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- Huevos rancheros over easy.
Looks good. Take it out.
This isn't your typical diner.
We're putting all types of food
on the table to our customers
from disco fries, pancakes, eggs,
club sandwiches, cheesesteaks, pastas.
You name it, we got it.
We try to be the top of all the diners in Jersey.
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Breakfast sampler, table 51.
Looks good. Take it out.
I think New Jersey's the diner capital of the world.
I think there's about 500 diners in New Jersey.
At one point there probably was 600,
but as you know,
it's become more difficult
to run these type of restaurants
and these type of establishments.
It takes a lot and it's become something
that's unique if you're still
in the diner business.
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So right now we're in the kitchen of Tops Diner.
This is Stephen McCormick.
He's our executive chef.
He's gonna show us how to butcher our meat over here,
which we do in-house every single day.
Come on in.
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- So welcome to our "meating" room.
This is where we butcher all of our steaks,
filet mignon, New York strip steaks, rib-eye,
skirt steaks, whole chicken, in our climate-controlled room.
Right here, we're using USDA Choice filet mignon.
Also a beef tenderloin
to cut our eight ounce filets
for our surf and turf.
- Having a butcher, in-house butcher is expensive.
We're fortunate that Stephen, the executive chef,
does that day in, day out on top of all his daily tasks.
So it's a testament to his hard work.
- We go through approximately
12 to 16 filet mignon portions every single day.
Friday, Saturday, and Sundays
we're going through about 24 to 30 portions
every single day.
You know, not a typical diner
is going to serve filet mignon,
surf and turf, and things of that nature.
It's one thing that we gave it a try
to see if people would like to see it
and people took to it.
We always listen to our guests
and what they want,
and what they would like to see on our menu.
We grind our scraps and trimmings,
and grind it and put it into our chili.
So that's one of the reasons why people love our chili,
because we're using filet mignon, skirt steaks, rib-eyes.
Not a lot of people do, if anybody do,
because it's not cost-effective.
- Obviously, it's always nicer
when you're buying a nice product,
and you're able to cut that rib-eye in-house
and New York strip as opposed
to being done at another facility.
- [Stephen] So this is our eight-ounce filet here,
which will be used for our surf and turf.
- Believe it or not, you're coming here,
you wanna treat yourself.
You're comin' to Tops,
get something more expensive.
- We're gonna build our surf and turf.
This eight-ounce Brazilian lobster tail.
This is a warm water.
Our center cut filet mignon,
coarse sea salt, and freshly cracked black pepper.
- John Benitez is the kitchen manager.
He's been the kitchen manager
since the first day we opened up Tops, the new Tops.
He does everything.
He could be expoing, he could be on fry, saute,
it doesn't matter.
- Now we're gonna take this over to the grill,
cook it to medium rare.
And as that's cooking,
we're gonna prepare our lobster tail now.
Some nice butter, clarified butter,
smoked paprika, pop this in the oven,
and this will stay in here at 450 for six minutes.
And add a little bit of butter,
put it in our broiler.
At that moment we have our lobster tail.
And that's our surf and turf.
- Diners make good disco fries.
You could go to pretty much any diner,
if they can't make a good disco fry,
then they should shut down immediately.
That gravy has to kinda soak in
and go through the layers of cheese and those fries.
- This is our overnight brown gravy.
This is our veal stock
made with veal marrow bones, carrots,
celery, onions, red wine, sherry,
all spice, bay leaves, thyme,
peppercorns, and tomato paste.
And what we do is we take our veal marrow bones,
we roast them in the oven,
and then we take our vegetables, carrots,
celery, onions, we roast that as well,
and then we smother it with tomato paste.
We cook it overnight for approximately 18 hours.
So right now we're making a roux,
which is equal parts butter and flour.
With the veal marrow bones,
we have a natural thickener,
which is the marrow from the bones already.
But we need a little bit of help
just to make it the right consistency
that we're looking for
for our disco fries and other sauces.
- [John] This gravy is laborious.
It's a labor, it's a sign of love and tradition.
It's the recipe that we sort of inherited,
but it's tried and true.
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This is one order of disco fries.
- When you're making disco fries,
and you're making that platform,
the cooks kind of like,
look at it like a masterpiece.
It's only cheese and gravy on fries
that was created by people
that were drunk at two in the morning.
- Let me get a side of grits.
- My parents bought Tops in 1972.
So when my dad came from Greece to New York in 1968,
and he ended up getting into the restaurant business.
And it was challenging for him
because he didn't have education,
he couldn't speak English,
he didn't know how to write a check.
He was learning on the go.
He found a place in Newark, New Jersey four years later,
and bought it with my uncles.
Without him, there would be no Tops.
He's Mr. Tops.
So this is Carlos.
