I have been told that within 100 miles can be considered local. I’m not sure though if this is a regulated claim. Labeling guidelines are published by the FDA and the State Of New Jersey. Labeling is different for restaurants though. They are regulated by local municipal Dept. Of Health. So, I’m not sure what standards apply to restaurants.
Not sure if this is specific to NJ diners, but many of them have pastries on the counter in those plastic cases. I’ve never seen anyone eat one. How many days old are they? I wouldn’t know what to do if I did want one. Do I take it, or tell the waitress I want one? Are they just for display or are those the ones that get served? It’s still a mystery to me after hundreds of diner meals.
You tell the waitress and honestly most (good) diners will turn those cases over 2x’s a day.
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Had the AYCE lunch buffet at Aarzu in Freehold this sunday . Really good! highly recommended. Naan basket always filled and readily replenished . Selections are all very well done for vegetarians like my daughter and non vegetarians as is rest of my family. Decor and service is really good as well!
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Jrs 2nd trip to the restaurant and review with a follow up note from the owner speaks volumes to the possibility of civilzed discourse btwn customer and owners on this forum. Coming back to the boards today and reading Jrs second review encorages me to give the restauant a try and the pics on portion size certainly don’t appear small.
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I 
Aarzu, And I think that buffet is one of the best bargains we have in Monmouth County!
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Pet Peeve - Not updating their website.
This morning I undertook the not inconsiderable drive to Flaky Tart timed to arrive so I would get there right at 8 am when they opened. I found it dark with a piece of paper taped to the door saying they are on vacation until after January 7. I checked their website just before I left and there was no indication of them being closed. C’mon! I’m no HTML guy but these days even an idiot like me is able to throw up a notice or scrolling banner on a website.
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Aaaaaaamen. And with the advent of social media, you don’t know how often I see something on Instagram like a special event at a restaurant and click through to their website and there’s absolutely no information on it. Drives me nuts!
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Case in point: On the Flaky Tart Instagram site they mention that they will be closed for winter break but no mention on their website.
I’ve worked at several small business which hired out their website design/maintenance. Any change or addition had a charge. The biz owners used Facebook, etc. as their way to communicate day to day things. I’m not sure if they found the website intimidating or if it was more of a time crunch/comfort level thing. Either way it is frustrating.
In 2019, it’s VERY easy to make those adjustments even without knowing HTML, and if you can’t/don’t want to do it yourself, then maybe you need to renegotiate the contract with your web team to allow for X# of minor adjustments like this. What a shame that owners don’t understand that this piece of their business is so important!
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Grand Tavern is closed for January and they have announced on social media and when you Google them and the hours cone up it shows they are closed but if you went straight to the website there is nothing about it, at least I didn’t see it
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I think what happens is a business sets up a website, and then a year or two later decides that they want to use Facebook, or Instagram, or GodKnowsWhat-dot-com, and just abandons the website. I spoke to a bookstore owner that did this and said that what they needed to do was just one more update to the website, saying that as of whatever date the web site is not being updated, and people should look at Facebook, or Instagram, or GodKnowsWhat.com. (Why they want to keep paying for a website when they are not using it is a mystery to me.)
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As the social media manager of a non-profit (Facebook, Instagram, Mail Chimp mass emailings), I can say this problem is not unique to restaurants. Our website (managed by someone else, and not an outside contractor mind you) gets updated MAYBE once a month. Our events are pre-loaded by the individual two or three months at a time. While the information is still timely, we sometimes have information up there months past when an event is held. I’m looking right now and see something from November. Big deal? No, but it just does not look professional.
However, I update our Facebook at least twice a week during our museum season (March through December) and sometimes more than that. Instagram can range from a month of inactivity to daily posting depending on what is going on. Mass emailings are 2-4 times per month, again, depending on what we have on schedule. I tell people all the time, if you don’t want to miss anything, you need to follow our Facebook. Sometimes a date or time may change slightly, or maybe a speaker canceled or is changed, or maybe we need to close the museum on a day we are normally open because of lack of volunteers. That’s never getting on the website, but it will be on Facebook within a matter of minutes.
Because of this, when checking out a restaurant, I will hit their social media before their own website. One, for the problem mentioned above by @seal and two because websites always seem out of date. How many times has your jaw dropped at a low price of a meal only to take you minutes to read that the menu/site was last updated in 2014? Too many for my liking. I judge a business’s worldliness by their social media activity, rightly or wrongly.
I know not everyone is on Facebook and certainly not as many people have Instagram, but in this world, they are two great ways to stay up to date.
The future of business is not in websites. We are a pretty large organization and probably get 40-50 website hits daily. Yet one Facebook post can reach 300-400 people within a few hours, and if liked and shared by a certain number, could reach thousands. A schedule of events I posted two years ago actually eclipsed a million views because someone with a lot of followers shared it and those followers did the same, so on and so forth. Not getting that with a website.
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Only around two-thirds (68%) of U.S. adults use Facebook, according to a survey conducted in January by the Pew Research Center, a non partisan respected research center.
I am not one them. I expect information for a restaurant like days and hours open, menu, address and phone number, liquor license or BYOB to be available on the website. I do not expect to see things that change frequently like the daily specials on the website. I do think if you’re closing or deviating from your posted hours it should be on the front page of your website, especially in the case of a planned closing like @seal encountered.
There are easy to use free plug-ins available to allow someone with no programming knowledge to easily insert a paragraph or less into a box on the front page of a website without having to involve outside programmers. (They will need to have the programmers do the initial setup)
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Well said!
Facebook is a poison.
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I think I have a new one maybe.
I went to tuzzios yesterday and I’ve been there a bunch of times. However, this thread kind of reminded me of things that irk me.
They only have one menu. They don’t have a lunch menu so there are no smaller portions. So if you want a plate (with protein) you’re generally shelling out 20 bucks or more for a rather big plate that I don’t want to hammer down while working. Jr posted on his lack of chicken on the Murphy dish, and I’d agree, but it is still substantial in “portion” and other dishes are pretty hearty there. I end up with a sausage and hot pepper pizza…pretty good stuff. I like the fact that they actually put a decent amount of flavorful sauce on the pizza. Sauce makes the pie (with good dough of course)
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Can I add one for supermarkets? Make sure any shopping cart or basket available to pick up on the way in is clean and free of any papers inside. It’s an annoying way to start a shopping experience to have to sift through several for a clean one.
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I’m with you with all the ad papers but worse are old napkins and Kleenex, I won’t touch any of them.
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Of course, this is not the fault of the store. If people return carts to the corrals with stuff in them, the store is hardly going to separate them individually to clean them out. This basically falls into the same category as people who park their carts crosswise in the aisles while they browse. 
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