REVIEW
Breakfast out for us has, for years, meant Mastoris Diner in Bordentown. We’ve moved on from Mastoris and now do our morning dining out at Daphne’s of Robbinsville and another choice breakfast spot nearby: Woody’s Towne Cafe in Allentown (that’s the small town in New Jersey, not the city in PA).
Woody’s corned beef hash starts with corned beef, not a can.
Allentown, NJ is the kind of town people generally refer to as “quaint,” which makes it unusual in this part of New Jersey. It’s not a tourist town by any means, just a pleasant little place with a healthy Main Street, which is where you’ll find Woody’s, owned by Donald “Woody” Wood until he sold it in 2014. Woody’s hasn’t skipped a beat since the sale.
Are you very, very hungry? Then the Dog Pile is for you.
Woody’s is precisely the sort of town café one hopes to find in a town such as this: a counter fronted by a row of stools, flyers advertising bake sales taped to the wall, a scattering of tables filled with local regulars, including one table reserved for Grumpy Old Men, extremely friendly waitresses who make you feel right at home…
For a change of pace from the usual corned beef, try Woody’s sausage hash.
We’ve only been here for breakfast, and the breakfast menu is limited to the basics — well, the basics for New Jersey, which means you’ll find pork roll and scrapple among the breakfast meats. Here’s the thing, though: everything tastes unusually good. Especially noteworthy are the hashes — corned beef or sausage — made fresh in-house, and the Woody Roll. And, if you are interested in stoking up for the day, the popular Dog Pile, which includes extra-large portions of meat, potatoes, toast, and three eggs, will do the trick.
It’s not all eggs at Woody’s. A dining companion ordered this breakfast combo, but we still haven’t had a taste of the pancakes, which are brought with a squeeze bottle of Log Cabin. It’s kind of refreshing, though, to see normal-sized pancakes like you’d make at home — the trend in restaurants seems to be towards mammoth manhole cover cakes.
What’s a Woody Roll? It’s a big, soft, yeasty roll that is baked fresh each day. One waitress described it to us as made with pizza dough, and that may be, but it’s softer than any pizza crust we’ve ever tasted. For breakfast, they toast it on the grill before lavishly brushing it with melted butter, and it’s well worth the 50 cent supplement to replace your ordinary toast.
Susan is an honorary Grumpy Old Man for the day.
As we said, we haven’t been here for lunch yet, but what we’ve seen go out to other tables looked very tempting. Besides the burgers and hoagies and cheese steaks, our eyes are drawn on the menu to the chicken, ham, and egg salads, all homemade. There are a bunch of Woody Special sandwiches, all served on Woody Rolls, and the Big Don Platter is a double burger topped with Russian dressing, fried onions, and cheddar, served on Texas toast. We’ll report back, of course, if and when we pay them a lunchtime visit.
Seating is at tables or these choice counter stools.
There are no desserts on the menu, but that matters little, because we recommend a stroll down the block to Swal Dairy for a dish of dense and creamy homemade ice cream.
On the main street in picturesque Allentown, Woody’s is a town cafe extraordinaire.
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