Wildlife Watching in a Crowded Restaurant: The Endearingly Eccentric River Breakfast Haven of Ma-De-Chat Shop
Where customers serve themselves and coffee steams off the sunlight like a treasured memory.
Once a month I venture into a restaurant or bar and embed myself for some good ole people-watchin’. I am an observer on the human Serengeti. Then I write about it journalistically, and exaggerate my findings promptly.
Wildlife Watching in a Crowded Restaurant Volume 2.
The Endearingly Eccentric River Breakfast Haven of Ma-De-Chat Shop
Location: Ma-De-Chat Shop, Milford, New Jersey
The Tab: Western Omelet with potatoes, grilled and buttered blueberry muffin, 2 cups coffee = $6
The vibe: Where the coffee steams like the cloudforests of the Himalayas and retired men abandon their wives on Saturday morning for gossip and breakfast. Strangers talk to you like you’re childhood friends.
8:02 a.m.
I drag myself from a cavern of unconsciousness. This is not sleep-in Saturday. This is drive-across-the-Delaware-to-New-Jersey-just-for-breakfast Saturday. This mission is imperative for the American people.
The world awaits – like the Apollo moon landing – for me to describe my breakfast.
I wear forest green-and-brown boots, gray New Mexican alpine hiking pants, and a solid forest green t-shirt. I am a simple tree, and forest camouflage is of course the correct color palette to wear in this dappled sunlit diner glen of red chairs and wooden tables. It’s well-known in scholarly people-watching case studies that one must wear proper camouflage or risk exposure. I have even consulted my physician about getting termite implants to feel like an authentic tree. He said no, plastic surgeons these days don’t do termite implants. You cannot be a real tree, Jon.
9:13 a.m.
I rumble across the rickety bridge from Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania to Milford, New Jersey. It is a cool 80 degrees and the Delaware River is a lazy swirl of foamed eddies and slow-drifting current. I imagine the river men of 300 years ago who fished out for shad, the boats crawling the channel with timber and fabric, and the same urge on-shore that I have now for a fulfilling breakfast.
I arrive at Ma-De-Chat Chop. I speak into my entirely imaginary and rational wrist microphone:
“Bogey Hopscotch HammerFox CoffeeSquirrel OmeletTurtle has arrived. Parking lot packed. Bogey Hopscotch, we’re gonna initiate a socialization anxiety screen – 180 cc’s.”
I don’t know what this means, but it sounds like I need it.
The front door has a handwritten placard: “CASH ONLY”. Good, I have at least $32 in foreign currency and doubloons from 1682. Hopefully, they accept pirate coins.
I walk into a rustic wood-paneled demeanor, a warm room that feels like a cocoon of chatter and griddle smells. There’s a bar to the left and tables to the right. I wander to the bar and sit directly in the middle.
I have it on fine authority that the engine of this establishment is a longtime duo who operates all facets of the restaurant, the atmosphere feels like your best childhood memory, and regulars sometimes serve themselves. Well, time to learn for myself.
A Betty Boop clock is on the wall. Dozens of mugs are on two shelves in front of me. I see a “Best Grandpa” mug and a 1964 Shelby GT Mustang mug. There’s a painting of three chickens and an American “76” symbol in their coop, denoting that this art has been hanging there since the bicentennial year of 1976.
“Need a menu?”
I have just met Shirley, one-half of the Ma-De’s powerhouse duo.
“Yes, thank you.”
Next to a sun-dappled window sits the coffeemaker and two pots of fresh coffee roil off steam like one of the funnels on the Titanic. To my left is a single older man. At the end of the bar is a single older man in a “Hawaii” hat. Behind me is a single older man. I may have embedded myself in the land of bachelors. Or more likely, I imagine every one of these fellas wakes up, strolls outside, and walks into this diner as if it is a second kitchen for them.
I look up from my phone and Shirley waits for my order.
“I’ll have the Western omelet and a side of a blueberry muffin.”
“Potatoes?”
“Yes, please.”
“That it, honey?”
The way she says it makes me feel like I haven’t ordered enough food, like this is totally an environment that rewards good eaters. I wonder if I should order a second omelet. No, Jon, calm down. Just because you are a growing man-boy does not mean you need a second omelet.
One omelet will suffice.
I gaze down the bar to the open-aired area with the griddle. The cook – the other half of the Ma-De’s powerhouse – stares down into the griddle at a row of nine order slips spaced out in front of him. He is the sole cook, and he takes them as they come.
“That guy for the Phillies almost hit a home run and it got stuck in the wall.” I hear the loud voice, the first snippet of good morning diner banter. “The guy in the outfield went and pulled it out of the fence. You always see somethin’ like that in baseball.”
I look up at the mounted television and below it is a chalkboard with a four-leaf clover and a pot of gold drawn onto it. “Happy Patrick’s Day,” it says. It’s August now, but it would be true blasphemy to change the sign now.
I gaze down at the man in the “Hawaii” hat. He is casually looking my way. He leans back against the window in a side profile and rests his hand on one arm. He looks around the room. Oh my goodness. He’s observing the crowd. I’m not the only people-watcher in here.
