Restaurant: Trolleycar Diner

[wolf]

Everybody knows how difficult it is to get me across the city line.

But, I was already across anyway, so ...

I went to dinner with Sycamore. He picked a fine and lovely restaurant ... it takes the traditional American Diner and kicks it up not just one, but a whole bunch of notches.

The Trolleycar Diner is just a bit into Philadelphia, just past Cresham Valley on Germantown Pike. I was across the line already, visiting my mom at the hospital, and after I watched her have a tray of hospital food, I went out for the real thing.

The diner has a liquor license, but their offerings are somewhat limited, but there's enough variety to keep you interested. I had a Pete's Wicked Strawberry Blonde beer. I had never tried this before and was quite pleased, which is unusual since it's a beer I could see though. The focus, though, is on the food. It looks, like diner food looks in the pictures on the menu, but for some reason never does on the plate. The menu has a disclaimer saying the pictures on the menu are for illustrative purposes only and your food will not look like that. They're right. Your food will look a whole lot better.

And tastes incredible.

I had one of my personal favorites ... the good old diner standby, Chicken Croquettes.

But no other diner makes them like this ... they weren't dry. They weren't overly bready. They weren't bland. The chef actually learned to cook somewhere during his career, I would guess at an actual cooking school of some kind. The Croquettes were delicately spiced and contained ingredients one would consider exotic for diner fare. Not only did it include hefty amounts of chicken, but chopped shallots were nestled in amongs the stuffing. I selected green beans for the vegetable, and they came FRESH, not canned, in a huge pile that took up about half of the plate.

The breads are provided by Le Bus, which if you are familiar with the area, is one fancy-schmancy place for Le Baked Goods. Even the croutons rocked.

There wasn't a shred of iceberg lettuce to be seen on the salad bar ... a mix of tender exotic greens formed the base of a nice little salad. The choices on the salad bar were sparser than on many diner salad bars, but I think that was because the focus is clearly the entrees.

Sycamore had some assorted fish/seafood thingy, which from the looks of things was also majorly tasty ...

Because it's a diner, the meal ended with pie. You gotta have pie in a diner!! The waitress put up with me pretty well, and I got my Blueberry Pie a la Mode with some chocolate sauce drizzled over the ice cream. Sycamore's Pecan pie was a good 2-1/2" tall, and seem quite moist and gooey ... not the usual brick of dried, clumpy attempt at making pecan pie many places give you.

Everybody should go there.

Often.

[SteveDallas]

This is just down the road from where I work. It's always a nice place to nip out for lunch when I feel like getting away from the office. As an added benefit to everything Wolf said about the diner itself, the owners are locals who have been very concerned about redevelopment of the Mt. Airy area.