Review: American Dream Diner in Orangeburg

(Credit: Kathy Gardner)

Photos:

There's no missing Orangeburg's American Dream Diner, part of the diner alley along Route 303, from the Palisades Center to the New Jersey border. By day, sunlight reflects blindingly off the gleaming chrome exterior. By night, the bright, steady glow of its red and blue neon piping makes it look like a condensed version of the mall that's just up the road.

All looks shiny and new inside, too, with even the food presentation ratcheted up a notch from the ordinary. Every plate comes out on a small round tray covered with a brightly colored cloth napkin, so even a simple sandwich or plate of eggs looks both festive and just a little larger than life. Similarly, food's served on more dishes than would seem to be necessary. Order a spinach salad with the optional grilled salmon and you get a tray with a plate of salad, plus a separate plate with the salmon. The strategy seems to be if you manage to fill the table visually, you create the impression that you're filling the belly.

Unfortunately, servings of standard sides — like vegetables with a dinner or even fries alongside a sandwich — can be skimpy. Sweet potato, offered as a side-dish alternative to mashed potatoes or fries, for instance, turned out to be not a whole or even half sweet potato, but a single slice of a slender tuber. Still, the restaurant does provide complimentary salad. Mainly iceberg lettuce with some red onion and tomato quarters with a bit of feta, it's served family-style at dinner.

Generally, the food we've sampled there puts the "eh" in edible — not overtly awful, but not particularly good, either, with diner classics a particular disappointment. A gloppy tuna melt seemed to hold more mayo than tuna, and a modestly tasty meatloaf was diminished by its draping of butterscotch-colored gravy.

Salads and wraps are better bets; the key may be to order food that is assembled rather than cooked. Either way, American Dream offers a wealth of choices: In contemporary something-for-everyone diner mode, the menu borrows influences from most of the world's major international cuisines and rivals "War and Peace" in the page-count department.

Service is eager, prices are moderate, and the place is hopping, so much so that parking can occasionally be a challenge. The American Dream Diner has made a successful launch by capitalizing on two seemingly contradictory elements: the comfort of the familiar — traditional diner food — offset by the appeal of novelty — a restaurant menu that goes well beyond the old standards.

For pics to click, go Inside: American Dream Diner in Orangeburg

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