Lucille's Country Cooking

Route 539 cuts straight through the Pine Barrens, that strange, sandy forest in the middle of New Jersey where the trees are stunted, the ground is dry and the towns are small. Halfway along it, in Warren Grove, a roadside building with a sign out front does the job that roadside buildings in the pines have always done: it feeds whoever comes through, cheaply, quickly and well.

Lucille's Country Cooking is a luncheonette in the old sense — a counter, a handful of tables, and a menu written for people who work outdoors and travellers who took the wrong turn on the way to the shore. Two dishes tell you what kind of kitchen it is. The first is scrapple, the Pennsylvania Dutch loaf of pork and cornmeal that is sliced thick and fried until the edges are dark and crunchy; it arrives with eggs and it is either your new favourite breakfast or the thing you will talk about all week. The second is a bowl of chili, hearty and unfussy, the kind that makes sense on a cold morning in a place where the nearest city is a long drive away.

There is nothing artificial here. The coffee is refilled, the pie is on the shelf, and the conversation is local. Come for breakfast or lunch on a weekday, when the room belongs to the people who live out here, and bring cash.

Bourdain's New Jersey hour, for Parts Unknown, was about the parts of the state that the turnpike hides, and Lucille's is a perfect example of them: an unglamorous, stubbornly independent kitchen in the middle of a forest, doing honest work for whoever walks in the door.