that's almost a foam, it's so etherial) and Mike and John were still arguing over whether that would be the final choice. It's these kinds of little things that make me want to try the stuffed shells, the new broccoli rabe appetizer, the spinich sautee - things that are fodder at other places might turn out to be noteworthy here.
The definite "Dinner and Proud of It" dishes look like they're going to be winners or losers depending on ingredients and cooking skill, rather than any ground-breaking new recipes, but that's not a flaw in my opinion, it's what was decided in putting together the menu. There's a spidini alla dabusco appetizer that looks worth trying based on description, as well as some pasta dishes (homemade ravioli with shrimp in a lemon-wine-cream sauce; homemade gnocchi with blue cheese and parm) and there are enough more complex veal and chicken dishes to merit mutliple visits to try them all. The seafood side looks a little weak compared to everything else, but even there, there's something that's got me curious enough to try it (sauteed shrimp, mushrooms,artichoke hearts, cherry tomatoes and basil in a white-wine-marinara sauce.)
The new menu has some additions to the regular fare as well - cheesesteaks, a couple of new pies including one with clams (although there are ALWAYS more pizzas in the rack than on the menu - Mike keeps putting new things out.)
I'm told that pricing is absolutely NOT set yet, but based on the prices the boys are playing with on the current version of the menu, it looks like appetizer and entree will be in the $22-$32 per person range.

Discussion on this place going strong on another thread:
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/861197

Giovanni (John) says it will be a couple of weeks before they're ready to try dinners - what was happening last night was the gas lines were being run for the whole setup. John is the full-menu chef and his background is Naples, but his taste runs to more northern dishes, so it might be very interesting. Listening to him talk, he brings the same passion to the dinner menu that Mike brings to the pizza. He uses some of the techniques that take a little added time but add dimension to the food (both roasted garlic and fresh garlic in the same dish - one for the sweetness and depth, one for the up-front bite) so I have what are probably unreasonably high expectations, but we can hope.
My concern, of course, is that a real dinner service at that location may be problematic. Minimum foot traffic after six; no ambience (they'll separate the front from the back - the front is pizza, the back is real food - other places in the area do the same thing, but with a more "restaurant-style" setting...) but I don't know if they can turn six or seven fourtops twice a night during the week, and it will probably take that to break even, in a place like this. John isn't talking about Chicken Parm and Sausage and Peppers; he's talking things like tiny littleneck clams, roasted, fresh in their own juices with butter, garlic, and fewer than half a dozen other ingredients which means the clams have to be absolutely first rate. He's talking about a menu with specials built around what's brilliant from his supplier that particular day. In short, he's talking about an East Village take on northern Italian in East Windsor...
If this place's dinners are as good as its pizza (and remember, I've said before that while the pizza may not be exactly your style, there's little doubt that, personal preferences aside, this is absolutely first rate fare) then I'll try to eat here once a week, if only to support local artists. If it doesn't hit the mark, then it's still a great pizza place, but if the dinners are up to the level I hope to see, then we as locals have no one to blame but ourselves if the kitchen investment proves too dear and we end up with a Pizza Hut in its place...

That may not be the motto, but it is the rule of EVERY good BBQ place I've ever been to, be it in the Carolinas, or Memphis, or Texas, or St Louis, or pretty much anywhere that BBQ is taken seriously. It's perhaps a function of the fact that there are enough everyday patrons to finish every last bit of what's cooked but it's also an indicator that there are places whose first allegiance is to their reputation and not their cash register.

Note that there ARE places, even in the BBQ heartland, who reheat the Q. In the very early months of Chowhound.com, Jim Leff (the founder and 'alphadog' of this board) asked me to review a book called "Smokestack Lightning". The review may still be somewhere on this board, I don't know if the book is still in print, but if it is, it's worth reading. This is a BBQ tour by a pair of guys who had the passion. The very first stop in the book is at a place called Hawkins Grill, in Memphis, where the BBQ is done in advance, stored below the bar in a fridge, and heated on a flattop when ordered. It's not just NJ that reheats..... from the reactions of Elie and Stewart (the authors) this was not a fatal flaw....

