Cuisine: Diner / American / Breakfast
When we first came to State Street Grill, we couldn’t help but feel like we’d been transported to some sort of Disney-adjacent experience. There is just a lotttt going on inside this diner. A million signs with anthropomorphic breakfast items, lots of different stations announcing “this is for pizza!” or “this is for desserts!” and just so many different ceiling heights and materials and clocks and stop lights and… Well, suffice it to say that this joint doesn’t suffer from a minimalism problem. Everything from the decor to the volume to the air conditioning to the menu is all-out maximalist. So, if you like your experiences set continually on ten, you’re in luck!
As I’ve mentioned insufferably over many years of doing this, I grew up in Southern California where diners really didn’t exist. We had coffee shops. They were generally chill places built in the 1960s with carpet on the floor and big, cushy booths where you could enjoy coffee, pastries and the occasional 2:00 a.m. bagel and plate of eggs. They were cozy and pretty muted, the only sound the whirring of the spinning pie case and the clinking of mugs being washed in the kitchen. It was comfortable — though many of the places we frequented had begun the slide into disrepair — and comforting. Not so much State Street Grill. As I alluded to, it can be kind of cold in there, loud when/if there are actually customers, and the large space is just filled to the brink with an overwhelming amount of stuff. It’s not a calming experience, and the decor is what I would call 1980s Alice In Wonderland nightmare fantasy light. I’m honestly not sure who this all is for, but I could do without it.
That all said, if you want a large choice of items, this is your diner. Yes, I know these NJ diners are kind of famous for having absurdly huge menus, but State Street Grill might take the cake in that category. Plus, they manage to organize it in a way that makes you feel like the crab cakes or steak tacos might actually be something they can make with some competence. Whereas a lot of diners bury their atypical diner items on the back page just hoping that nobody orders the broiled cod or lobster Thermidor. I have no clue what gives me the impression this joint might be more on top of these items, but they come in with some swagger (reading their website), so I just feel like I have to believe them. Granted, I’ve only ordered breakfast items here, so I’d have no idea how their chicken Szechuan, seafood paella or Hawaiian pizza is. They do push their brick oven pizzas — including the aforementioned neon-lit pizza station — which don’t look terrible in the photos I’ve seen. But overall the food we’ve gotten is certainly serviceable and on par with most of the diners in the area. Regardless, if you need a wide variety and assortment of grub for those kids and picky eaters in your life, they will cover all of your American food — plus a bunch of American versions of international dishes.
The funny thing is, when this place first opened we considered it the “fancy” diner. That was most likely based on the higher prices at the time, the absolute assault on the senses and the enormous menu. It was also packed and loud and things were booming. That title has since passed to the Chit Chat Diner in West Orange for the exact same reasons. Since then, however, it seems things at State Street have slowed down quite a bit. Or, perhaps, we just hit the place at an off time. But there were way fewer customers, the shine had come off some of the more flamboyant parts of the place and the service was pretty much on par with the sagging surroundings. It had the air of one of those mylar birthday balloons that’s lost its helium buoyancy and is caving in on itself while hovering a couple inches off the ground. We just took it as not a great sign that this rather cavernous space was 95% empty at a time where there should have been way more customers, and that the servers felt like they were matching that energy of the attendence. Once again, the food was fine, and food inflation has moved to pretty much meet the pricing, but the invisible hand of the market has seemingly turned against the once-vibrant eatery. I’ve always found their incredibly dinky, always-full parking lot to be a barrier of entry as well — a couple times in the past having to circle the block looking to get lucky with street parking — but perhaps the downturn in business will make that less of an issue. The potential is there, but we shall see where they go from here
9 State Street – Bloomfield
973/748-3003
statestreetgrill.com
