ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Today we made the $10 trek from Baltimore to New Jersey. The highlight of this trip was the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Well, that and the long conversation we had about the hypothetical situation “What if Kansas City was obliterated in a nuclear attack and all the planes were grounded and our company didn’t even exist anymore, what would we do?”

After we got into Pennsville, my New Jersey friend came down and picked me up. Because there is only Italian food and chain restaurants in Pennsville, we drove over to Salem since he knows better than me what they’ve got. He gave me a complex list of arcane rules pertaining to selection of acceptable New Jersey diners:

1. Restaurant must have both the word “diner” and the word “restaurant” in the title. Period. Acceptable: Mr. Angry’s Diner and Restaurant. Itchy’s Restaurant and Diner. Unacceptable: Dolly’s Restaurant. Last Chance Diner. From this I speculate that nobody is ever supposed to eat at the establishment owned and operated by Arlo Guthrie’s friend Alice, regardless of the fact that you can get anything you want there.
2. Restaurant should have an arcade game in the entry, preferably Pacman, acceptably Ms. Pacman.
3. Restaurant should have a specific type of “Jersey diner” architecture, which my friend could not describe to me or give me a good contrasting example of.
4. Restaurant should not have one single remotely healthy item on the menu.
5. Restaurant should always have Greek items on the menu

When the waitress arrived, we placed our orders. I ordered a gyro, which the Greeks in Kansas City pronounce sort of like yheer-oh, and turtle soup. But when I ordered this, the waitress looked at me like I was nutty. “Jy-roh?” she said in a thick Turkish accent.

“They say it yheer-oh in Kansas City,” I said defensively.

She shook her head. “Jy-roh,” she said firmly.

The turtle soup turned out to taste a lot like beef vegetable soup, if you added three tablespoons of salt to the cup. It was not bad. The jy-roh was acceptable. When I got back to the hotel, I immediately looked up “gyro” on Merriam-Webster.com and vouched my pronunciation as the correct version. Yheer-oh! Yheer-oh! Yheer-oh!