I've done BBQ for many years, and the single biggest advantage an amateur has is he doesn't have to "make BBQ pay." The second biggest is what was pointed out by Corvette Johnny, above [paraphrasing]: we can oversmoke if that's what WE like. We can go to the "falling off the bone" point if that's what WE like. Cheryl Jamison is not going to show up at my front door and berate my ribs for the experiment with Chinese Five Spice (ok, it didn't work out as brilliantly as Dave Sit's do, but, for crying out loud, it was an EXPERIMENT!) I don't lose points with friends and family because I make by BBQ the way I want it on that particular day (or actually the way I wanted it on the first of the three days it takes to plan the BBQ) - in short, we have it a lot easier than the guys who have to make a living at it, and MUCH easier than the guys who have to hit an engineered scoring grid.

The location at the Town Center Plaza (Multiplex Cinema shopping center) in East Windsor hasn't worked out for a couple of previous pizza shops. Singas opened, lingered, and died. The Azzaro brothers (of Trenton Tomato Pie fame) couldn't make a go of it no matter how well their other stores did and they were out in a year. Now a new place is in its third week: D'Abuscos Pisseria E Cucina. The sign says "Brooklyn Style Pizza" and that's almost a double-dog-dare-ya to find a flaw. I mean, if someone tells you they can make Brooklyn-Style pie, it's either hype or it's real - there's no middle ground. ("Don Pedro's of Vineland Brooklyn-Style Pizza" is probably hype...)

Bottom line: this is DEFINITELY the real deal. I've now been there four times. Before I spoke to the owners on my first visit, I tried a couple of different style slices. A couple of things were obvious: no sugar in either the crust or the sauce; a tiny bit of semolina, but it didn't screw with the crispness; the crust is one of the best I've ever had. Like all Brookly pizzas, it's under-salted. Good cheese, not the crap from Sysco's ("let's buy our cheese where we buy our kitchen cleanser and save on the delivery costs!"); thoughtful specialty pizzas. There are 3 main styles: Napoletana round thin-sliced, amazingly crispy sicilian squares, and some round "pan pizzas" that have everything except the kitchen sink on them - I normally avoid these like the plague, but today I tried the "lasagna pie" and I tell you that it had every flavor you expect in lasagna, and a huge but tight and crisp crust - one slice is a meal.

Speaking to Michael, the first time, he confirmed the "no-sugar" rule and explained the semolina quandry - he dusts the bottom of the pie in it AFTER the pie is made. He also presented his credentials - he's a nephew of the family who owns Gino's Pizza in Brooklyn (no, not the fancy restaurant but the pizza joint that has had an ongoing rivalry with their neighbor Lenny's for generations.) I asked about the water - seeing how phenomenal the crust is, I thought it might be imported - but Michael explained that for a week before they opened, he made small batches of crust, all day long, to get the recipe adjusted for the local water. This is key and extremely telling. The prior owners had a pedigree, but their pie was soggy, probably because nobody thought to take a week experimenting, taking notes, and modifying a recipe.

This place is absolutely worth trying. The specialty pies are not inexpensive (their version of a "grandma pie", a Sege pie with thin crust, fresh mozz and amazingly carmalized onions is 18 bucks), but I've seen higher, and this time it's worth every penny. I haven't tried the sandwiches yet, and the fold-over handout-menu (all they have) says "We apoligize for the limited menu. We are currently installing a full service kitchen in our facility to better serve you. We appreciate your continued support and thank you for your patience during this time" so I suspect real entrees are on the way, but there's no reason to wait. The Pie is the thing. As we all know, above a certain level, the "best" pizza is a matter of personal preference; with that said, this isn't my favorite pie in the world (although I've been there 4 times in 3 weeks,) but it may be yours, and it is ABSOLUTELY perfect in what it tries to be. This is one of the pies that should be in anybody's "best list" even if it isn't first. To find it in East Windsor, of all places, is amazing. Would love to see this place succeed where two others (albeit with medicore pies) have failed. Would love to know that the local consumers can tell the difference and that the location isn't the Bermuda Triangle of Pizza Joints....

