Gotham City Diner

Visited Friday, September 21, 2018
Location: 39-10 Broadway, Fair Lawn, NJ
Hours: Every day, 6 a.m.–2 a.m.
Website: gothamcitydiner.com

Gotham City Diner is unique on our list because it actually has a second location over in Ridgefield. We are wary of a diner that isn’t just a single location because too easily it can become a chain restaurant, and that’s not a diner. (Looking at you, IHOP.) But any doubts we had were quickly resolved by the superhero branding and imagery, which of course are classic diner staples.

BUD

DAN

Main Dish

Gotham Express

It’s well established by now that I try to seek out a diner’s signature food so I can get a taste of the best they have to offer. Gotham City made it easy for me because their titular dish—the “Gotham Express”—is a steak sandwich. Thank goodness it wasn’t some kind of avocado wrap or banana French toast—avocados and bananas are both abominations unto God. (No mean comments please. We can discuss this like mature adults.)

The menu description was very promising: sliced seasoned steak tossed in “Our Secret Steak Sauce” (that capitalization shows that they mean business), with chopped scallions, tomato, and mozzarella on a garlic ciabatta roll. I held the tomato.

I had some problems with this sandwich. First, I expected strips of sliced steak, as the menu describes. These were cubic chunks. Maybe I would prefer it this way if I weren’t expecting something else. Second, the way the sandwich was presented made it practically unmanageable to eat any way but open-faced with a fork and knife. I’ve fought this battle many times before and it really can go either way, but this time I wanted a proper sandwich, like the Earl of Sandwich always intended. (That’s the legend, right? He wanted to be able to eat while playing cards, and the bread let him hold his food in one hand?) Third, I saw no sign of scallions. This was a steak and mozzarella sandwich, make no mistake. On its face, that could be a perfectly successful recipe, but here was the kicker: the “garlic ciabatta” bread was virtually spongy with garlicky butter. It was cloying. I appreciate the sentiment of garlic bread as the sandwich bread of choice, but it was not executed well here.

Main Dish

Brooklyn Burger

NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA BAD HAM[burger].

Let me start off by informing you readers that I’m actually a pretty big comic book reader, so this review is going to be stuffed with puns. As stuffed with puns as I was with this sub-par burger experience.

This burger came with all the works—mushrooms, grilled peppers, fried onions, AND the patty itself was marinated in Worcestershire (try spelling that right on your first try) sauce. Every part of this burger sounded amazing. When I got it though, the patty was crispy, a hard tell that it isn’t cooked medium as I asked. I can look past a slightly overdone burger though, if the Worcestershire wasn’t absolutely overwhelming. “Marinated” in Gotham City I guess translates to “soaked in for 5–6 weeks.” It was so strong and salty that it overpowered the flavors of all the excellent toppings it came with. I didn’t even finish it, it was too much. Worcestershire sauce, like comic book puns, are best when used in moderation.

Fries

The fries served with my sandwich were forgettable. But for no reason that any of us could discern, they served an entirely different type of fries with Dan’s burger: beautiful little shoestring morsels that I ate directly from her plate. This is the first time I’ve seen thin French fries at a diner in a long time and I much enjoyed it.

Fries

I’m going to write about the fries I ate, not the ones that came with my dish.

The fries that came with my dish were literal shoestring size. Thin and crispy. Not my thing. I swapped out with Bud who loves a thin and crispy fry, and himself got the thicker, soggier sort. That’s more my jam.

That being said, these fries, as Bud said, were nothing more than forgettable. They were bland and boring. Also, the honey mustard was gross. Too potent and mustardy.

Dessert

Brownie Sundae

Dan and I try to keep each of these reviews self-contained, unaffected for better or worse by any past experiences we’ve had at a particular diner. However, we’ve been to Gotham City before and were not impressed with the cheesecake, so we steered a different direction from the start. Dan sniffed out some very fudgy looking brownies in the dessert case, and we asked the waiter if he could concoct a hot brownie sundae for us. Will the brownie be warm? Yes, he vowed. Will there be lots of whipped cream? Yes again.

