YDKJ Diner Challenge! Colonial Diner, Lyndhurst

by Alice Magdziak • June 21, 2015 • Bergen, Dinerland, Food • Comments (0) • 2665

The Colonial Diner in Lyndhurst is right off Route 3 and is a classic rail car design with a built on side room. It’s a very cute little diner with some really great food. We’re challenging ourselves to review lots of diners across New Jersey using the same menu items for each diner. There are many dishes that a diner needs to get right to be truly great. We think we’ve picked some of those obvious dishes and we’re crisscrossing the state to see how our many diners do on these menu mainstays. We’re also allowing ourselves a wildcard item or two just to keep it interesting.

So, how did the Colonial Diner do? Fantastic! Breakfast was good and dinner was out of sight! Here are the menu items that we’re judging all diners on:

Western Omelet

This was a little overcooked for my taste. The good news was that there were lots of fresh veggies and plenty of salty ham to make the dry eggs taste a little better. The home fries were good but also a little dry.

Taylor Ham, Egg and Cheese on a Roll

This was a really nice example of the classic NJ sandwich. LOTS of meat is under that curtain of cheese in the picture above. Check out the picture in the gallery below of the sandwich halfway through and you can see all the layers of delicious Taylor Ham. This egg was also very browned but, like the omelet, the other layers helped the dry egg.

Pancakes

These were the big thick diner pancakes of everyone’s dream. Nice and dense with lots of flavor. We brought our niece with us for breakfast and she liked her silver dollar pancakes a lot.

Chicken Fingers

Our classic dinner items start off with chicken fingers. These were better than average with just a little breading and a nice amount of real-looking chicken—nothing too processed about the texture of the meat.

Hamburger

Dinner really blew us away at the Colonial Diner. This Breakfast Burger was amazing. The hamburger patty was a good sized diner burger and the runny egg, bacon and cheese were perfect. If you’re going for any meal here, you should definitely make it lunch or dinner. Everything we had for dinner here was above average or great.

Our wildcard items at the Colonial were especially outstanding. The soups we tried were generously portioned and had a nice blend of seasonings.

Their cream of mushroom soup had lots of mushrooms and a generous amount of dill which I don’t think I’ve tasted in this kind of soup before. It was so good that I wanted more after finishing the bowl.

The lentil soup was just as good as the mushroom but this one was a little more zesty and not as thick as some lentil soups. We couldn’t get over how good these soups were!

I got the Avocado BLT Wrap as another wildcard item that ended up being delicious. It had a lot of bacon and plenty of lettuce, tomato and avocado to make it taste fresh and even mildly healthy despite the bacon. The mayo was very lightly applied which is exactly what I like. This was a really great wrap.

The diner has the classic booths and counter stools in the train car portion of the building and tables and bigger booths in the added on section to the left of the train car. There are really interesting mixed media painting/sculpture scenes all along the walls which are fun to look at while you wait, too.

Check out all the pictures from our visits to the Colonial Diner in Lyndhurst. It’s a great example of a little train car diner that packs a lot of great food and atmosphere into a small space.