Tina's Bagel Factory

Months ago, when the end of winter was swirling about my grittily post-industrial home state in a wonderfully painfully cold wash of grey, my car chose, as cars of mine tend to choose when presented with the opportunity, to break down. I was on the way home from work with some thirty-five miles to go before I slept, and found myself sitting on the side of Route 295 South with no clutch to call my own, phoneless, unpitied by passing motorists, and in need of a tow truck. I was 10 miles away from work in Princeton, so I chose the nearest exit, only a mile or so down the road. As luck would have it, this exit was number 62, for Olden Ave North. The luck involved, just then, was not apparent -- it looked like it went to truck depots or more blank highways, since central Jersey is composed mostly of such things. hoping there would be a gas station equipped with a pay phone somewhere, I trudged down the ramp, dodging heavy machinery as I went, and found myself in a place that looked something like the outskirts of a town. Promising! The gas station phone was out of order, and the bar was not yet open (it was 7:30 AM - they still had another hour and a half), so I kept walking until a friendly sign greeted me.

Bagels! Freshly baked bagels, symbolizing as all baked goods do, warmth and family! What more comforting boon could a weary traveller, displaced and far from known spaces, hope to find? None, I say. A spring could be detected in my step, I am sure, as I heaved myself toward what seemed to be an entire strip mall hollowed out for the purpose of bagels, heat, telephone, and sitting.

The story has a happy ending. I got all four of those things, called work, got a co-worker to retrieve me and another to use his AAA membership to get my shoddy and slow but appealingly Gigeresque NX-1600 towed home at no cost to either of us. But, though the tale is over, the article is not, for I am about to tell you, dear readers, about the least usual diner in all of New Jersey, what you should order if you ever have the chance to visit it, and why many people would curl up on the floor in a ball, crying for Mommy, within moments of setting foot inside.

Tina's is split into three distinct sub-businesses, as I discovered upon entering. From left to right, it goes: take-out pizza joint, sit-down diner/restaurant, take-out bagel counter. Near as I can tell, the center is open for sit-down customers throughout the day, but it is not allowed for whatever reason to dispense bagels-to-go from the same counter that will later be used for Italian delights, so only two thirds of the place are ever simultaneously open. I have never gone there during the evening, and if you want to experience the varied, delicious, and in some cases (French toast bagel) unique selection of circular breakfast breads, I recommend that your first visit be in the early hours, as well. The non-bagel fare is acceptable, affordable, and plentiful (on a more recent stop, my friend Mike got bacon and eggs for less than five dollars, and could have fed three stout men with the three eggs and six slices of bacon he received, not to mention the accompanying mound of potatoes), but hardly remarkable, which the bagels are.

But one does not dine out for the quality of the cuisine, as we all know. Atmosphere is ninety percent of the dining experience, and Tina's has enough of it to solve the "colonize Moon or Mars, Moon or Mars...?" question for good. Because the moon has no atmosphere, but Mars has one that can be cloud-seeded. Get it? Atmosphere. - Editor

Simply put, you cannot look around in the place without seeing a clown. try it. Have a friend lead you in while you cover your eyes with your hands, and once you're in the dining room, allow a tiny crack between two fingers, for a narrow field of vision. It will be full of clown.

It may be a clown painting, dozens of which are hung, some at confusing angles, on the walls. The saturation is about 60% clown, so there is visible wall, but I suspect that the reason is the difficulty of hanging paintings very close to the ceiling. Two of the largest paintings are on velvet, and they warrant further description.

#1. Velvet Clownie, Devourer of Worlds. A fairly typical clown, except painted on velvet, possibly by someone with one eye. His hat is at an angle that would be correct if it were centered on his head: straight up. Unfortunately, it is slightly to the side of the crown of his skull. WHAT HOLDS THE HAT ON, CLOWNIE??? It could only be the physics of non-Euclidean geometry. The whole painting is like that, but it's always to tiny degrees, so it takes a few moments of deep analysis to catch what the problem is. Otherwise, it just looks... off. That would be forgivable, though, if it weren't for the mouth. Oh gods below, I feel the madness taking control! Ia! Ia! goodness me, that mouth was intentional, I know it was. For you see, at first glance, he appears to be a human being in clown makeup, with the big red lips painted around his wide-open, smiling mouth. But if you take a closer look, the horror reveals itself. Those are his lips. His mouth is huge, and the inside of it -- the shading on the inner redparts, the teeth -- have the same shifted positions noted above.



#2. Clownchrist. Obviously adapted from a velvet paint-by-numbers Christ carrying a cross. The position of the head and most of the expression on the face (you know, everything except the jolly clown mouth) are straight from the traditional Western Jesus. His arm and hand are in the correct position, they are simply empty. To make matters worse, when the artist was picking a hairstyle to replace the altogether unclownlike style Jesus is known for, he (or she, for I am beginning to suspect Tina herself may be responsible) must have been looking at a picture of Farrah Fawcett from the '70s. Farrah's hair is sandwiched between Jesus's pancaked and greasepainted face and a jolly hobo hat.



If you are not blessed with a 2-D clown as your first sight inside the diner, you will probably see a doll. Tina must be fairly sadistic; as we all well know, the creepiness scale goes doll, clown, clown doll, in order of increasing potential for terror. These dolls occupy nearly every flat surface that is not needed for keeping the food off the floor. There is a ledge that runs along the perimiter of the dining room, and it is put to good use as a gallery. Interspersed with the dolls are music boxes, one of which has the distinction of being the most disturbing thing in the entire place. It has a hobo clown, who actually looks like someone took a drunken transient and applied clown makeup to him while he slept, and he's been walking around for a few days not knowing it's on, which is pretty bad. But worse, he's riding a globe, which is the main spinning part of the music box (it's not the kind you open, it's the thing-spinning-on-pedestal kind).

As a final touch, there are marionette and parachutist clowns suspended from the ceiling. There is also one ordinary clown doll climbing a yo-yo and one who would appear to have been hanged. I did not look closer, thinking it none of my business how he died, and that they all probably come alive at night and someone cuts him down when they go off to smother the local children in their sleep, so it's not like he's trapped there. I also did not go into the bathroom. If you want to know if there are clowns in the bathroom, then you can damn well look for yourself. I never claimed to be a brave man.