Some of the best food you’ll ever get in your life will come from a local diner, so for this week’s review I made a trip out to Route 1 to check out the Princetonian Diner.
Only a 10-minute drive from the College, the Princetonian Diner’s menu has a little bit of something for everyone. If you’re into anything from panhandle breakfast dishes to vegetarian entrees, this place probably has something for you.
I personally was in the mood for a classic gyro, which can come with either lamb or chicken. This sandwich comes on pita bread and includes sliced meat — in my case it was chicken — lettuce, tomatoes, onions and the kicker, tzatziki sauce.
Producing a really bad gyro is pretty hard to do, but yet again, so is making a really good one. In this case, the Princetonian Diner fell in between the extremes.
Let’s take a step-by-step look at this dish.
To start, pita bread is pita bread. So, no matter what, the outside is already going to be fantastic. The key to the sandwich though is the insides.
The staple of this sandwich is how the meat is prepared and sliced. In terms of a chicken gyro, you need to make sure that the meat is not too dry and that the cut is not too thick. Basically, you want to eat the sandwich and not have to think about the chicken you’re eating because it’s been prepared so well.
While the Princetonian did a good job of cutting up the chicken on this sandwich, the meat was a little dry for my liking.
The good thing about a gyro though is that the accessories can make up for a dry piece of meat.
The first step in accomplishing this is to get a solid blend of lettuce and tomato. You want the lettuce to be shredded — not like the solid type you’d want to see on a hamburger — and you need a thin tomato to complement it.
Just like the chicken, you shouldn’t really realize that you’re eating a tomato. If you do, then the cut is probably too thick and you’re better off just taking it off.
In this case, the tag team of lettuce and tomato saved the sandwich from a knockout blow.
While onions also help save this sandwich, the real x-factor is the tzatziki sauce. Tzatziki sauce is made of mostly strained yogurt, but after it’s mixed with other ingredients it’s better described as a cucumber sauce.
This stuff is downright delicious.
You don’t want to drown the sandwich in this stuff, but you definitely want it oozing from the sandwich and dripping down the side of your mouth as you eat the gyro.
The bonus characteristic of the sauce is that it’s perfect for dipping the complimentary fries — that’s assuming you passed on the Greek salad — in between bites of the gyro.
With the sandwich on the brink of being good or bad, the tzatziki sauce defiantly salvaged the meal and supplied me with an average gyro that wasn’t the worst I’ve ever had, but wasn’t the best by any means.