Based on the second post in the window (from the lawyer) and from what the guys next door said (quoted above) don't expect it to re-open.....

Yup - it's official. Pom-Pom is gone. There are two signs in the window saying "Temporarily Closed For Renovations - Check Back Soon!!"

Unfortunately, there's also a letter from a lawyer posted in the window that says "On this date the landlord found the premises to be abandoned, along with the hazardous condition of an open natural gas valve.... PLEASE TAKE NOTE that the lease with your company has been terminiated EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY and you are not to enter into or upon the premises....."

I went next door and spoke with the guy who bought out Jerry and Geri's old liquor store, and he tells me that this had been brewing a while and nobody was surprised.

Again, for the sake of the chicken, a real shame. On the other hand, I wonder if they're going to put the commercial smoker up for bankruptcy auction......

Will stop by on my way back from fencing tomorrow morning and see what the story is. Despite the fact that I no longer enjoyed the BBQ since the change-over, the chicken was wonderful, and will be missed.

I hate writing this kind of followup review... it's so hard to be fair, yet I need to let those who read my original post know what has changed...

There is no pit-master anymore. Tommy (one of the two owners - the "back of the house" guy) confirmed that they couldn't afford him with the way business has been. Tommy has taken over all the cooking, and is the first to admit that he's never done BBQ before and doesn't even like BBQ. I spoke to him AFTER I took the following tasting notes:

Pulled Pork - smoke has completely disappeared. This is Sunday-at-the-Church roast shoulder - very, very moist; very, very good meat; no BBQ spice, no smoke.

Sauce - more vinegar (it needed it) and less sugar (it needed it) but still only one sauce available, and instead of the old Memphis sauce, this is a generic BBQ sauce that doesn't speak to a region, a point of view, or a statement. It's a "offend nobody" sauce and although I'm not a fan of Memphis sauces, I prefer that to what's now offered.

Ribs - incredibly good meat - possibly the best St.L rack I've seen north of Lexington (it comes from a specialty butcher on Long Island) but again, no smoke, no spice, no point-of-view. Beautifully cooked but not smoked. Juicy and just the right degree of "not-quite-fall-off-the-bone" to make the texture right, but done with no passion, no layers of flavor - just pork and sauce.

Sides: The Collard Greens are less sugary (thank goodness) but still a bit sweet for my taste. Less over-cooked than they used to be. The mac and cheese has a brand-new cheese mixture and a bit more salt (the original was great but needed more salt) but has a very safe, not-quite-browned crust to it. No BBQ spices in the mac and cheese anymore, but very nicely done as a non-BBQ side.

Tommy is a very, very good cook. He knows what makes a dish work and what doesn't - what he lacks is any understanding of traditional BBQ, any passion for the genre, and any notion that great BBQ is partially a result of excesses. That runs so contrary to his style as to make this a "has-been" for BBQ devotees. With that said, the chicken (which was his all along) is still the great staple of the menu - Grilled or fried or off the spit, those are his recipes and while they're not BBQ, they're wonderful. Even the "BBQ" is probably more approachable for the suburban audience, and I really hope that tasting this stuff inspires people to search out real "Q", which, sadly, Pom Pom no longer serves.

Once upon a time, Chowhound was a board devoted to inspired and passionate cooking, where flaws in technique could be forgiven for the sheer enthusiasam and devotion one brought to the dish. That may be of no relevance in today's market, but I count myself as lucky to have heard Jim Leff say of a very popular place "Yes, but the guy who makes the food is a cook.." - it may be very mainstream, but it's not Chowhound.

Glad you enjoyed it. The sauce is probably a little too Memphis for you, as it is for me; the pitmaster's background is in the triangle, not the east coast where vinegar is the real base.

This time of year, I do my own Q at least once a weekend (as opposed to the dead of winter when I only do it once a month) but I still stop by Pom Pom for sides - my greens and my yams can't hold a candle to theirs

You're absolutely right - it's native to Alabama - I still think of it as a GA sauce since the first place I ever had it was in a place outside Donaldsonville in extreme Southwest GA.