NEW TO BROAD STREET: FILL ‘ER UP
Put a lobster in your tank: Partners Peter Burr and Glenn Saldarini add creativity to the standard deli menu.
It’s a staple of postwar American iconography: the gleaming new filling station at the edge of town, where attendants in spotless white togs flash toothy smiles and cheerful motorists tank up on gas so cheap there’s no need to post the price.
Good luck chancing upon that scene today, if it ever existed.
Red Bank’s got a new filling station on the fringe of its downtown, but in keeping with the borough’s reputation as a border-to-border restaurant bazaar, the fuel on offer is gustatory. And while it will certainly cost you more than a buck to fill up, the Broad Street Filling Station is teeming with earnest optimism, signaled first by that big red star in the logo and then by its daring-for-a deli menu.
The Mad Men behind Texaco may do a doubletake, but the three-week-old eatery’s owners are hoping they can succeed by offering novel fare to top off the bottomless stomachs at nearby Red Bank Catholic and the downtown business community. At the same time, they hope to win over a broader food-loving crowd both for lunch and early supper, which is offered Tuesday through Saturday.
Before he and his partner Peter Burr leased the storefront at 128 Broad, chef Glenn Saldarini says they spent a couple of days hanging out with the guys behind the space’s most recent tenant, the Broad Street Deli. And they saw what happens when the lunch bell rings at RBC.
“It was pretty crazy here,” he says. “Sixty, eighty kids in a half-hours time.”
That cohort, Saldarini hopes, will constitute a big part of the Filling Station’s customer base. To keep them coming back, he’s offering a conventional build-your-own sandwich option based on Boar’s Head provisions. Those sandwiches go for $7.
There are also salads – Caesar, mesculin, roasted pear and tuna – priced from $6 to $9.
What makes this not your granddad’s deli, though, are the signature sandwiches. There’s a roast duck club of composed of duck breast, Swiss cheese, red onion, tomato and bacon on whole wheat toast for $11.
There’s an ahi burger of ahi tuna, tomato, scallions and citrus-wasabi aioli on a toasted brioche roll for $13.
And, at the far end of the pump island, a lobster BLT on toasted bioche for $15.
“It’s continental cuisine — high octane continental cuisine,” says Saldarini, a 1994 grad of the Culinary Institute of America and, most recently, a chef at Dino’s in Long Branch (at Ursula Plaza shopping center) and the Brickwall Tavern in Asbury Park.
Saldarini and Burr say they know what they’re up against, embarking as they are in the midst of a recession. “You’ve gotta have some sand” to open a new business in this climate, admits Saldarini.
Their restaurant’s also in a bit of a transitional zone, mapwise. Though located just 25 paces south of and across the street from Garmany, 128 Broad is in a block that is only marginally part of the town center.
But Burr, the former general manager at Murphy Style Grill, says he and Saldarini know the market and what it takes to succeed as restaurateurs and partners. Both in their mid-30s, they’ve been pals since high school, and each as spent the past two decades in the food service industry.
“It’s scary, in a good way,” says Burr. While Broad Street can be unforgiving of poorly executed business plans, “I feel with my work experience I know this street.”
He also thinks he knows what the area needs, beyond a fueling station for ravenous teenagers. “The town’s looking for a good early-supper thing, a little higher-end but not too pretentious, a foodie spot,” he says. “A BYOB, somewhere that kind of lets the food speak for itself.”
Bottom line, he says, is that the Filling Station could become a destination that people go out of their way for, much as some motorists today will log extra miles to save a half a buck on a tank of regular unleaded. What will make the difference, says Burr, is the food, which in this case is so much more than mere fuel for the body.
“Glenn’s an artist,” he says. “His breakfast and lunch menu is beautiful, creative, and it tastes good.”
In addition to breakfast and lunch, Broad Street Filling Station does early suppers Tuesday through Saturday, closing at 8:30 pm.
Tomorrow in oRBit: Hemp is on the way, as a trio of area shops rescues a much-maligned plant from some undeserved misconceptions.
Posted
September 10, 2008
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[...] identified it as a shot of the vintage gasoline pump on display at the outdoor café of the Broad Street Filling Station in Red Bank, at the corner of Broad and Peters Place. (The restaurant itself is a couple of doors [...]
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