Hi again, everybody.
This is Hank Zoner, The Grape's Unwrapped.
I love newspapers.
I've been reading them all my life.
I still get the newspaper delivered to my house.
And here I am in an iconic New Jersey food place, Rutz Hut at the counter, flipping through
my newspaper, having one of their classic hot dogs.
This is actually listed in the thousand places you have to go before you die in the United
States and Canada.
And it's the only active place in New Jersey actually on that list that tells you something.
My education in wine and food predates the internet.
I started reading newspapers.
I would re-frank Pryle's column in the Times to learn about wine every week.
And when I moved to New Jersey, I started getting the ledger delivered every day and
I would read the food columns and the column I really, really was attracted to the most
and got a lot of information out of was Pete Genevieve's columns.
Pete would write about great places to eat throughout the state.
He started the Munchmobile, would travel around the state.
And it's something that not only I followed, but my whole family followed, including my
kids.
So we're going to do a segment here today where we're talking about the state of food
in the state of New Jersey.
And I think probably the best person to do that is to have a conversation with Pete
Genevieve's.
And Pete happens to be here today at runtime.
It's good to see you again, Pete.
Thanks for coming out.
Thanks for coming out.
You followed behind us.
Yes, I followed behind you.
And I told people that day.
We get a lot of stalkers.
You are approved.
Yeah, I was approved because he was eight years old at the time.
And the thing that amazed me at the time was logging 300 miles that day behind you was
the reaction of the people on the roads of New Jersey all over the state that day to
the Munchmobile.
Yeah.
I mean, it's nothing like it.
Right.
I'm with an eight-foot-long hot dog.
That's true.
That's true.
It's better.
As the only person in the world who's ever driven both the Munchmobile and the Oscar
Meyer Weiner.
The Munchmobile.
I drove it down Route 101.
Did you really?
I drove both hot dog vehicles and the Munchmobile, we beat it in a drag race with nothing else.
The Weiner Muppel is very slow.
So when we talked about meeting, you said that to you this was really the iconic New
Jersey food place to stop at and have our conversation.
It's certainly for hot dogs, absolutely.
It's one of a kind, the brick outside, the inside of the tile floors that haven't changed
in whatever, 60, 70 years.
Yeah.
The ripper, the cremators, of course, you know, the ripper is because the hot dog splits
open when it's cooked, the cremator's an extra well-done ripper.
A lot of people, actually, it's amazing how many people come here over the years that
don't know there's a restaurant.
Right.
Right.
They really think this is nuts.
There's actually a restaurant there with a kind of a full menu.
Well, that's, I was looking at the full menu here, I'm like, wow, beef liver, I said who
is it?
Because everyone comes in for the hot dog.
Chicken cordon blue.
That's why I'm like, what?
Chicken cordon blue?
Okay.
That's very funny.
But it's one of the, if there was a New Jersey food hall of fame of all foods, this would
be in the initial class, the New Jersey food hall of fame.
You ride around in this van with a hot dog, we're meeting at a hot dog place.
New Jersey does hot dogs well?
Oh yeah.
Well, I've argued, I said about five years ago, New Jersey is really the center of
the hot dog universe.
A couple of other publications have picked up on that now, but I was the first to sort
of say that it's, you know, the chili dog started here in New Jersey, Patterson or
Plainfield, both sort of claim it, the Italian hot dog started here in Newark back in 1932.
I think we probably have more hot dog places per square mile than any other place in the
country.
Interesting.
Especially in North Jersey, people have hot dogs.
It's a hot dog culture here.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's great for them.
It's the 20s and 30s to get into North Jersey, most certainly, center of the hot dog universe.
So what's the state of the state?
I want to hear a state of the state address from you that I'm really interested in.
What's the state of the state when it comes to food?
What's New Jersey doing right?
What's it doing well?
Well, I think the casual, I mean, since I'm usually about the casual food, I think there's
very few states that can, well, the first thing, I think what we do better than any
state is the, I think maybe Los Angeles, which is not a state, but diversity.
State of mind.
Yeah, state of mind.
I think diversity in terms of food, I mean, again, especially in North Jersey, Central
and North Jersey, you don't have to go, there's no reason for you to go into New York City
if you want to do any, you name the cuisine or the nation and the United Nations.
You don't have to go into New York City for that.
Right.
Right.
A lot of people still don't realize that about New Jersey, just how diverse the people
are, first of all, and how diverse the food is.
