When Good Food was Fast Food
On Sunday mornings in the 1950s my Dad would take my brothers and me to the pony rides at a small track on a ridge above the Passaic River. It was a wonderful way to sample a bit of the cowboy world we watched on TV westerns. Young stable hands would help us mount and, when we were very little accompany us around the straw covered track.
Nearby was a wood frame café where we ate many happy dinners. Through the plate glass window along the front one could see a crowd of celebrants at the counter and over the roof, in neon letters vertically arranged on a tall thin strut, a sign stating simply, “RUTT’S HUT.”
One of North Jersey’s most cherished secrets was exposed recently when a food taster at the New York Times ventured to the garden state. There in the city of Clifton, home of Old Spice and Buddy Macy, the King of Comedy, the gourmet sampled delights of which Epicurus could only dream.
Building on his mother’s recipes brought from the old country before the first War, Royal Rutt in 1928 commenced to create a modest kingdom of hot dogs, mustard relish, barbecue beef and gravy that thrived without any advertising but word of mouth.
Rutt’s Hut recalls an America when fast food could be very, very good. Sundays through Thursdays from 8am to 11pm, till one am on weekends it was always busy. But it was at suppertime on Friday, Saturday and Sundays that it was in glory. An endless line of cars inched down the steep short drive from Allwood Road and through a parking lot jammed full with a few hundred cars and families. It was cool to eat inside at the counter along the front window but the standard was to eat in the car, the men and older boys often standing outside using the car hood as a table and looking down at the river.
For a kid, anyway, ordering was almost as good as the eating, an exciting and dramatic prelude to the food itself. The take-out counter was about twenty –five feet from side to side and on weekend evenings dozens of people would be waiting for one of the half dozen attendants to take and then retrieve their orders from the apron-clad cooks standing amid the steaming vats a few feet further back.
Royal Rutt served the best hot dogs in the world. Two thirds beef, ten percent cereal and the rest other ingredients they were not grilled but seared, perfected and infused in 350 Fahrenheit boiling oil. To acquire just the right kind of beauty one had to know the passwords: a scored and bursting ripper, a weller, a cremator, an incinerator indicated increasing time in the sizzler. Discerning gourmets used only Mrs. Rutt’s mustard-relish though sauerkraut was considered a reasonable alternative. Other condiments were frowned upon as disrespectful to the dog.
Many patrons prepped for the main event with a couple of barbecue beef sandwiches with the rolls “double-dipped” (DD) in the incredible delicious gravy. Thus fortified, a child could face with equanimity the upcoming week of school. The double dips inevitably were accompanied with “a side of French” (fries), a mavis (Yoohoo) or a Howdy (orange soda – only at Rutt’s). My cousin Stuart and brother Seth were sturdy souls who used to go for the onion rings, too.
Lightweights out for a more formal atmosphere could eat in the paneled dining room and order, in addition to the usual fare, things like turkey dinner and salad, even vegetables. But the genuine Rutt’s Hut experience was to work your way to the counter and order to-go: “six DD, four Rippers, an Incinerator, six French, a couple of Howdies and four Birch [Beer], traveling…” There were no bags, just white cardboard plates and for the fries, shallow white cardboard bowls with scalloped edges. For utensils they had thin wooden two-pronged forks and napkins. Dad stacked up some plates in your hands; somebody grabbed the forks and out you went.
Stuart and I visited Mr. Rutt at his home a couple of times at his home near the corner of South Parkway and Passaic Avenue. He was good-natured, gave great treats at Halloween and once astonished me by putting on his wooden leg while we watched. When he sold the Hut a few years ago, the contract specified that the new owners would retain the recipes. There is disagreement among cognoscenti about the degree to which this has in fact occurred.
The pony rides are long gone and a new highway extension blocks the view of the near side of the river but Rutt’s Hut still serves the world’s best hot dogs. A great and ample supper costs less than six bucks. You can’t get there from here…