I wonder if I should bark in alarm. Stay cool, man. No barking or howling. Drink your coffee. Stay cool.
“This looks like you.”
I look up. It’s the grill cook/owner, who I find is named John, and he slides two plates in front of me with the most kindly smile. He returns to his line of order slips.
Suddenly a customer gets up from his bar seat, walks around behind the diner bar, and picks up a coffee pot. “Which one is the regular?”
Shirley hustles by and points. The fella fills his cup, empties the pot, and then changes out the coffee filter and puts on a fresh pot. He returns to his seat and…and…I want to do that.
I stare down at my now-lukewarm coffee that I’ve mostly drained. I look up as this fresh pot blows up steam and it blends with the sunlight that filters through the window. It’s like a cloud that I want to drink in and exhale into a Mason jar, to be molded into a coffee steam candle.
I do not think I have the courage to wander behind the bar. I think about yelling, “Over the top!” and rushing the coffeepots like a World War I soldier with a bayonet. Or going out to my car and fetching my fishing rod, and casting a fine topwater lure toward the coffee pot, and the coffee pot bites down good, and I’ve got it on good, yanking, jerking, splashing all over the bar, and I’m reeling it in like a madman across the bar counter without a soul noticing until I land this gleaming coffee pot.
Then I sit and clear my throat, and gently pour a fresh cup as if nothing happened.
9:48 a.m.
John has knocked down the order slips to a count of six. Shirley picks up the coffee pot. Oh, thank goodness. I won’t have to do anything dramatic. She leans across to a two-top table.
“You guys okay with coffee or you need one?”
I hear, “I could use a little top-up if you got the chance.”
She walks around right quick: “Well, I got the chance.”
My fresh coffee is now roiling steam like one of those Titanic funnels. I hope my coffee doesn’t hit an iceberg and sink into the bar. Losing my coffee to the Atlantic Ocean in a Milford, New Jersey diner would make me sad.
Another solo gentleman comes in behind me and sits right next to me. Oh, goodie. I’ve got company. He’s in shorts and throws the vibe like he’s spent time at Barnegat Bay on a Cabin Cruiser trolling for bluefish. He lays a large beaten-up iPad on the counter. He gets up and casually walks behind the counter and fetches a dishcloth. He sits and turns to me.
“When I lean on the counter and my elbow gets sticky, it’s time to warsh it.”
The camaraderie is instantaneous, and he is not spooked by my pretending to be a camouflaged tree/coffee pot wrangler. “Oh, for sure,” I say.
He wipes down the counter, returns the rag, and sits to read his tablet.
A sweaty biker man in a spandex biker suit enters and starts talking to Shirley and John about getting breakfast sandwiches to go. John pauses grill duties to say hello.
“I’ve never been in here but heard so many good things.”
John says, “Well, we’ve been here 47 years and pissed a few people off in our time, too.” He laughs. “But that’s business.”
10:07 a.m.
The breakfast order slips have been knocked down to one. The place is still full but the rush has faded. John gently wraps a pair of breakfast sandwiches in foil for the biker, and I’m reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s story, Big Two-hearted River, where the protagonist wraps up and tucks an onion sandwich in his breast pocket.
Three more single men have camped themselves at different areas of the diner bar now, two of them around my age, and are congenially eating breakfast. I think of people who wake up and do yoga. Or meditate. I see this as their form of meditation. This is the gather-yourself, collect-yourself spot. This is the get-right-for-the-day. Fill your belly and start it in a place that welcomes you, unpretentious.
The gentleman with the tablet next to me:
“Hey, Shirley, it’s 10:30 – pretty quiet in here. You want me to go out and beat a steel drum for customers?”
“No, no, no,” she says. “We don’t need that. I’m enjoying the calm.”
She relays to another patron that she arrived at 3:30 a.m. this morning. She is hostess, waitress, owner, cashier, and confidante.
I contemplate a second blueberry muffin. It was so fluffy, with the butter crisped in. I, of all people, know that the most underrated vegetable on the food pyramid is diner grill butter.
But I relent. I go to the register. Shirley rings up my bill.
“Six dollars.”
I pay, leave, remind myself I’ve just drank two cups of coffee, come back inside for the bathroom, then leave again.
If Ma-De’s Chat Shop is a mug that perches on the shelf of the Delaware River, then it is one that the drinker cherishes. Where the water slowly swirls and eddies in a late-summer swoon, so do the customers who swirl and eddy through the morning without a thought yet to the day ahead.
Merchants and fishers once found solace on the misted morning river, and so still do the locals here along its sunlit banks.
I’m so glad you came along for this visit to a warm and wonderful refuge on the river. If you’d like to support Stomp Roams, you can share the story or tap that little “subscribe” button. Learn more about the author at www.jonathandelp.com or follow @ljacktwain.
How deep into this world do you want to go? To read the first edition of “Wildlife Watching in a Crowded Restaurant”, you can read my observations on a fresh, wild, exotic public love with “Love and Nashville Hot in the Jungle.”
Such a gem of a place! Felt like I was sitting at the bar while reading this.