Five Points Diner Restaurant - Deptford, NJ

Posted by Chewru Guru

April 22, 2008

Five points in name only.

Five Points Diner Restaurant
Deptford, NJ
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Meal: Breakfast / Weekend / 11am
Price: $70 (For 7 - Not Including Tip)

We’ve been to several diners now, and its safe to say we’re starting to get a feel for who wants our business and who doesn’t. This time, six of my friends joined me at Five Points Diner for breakfast and we gave it the full go-round. As I had been to Five Points numerous times for dinner, and enjoyed it, I really thought we’d have a great showing by the mega-popular, well-located icon of the Route 47/41 intersection. Had I scored it simply from recollection, it’d be a benchmark for others to follow. When you’ve got six other opinions at the table, though, interesting things begin to happen. Nothing is for certain, and as they say in sports, ‘this is why they play the game’.

Five Points is a fairly big diner, and has a split interior between booths/bar stools and a larger dining room. It’s unlikely to see the place anything other than packed during a typical meal time, and this visit was no exception. We didn’t wait long, which was terrific, but we did notice that there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of wait staff compared to the massive amount of people there. More on this later. Inside the diner, you’ll find really typical table, chair, and booth elements with really nothing very memorable in terms of atmosphere. With its to-die-for location, you think they’d pepper the walls with some local flare, but that’s just my opinion. Expect wait staff to be in traditional black and white uniforms, which for some reason is always appealing to me.

Since there were seven of us, we ordered a mix bag of items. We started with orders of mozzarella sticks and onion rings, as is becoming tradition, and a bunch of omelets, french toast, waffles, scrapple, and several cups of coffee. One of the party bucked the trend and went for a roast beef sandwich. We immediately noticed a bit of ‘nickel and dime’ action on the menu, clearly stating that coffee refills are limited to the second cup only (which means that you get a single refill), and that substituting egg beaters for plain eggs sets you back another $.50. On the waffles, fresh fruit will set you back $3.00 - for what looked like the quantity you’d get in a middle school fruit cup. The roast beef sandwich, little more than a wawa shortie, was nearly $8. Egads! The rest of the breakfast items were mid-to-high priced, but not obscene.

After an almost-too-long wait, we got our items - all at once. That’s a pretty big mistake as far as we’re concerned, because we really don’t want to get our ‘rings and ’sticks with the rest of our food. They’re appetizers, and not only do we expect them first, but we want them gone from the table by the time the rest of the stuff came. On top of that - they were fairly cold, which prompted some of the group to insist we send them back. The problem appeared to be that Five Points was simply too short handed for a Sunday morning. There was one poor waiter running around taking care of one half of a very large dining room, and he could only do so much at once. It took us a bit of lobbying to get our ’second cup’ coffee refills, but it was hard to blame our waiter for that. What we could blame him for, however, was a couple mishaps with our specific orders. For starters, I explicitly stated that I did not want cheese on my omelet, and of course, I got plenty of cheese. My buddy specifically asked for mayo on his roast beef sandwich, and was given it on the side instead. Finally, one of our coffee orders was delivered as iced tea. These lapses of accuracy probably come back to the chaos of the dining area, but still, that’s why you write things down.

Getting to the actual quality of the meal, there continued to be mixed opinion. For this review, I actually polled everyone at the table for a score from 1-5, to really reflect what the group thought. I promised them the averaged score is what I’d post here. Power to the people! For my tastes, my breakfast was actually a little overcooked, but still very good. There wasn’t a whole lot of ’stuff’ in the western omelet, which disappointed me considering the super large dinner portions the Diner typically has. The opinion of others was mixed from downright disappointment to decidedly delicious. Here are the scores, in order of lowest to highest: 1.9, 2.3, 2.5, 2.5, 2.9, 3.3, 4.0. What you see is that more than half ranked it just average or lower, which coming into the review would have really surprised me.

Overall, we’d probably recommend to get breakfast at another of our diners we’ve scored a little higher, but we’ll definitely be looking for feedback on dinner. It’s possible that we came on a day when someone called out or there was some other mitigating circumstance that muddied our breakfast experience, or its possible that Five Points is slowly declining after years of good experiences I used to have there. We’ll let the rest of you weigh in.

Pros:

- Breakfast portions were good
- Enough seating to accommodate our large group
- Not a long wait, even on busy Sunday morning
- Waiter was polite

Cons:

- Extra little charges everywhere
- Some ordering mishaps
- Appetizers didn’t come out first
- Was hard to get service for refills and such
- One of the more expensive diners

Combined Group Score: 2.8 Chews