What Is New Jersey Cuisine?

John Holl, a lifelong New Jerseyan, was explaining the greasy intricacies of the several plates of New Jerseyana that sat in front of us: A Taylor ham, cheese, and egg sandwich on a toasted bun, and disco fries, which are similar to poutine. “What I like about it,” Holl was saying, apropos the ham sandwich, “is a little bit of burn from the griddle gets on there. It’s got a little bit of that spicy tang. And—you can see it in the disco fries as well—those are just slices of yellow American cheese. They put it under the broiler for a few minutes—it starts to melt. Over on this side you can see the skin of it, as it were.”

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It’s true that melted American cheese develops a layer that could definitely be described as “skin.” It was about 10 in the morning at the Brownstone Diner & Pancake Factory, a Jersey City institution, and we were eating what Holl described as “poor-decision food after you’ve been out drinking all night.”

Holl is the author of the new cookbook Dishing Up New Jersey, which is the second NJ-themed cookbook out this year, the other being The Jersey Shore Cookbook. Both showed up around the same time as a big package in Saveur magazine celebrating the local cuisine, which happened to be around the same time the Garden State inspired a tribute to diner food here at Epi. Is New Jersey cooking having a moment?

“If it is, it’s about damn time,” Holl said. But he doesn't like the notion that this might surprise anybody: “Just because you’ve suddenly found this doesn’t mean this is new.”

Jersey is home to more diners per capita than anyplace else, and they have a special place in its food culture. They put out the kinds of dishes that distinguish New Jersey from places that, for instance, don't serve Taylor ham, which is also called (there's some contention here) pork roll. It's basically a zesty processed-pork product, not technically ham, that was invented in 1856 and whose legions of fans have kept it in production ever since. Disco fries, too, get a regional spin: where poutine requires cheese curd, disco fries prefer slices. New Jersey boasts its own rich, complex hot dog ecosystem. And then there's the class of sandwiches with names like the Happy Waitress, an open-faced grilled cheese with bacon and tomato, and the New Jersey sloppy joe.

An egg-and-cheese sandwich with Taylor ham. (Or is it pork roll?)

Photo by Shutterstock

The New Jersey sloppy joe, it should be mentioned, resembles a sloppy joe not at all. It's a double-decker sandwich on sliced bread. Its filling traditionally comprises sliced roasted turkey and sliced beef tongue, topped with cole slaw, finished with Russian dressing. If you're wondering how it came to be called a sloppy joe, it's because that was the name of the bar in Cuba that inspired the sandwich. Some guy from New Jersey ate it there in the 1930s and was so pleased with it that he imported the concept back home.

Actually, this story gets at the root of what makes Jersey food Jersey: a willingness to absorb everybody else's food and, for that matter, everybody else. Consider that one in five New Jerseyans is not a U.S. native, and that a quarter of the state is of Latino or Asian descent. “Unrivaled diversity marks New Jersey’s foreign-born population,” according to a dispatch from Rutgers University, which highlighted the state’s Indian, Mexican, and Filipino populations. Everybody comes to New Jersey—Ellis Island is actually here, Holl points out, not in New York—and they bring their culinary know-how with them. “In Newark’s Ironbound [neighborhood], you have Brazilian and Portuguese,” Holl says. “You have a lot of Middle Eastern up in parts of Bergen. If you go up into Fort Lee there’s Korean Americans. If you go into West New York, that has the second highest population of Cuban Americans outside of Miami.” They join the older groups—the Italians, for instance, who created Trenton tomato pie.

So when asked point-blank what New Jersey cuisine is, Holl answers “diverse.” Which isn't very helpful, but neither is it untrue.

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“It’s a melting pot of so many ethnicities, and that’s what makes it so interesting” says Deborah Smith, the proprietor of the food and dining blog Jersey Bites. Smith wrote The Jersey Shore Cookbook, which brings to mind another kind of diversity New Jerseyans like to brag about: geographical. Most entrees in Smith’s cookbook involve seafood—swordfish, lobster, clams, day boat scallops—but travel a little ways inland and you'll come across an agricultural scene worth boasting about. New Jersey is a top-ten-in-the-nation producer of cranberries, blueberries, tomatoes, and corn. (Smith's got a recipe for a hot dog topped with blueberry barbecue sauce.)

Holl first got hip to this situation as a newspaper reporter, a job he had for about 20 years. (He's now the editor of All About Beer magazine.) Reporters, he notes, "have a knack" for finding good food: Korean in Bergen, halal in Patterson. Funnel cake and saltwater taffy on the boardwalk. In his cookbook he borrows a slaw recipe from the Manischewitz Company, which is located in Jersey (so is Goya), highlights the garden-ocean potential with dishes like cucumber gazpacho with crabmeat, and works in recipes for vegetable curry and tofu tikka masala from a cooking school in Stockton. So to him, the question's really not “What’s New Jersey cuisine?” The question is, rather, “What isn’t?”