Well, you do a wrap up column every year with your 25 favorite dishes, and there's really
not a lot of replication on that.
It's really all over the place.
It is.
It's all over the state.
It's all over the state.
It's all over the world as far as different types of cuisine.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I don't, I'm not just writing about burgers and pizza and whatever things I like.
It's, you know, I'm always hoping for, you know, open mind, open stomach at all times.
So what are we lacking in?
What's New Jersey not doing well?
Like in casual food, I think.
Well, actually, well, I will say one thing, barbecue.
Yeah, I know.
I heard that.
I said it a couple years ago.
You said it a number of times.
New Jersey is a barbecue wasteland.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's still in.
It's so, yeah, exactly.
And it got a lot of people.
Actually, a lot of people agreed.
I mean, honest opinion.
I pay for my food.
I can be, you know, I think I'm honest.
People know I'm, I can be, I'm tough, but I'm fair.
Yeah.
I'm not, I'm not never nasty toward anybody or, you know, it's a liberty trying to cut
somebody down.
But if you're, you know, if you're not on my list, you can sort of like draw your conclusion.
I think your writing style is very honest, I mean, and that's one of the things I appreciate
about it.
You're not, you're not sugarcoating the reviews.
And if something's not up to snuff, you, you disagree regularly with a lot of times
the people who are out there in the trenches with you.
It's the fun part.
It's the fun part of the job is when you publish a list, you know, this is the best barbecue
and you get, I get called an idiot a lot.
That's pretty much everyone's favorite word for me is you idiot.
Sorry.
But that's fine.
It goes with the territory and as long as they're disagreeing in a, you know, in a
sort of nice way, they're not being nasty about that's fine.
Bring it on.
You know, I can defend my choices.
Yeah.
You started the ledger 1998.
You were writing for New Brunswick Papers before then.
I was with the Home News before that.
But you didn't start writing food.
You were doing more for the future.
No, I just came on as a general assignment reporter, features sort of like Jersey Anna,
which I'm still doing, you know, 20 years ago, which I was doing the New Brunswick
Papers too, but in 98, so the Montreal Papers, I had launched that year in 98 that summer.
I came on in the spring.
So 98, so I think that was part of the reason I was hired because, you know, Mark was not,
he was a feature editor at the time, there was no way he'd be able to do the Montreal
Papers going forward.
So the next year I took it over in 99 and been doing it ever since.
And again, 20 years.
Do you remember your first food story for a ledger?
It was, well, I did a column for many years called Eat With Pete, which would say a weekly
column and again, casual food, you know, looking for the, you know, I never did sort
of white tablecloth, chandelier kind of places and places that were not familiar.
I was always going down back roads and just looking for, you know, actually my first,
I think my, actually my very first column was Tony's Hot Dogs in Newark in Brunswick
Park.
I think that was my very first column.
You have traveled literally down lots of roads in New Jersey.
How many miles a year do you think you're putting in?
Easily 30, 40, just in New Jersey, 30, 40,000 probably.
I mean, one day I drove behind the muscle bill and my son was on it.
I know I put in about 300 miles and it's pretty amazing when you're driving 300 miles
in a day behind a van with a hot dog on it.
People just speeding up to wave to say, hi, people are getting out of red lights.
We're out of millions smartphones.
But people really follow and this is your pizza tour.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, we've done, so we've done, this is not, and nothing to do with the muscle bill.
We've done six so far in New Jersey, what we call New Jersey's best showdowns.
You know, we've done diners, we've done, the first one was bars, which was things they
make me to.
It's been a whole week, it's been a whole winter going to bars, had a driver on top
of it.
God, I hate my job again.
These are long, this is, no one does anything like this, no other website, no other magazine
in the state does, goes to the extent that we do.
We ask people for nominations, like a week of nominations, a week and a half to vote.
We're in the voting stage right now and then they pick basically half the field.
So it's like 50 semi-finalists, they pick half, I pick half, the voting, whoever gets
the most votes in each region.
So 50, I visit everyone, sample, you know, P3's all have two pizzas at each, lots on
50 finalists, that's a good three weeks doing that, then I pick 10 finalists, go back
to visit the 10 finalists and then pick a winner, it's a serious process.
So Pete, in addition to the columns and everything else that you're writing, you've written a
few books, it looks like 10 books.
All available on Amazon.
All available on Amazon, right?