He's been here since,
how long have you been here, Carlos?
- Over 20. - 20 years.
He starts the engine over here
with Marcos over here in the morning.
Without them we couldn't do this, man.
It takes a village
and they're part of it over here.
- We're the backbone of the business.
- I would say about 125 people are working
in the back of the house
from porters, dishwashers, to prep, to line.
- This is our prep cook, Santiago Garcia.
He's gonna show us how we
make our famous fried chicken here.
- I season a little bit of chicken with salt and pepper.
Then, I put it into this bowl,
so I can start with whites.
- On one weekend, easily, easily, easily,
we're selling at least 200 to 300 pounds.
And that's just night shift, really.
Like that's how much we sell.
- Chicken and waffles became a staple
where growing up in the nineties,
I don't think anybody knew
what chicken and waffles was
unless you were from the South
or I would say like, Harlem.
- This is our pressure fryer, the Henny Penny.
This machine alone is extremely important
to our day-to-day operation.
When we have such high demand for fried chicken,
this can cook eight full chickens
in 13-and-a-half minutes to perfection,
which is why it's used
in so many specialty fried chicken restaurants.
Once these are fried, we put 'em into our cooling racks,
then we have the orders here prepared,
and we take a portion at a time,
so maybe five or six orders,
put it right there by the deep fryer on the line.
And then we start keeping track.
Once we're down to about four to five orders
depending on what time it is,
we know, add another 10.
If it's busy, add 12 orders.
If it's a little bit slower,
we know, okay only add about five or six orders
to whatever we have currently.
If we were to use a regular fryer
that's not pressured,
it would take at least 18 minutes.
Imagine you were to wait 18 to 23 minutes
for one order of fried chicken.
When we opened up the new diner,
when we rebuilt,
we transitioned from a lot
of the old traditional machines
that we had for 20 years plus.
Now we're using the Rolls Royce of deep fryers.
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This is our house-made hot honey.
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- The new Tops that we're sitting in right now,
I mean, we didn't start the actual construction
of the steel
'til March of 2020.
At that time also, we lost my dad,
which was a bigger blow
than anything we could ever even think of.
At the end, we had to kind of pick each other up,
and I think my dad built us that way,
where he was adamant that we needed
to build this new place
and give the people more.
People, when they come to Tops,
and that's what I love,
they always try to go all out,
and we wanna make sure that happens.
- [John] All right, so our lobster tail
is fresh water Maine lobster tail,
and they're sweeter.
So that sweetness pairs very, very, very well
with our Mornay, with a cognac.
- We started featuring the lobster mac and cheese
I'd say like 2012,
and it just gained popularity,
and we've tried to keep it the same ever since.
Nowadays, you wanna have lower staff.
You wanna have things on the menu
that are easier to build, easier to make,
high profit, high volume.
So we're still doing things
that most restaurateurs
can't do and can't handle.
I'm gonna take you to the bake shop.
Obviously, you can't have a diner in Jersey
without a bakery.
Cheesecakes, sponge cakes, layer cakes,
pies, brownies, cookies.
Bake shop has to have that in-house.
This is Nathalia, our pastry chef.
- So now we're gonna mix our batter
for our cheesecake for the day.
In here we have our cream cheese, sugar, and salt.
We're gonna mix this
until it becomes a very nice and smooth batter.
We make cheesecake about six days a week
in the diner.
Right now we're serving original cheesecake,
strawberry cheesecake, blueberry cheesecake,
cherry cheesecake, Oreo cheesecake,
and red velvet cheesecake.
So now I'm adding sour cream to our cheesecake batter.
This is our heavy cream.
So this is our cheesecake batter
ready to go in the oven.
We're gonna fill our pans.
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So now the cheesecakes are all in the pan,
we're gonna put them in the oven to be baked.
So we add water to the pans to avoid cracks
on the cheesecake and to create a more even temperature.
This is the traditional way to make cheesecakes,
and that's how we've been making it
since the early '70s.
- I think our most popular dessert
at Tops is strawberry cheesecake, hands downs.
Tres leches sells the most,
but I have to say strawberry cheesecake
is the most popular.
Strawberry cheesecake's like Michael Jordan,
and tres leches is like LeBron James.
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I wanna satisfy and wow my guests every single day.
We wanna make sure that they came here
and they felt like this is a second home,
and they can come back and they feel good.
It has this dynamic of people.
People that embody what New Jersey is, what we are.
We're thankful that Tops
is considered one of the best diners
in New Jersey,
and I hope that it just keeps going.
It's a landmark, it's an institution.
Diners itself have been here
for so many years and we have to continue
to kinda keep it from being extinct, so to say.
Because it's rare and it's unique,
so somehow, some way, we gotta keep it going.
(cheerful music)