What we got was not what we expected. Instead of the classic hot brownie on a plate, vanilla ice cream melting around it, this was a giant goblet of ice cream, capped with whipped cream, strung with ribbons of chocolate and caramel syrup, with a maraschino cherry on top. We eventually dug through to some meager chunks of hard, burnt-tasting brownie at the bottom—so I can’t say there wasn’t any brownie in this purported brownie sundae—but it wasn’t the star of the show.

Thing is, the ice cream was actually pretty good. It just wasn’t what we wanted.

Dessert

Brownie Sundae

I’ll give our dessert this much: it sure was pretty. Maybe the prettiest brownie sundae I’ve ever seen. If only it had some brownies in it…

There were so few pieces of brownie in this concoction that I strongly believed there was some conspiracy afoot, where the chef cut the brownies in half. The monster brownie I saw behind the glass was definitely more substantial than the little squares they decided to be so kind as to throw into our two-gallon ice cream bowl. What’s worse is that about half of the brownie pieces I managed to fish out were CRISPY. Like, so crispy that Bud asked me if it was maybe toffee. NOPE. Just burnt brownie. I can’t believe you messed up a brownie sundae, Gotham City Diner.

Service

Our waiter was a soft-spoken young fella, and he was very polite. He didn’t do anything wrong. My two gripes are with the kitchen, I guess. (I don’t really know how restaurant management structure works.) First, our dishes came out unevenly. We were a party of six, and I think just one of us was served for three or four minutes, before two more dishes came out, then another one or two, and somebody sat foodless for an oddly long time. Second, the wait for our dessert was just unreasonable. This would be a prime place for some variation of “oh I guess they were milking the cows and making the ice cream from scratch har har har” but I’m better than that.

Service

I’m sure this young gentleman is a fine person, but a fine waiter he was not. It took over an hour and a half from sitting to leaving to get our entrees and one dessert. It got busy, yes, but this seemed excessive. This was perhaps the slowest service we have received since the infamous Land and Sea “restaurant.” There was nothing special about the service here from the moment we entered the door to the moment we left. No fun interactions with a host or hostess, waiter, diner management, nothing. Though it was a very expansive one, it looks like Gotham’s menu didn’t include SMILING.

Also, oh my god don’t even listen to this hypocrite, Buddy literally leaned over to me and whispered “what’re they doing back there, churning the ice cream themselves??” This guy has a lot of nerve saying he’s “better than that.”

Value

I always feel a little sticker shock when I order a steak sandwich, but I have to try to keep it in context. The Gotham Express was $15.25, and I guess that’s fair. The sundae was $8.25, which I think is much less defensible. Oh, and they had the one-free-refill maximum. Come on.

Value

No wonder Bruce Wayne is so rich, he probably owns this place. An unimpressive burger for $12.50 and a brownie sundae for $8.25? Yeesh. If I didn’t have my GPS to tell me this place was on the intersection of “Broadway” and “Tunbridge Road,” I’d think it was planted square in the middle of “Crime Alley.”

Ambience

Gotham City does the dark-and-moody diner style, and it does it well. It was clean, modern, and intimate. Notably, they take the “Gotham City” moniker to an extreme, decorating with explicitly Batman-related paraphernalia. I know virtually nothing about intellectual property law but that can’t be legal, right? Unless they licensed it? But why would a restaurant license superhero imagery? What’s next, X-Men Tavern? Incredible Hulk Café?

Ambience

Ugh, I’d literally kill for an “X-Men Tavern”.

For all the complaining I’ve done about this diner, I’ll give them this much: it’s cool looking. There’s some ambiguously familiar Batman characters and visual references that are just off enough to avoid any copyright issues. I liked that. There was a very Barbara-Gordon-batgirl-sporting-blonde-hair mural painted right next to us. As a comic fan, this infuriated me. As someone interested in copyright, I appreciated the effort.

OVERALL

My sandwich was underwhelming and we had some problems with the service, both with the speed and the communication. Maybe I’m being too forgiving, but these felt like problems that are correctable with another visit by ordering a different dish and dealing with a different waiter. But on the merits of this visit alone, I was not impressed.

OVERALL

Like Batman’s Gotham City, Bud and Dan’s Gotham City experience was dark, grim, and unrewarding. This was the second time visiting this diner (first time since starting the blog), and both times I didn’t enjoy my meal or dessert. The food wasn’t good, the prices were too steep, and the wait was too long.

I’ll always give a diner a second chance, so I did, and now I can never go back again.