And they obviously cover New Jersey, but it's not just food, you've gone outside the borders
of New Jersey too.
Book on the Jersey Shores, nice book, most of these are done by Rutgers University Press.
I book on Route 1, Maine to Florida, I spent like a year just driving Route 1.
Wow, wow.
Looking for stories, nothing to do with food, just human interest stories.
But the other one's been in the New Jersey Curiosities, which is sort of like a weird
New Jersey, sort of oddball New Jersey, but the rest of them have been food, you know,
this is really the only book on just on Jersey, excuse me, on Jersey food, New Jersey, food
looks like New Jersey, but my most popular book.
What's most classic?
Jersey dog.
Almost as classic as a New Jersey hot dog is.
Came out 20 years ago.
New Jersey diners.
They sell, I mean, yeah, diners, we're the diner capital of the world, 600 diners more
than any of the state.
600.
600, yeah, it's just, and very few clothes, if they close, somebody else takes it off.
Moves right in and opens them up.
You see very few diners close, and you know, diners, you can begin to understand Jersey without
understanding diners, and it's just so woven into the fabric.
It really is.
I feel like if you've lived here more than five minutes in New Jersey, you've been to
a diner, right?
You have a favorite diner.
What I normally do at this point is I bring things back around to beverages, starting
with wine and other adult beverages.
And since I'm talking to the food writer in New Jersey today, and we're in the iconic
food spot in New Jersey, I figured I'd focus on New Jersey beverages.
The first is a beer from Demented Brewing.
You know, I like carton and cane a lot, and I think they actually raise the bar in New
Jersey as far as beer making goes, and now there's a whole bunch of other really good
brewers.
And Pete, you actually put this one on my radar, because you did a beer review.
A New Jersey Crap Beer Showdown this winter, and they were the winner.
Yeah, this strawberry cream ale I thought was, is a really great summer beer, and I'm
thinking to myself, hey, this is a good hot dog beer, too.
New Jersey wineries, you know, there are New Jersey, people say to me, oh, they can't
be making good wine in New Jersey, I disagree vehemently with them.
There are a number of wineries, including Heritage, and Heritage is down in Mallorca
Hill, and this isn't just good wine for New Jersey, this is good wine for anywhere.
And Bill Heritage, it was really excited when I saw him recently at the New Jersey Wine
Cooperative, which is a select group of some of the best wine makers in New Jersey, where
he's actually growing a chen-en blanc on his property, and it tastes really good, too.
It tastes like chen-en blanc, all the taste, and really excited when I told him that after
I tried it, I really liked it.
But the other thing I thought that would be fun to focus on today, because I think it
also goes great with hot dogs, is cider.
And this is Ironbound Cider, which is being made in Asbury, not Asbury Park, New Jersey,
Asbury out in Hunterdon.
It was great with hot dogs, I think it's a great New Jersey story with what Charles
Rosen is doing with Ironbound, and I thought it'd be a great way to kind of take out,
to do a pairing, and also to take this out, and that would be to try the Ironbound Cider
made from these Harrison apples, which is an heirloom apple.
Cheers.
Drinking on the job.
Drinking on the job, and we're not spitting.
And I think I'll have to have some of this hot dog, and see how that goes.
I'll go ahead and dive into the ripper, get that relish.
There's only one rucks.
This is the part where we don't really talk much, and enjoy it.
You learn, it's on the fly.
So I think this is a great pairing, not just of a food and beverage pairing, but also a
great New Jersey pairing.
Pete, I appreciate you coming up north and spending some time giving people a chance
to kind of get a better understanding of you.
As I said, they're really immediately focused on what you're reviewing and what you're
talking about at any given time.
So a chance to actually do a review of the reviewer, an interview of the interviewer.
I think...
Great lights.
Yeah, I can see how anxious and nervous you are about the whole thing.
Thank you again for coming up.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
Thanks.
This is Hang Zone of the Grapes Unwrapped with Pete Genevieve.
We'll see you again next time as we get to know wine, and food, and great people, and
great places.
Cheers.
Bгов.
Gross advice.
Carrot.
Rip-a-aw.
Rip-a-aw!
Rip-ers!
Rip-a-aw.
Rip-a-aw.
Rip-a-aw!
Rip-a-aw.
Rip-a-aw.
Rip-a-aw.
Rip-a-aw.
Rip-a-aw.
Rip-a-aw.
