written & photographed
by jessie beauchaine

What defines a hero?
Is it someone who leads, who creates, who challenges us to strive higher? Each fall, we at Edible Jersey ask our readers to vote
for their local heroes in five categories: restaurant, farm, food artisan, beverage artisan, nonprofit. Here, we present the winners. Each, in their own way, is an agent of change, challenging us to think differently about our food community and the role it plays in our lives.

Restaurant: The New Vincentown Diner

For as long as Jim Melissaratos can remember, the diner founded by his father and uncle in the 1960s has been called The New Vincentown Diner. But until recently, there wasn’t much new about it. The food was what you would expect from a hasher —serviceable comfort food on the order of hamburgers and fries, country-fried steak, and French toast, and the coffee was your typical lukewarm brew.

Then six years ago, Melissaratos started sourcing the restaurant with local ingredients. He and his cousin, who had begun managing the place, brought in local organic eggs, seasonal produce from area farmers’ markets, wine from local vineyards, organic grass-fed beef from Simply Grazin’ in Skillman, and joe from the Princeton-based independent micro-roaster Small World Coffee.

All of which means that the diner’s brawny, soft-spoken chef, Oleg Zelenko, isn’t just slinging hash. Diners can still get their burgers and creamy leek soup, but they’ll be eating healthily—contributing not just to their own well-being, but to that of the planet.

Melissaratos knows his audience. In the face of a food movement that can seem elitist and not a little self-righteous, the man who calls himself “Jersey Jim” says, “We’re bringing local to the everyman.”

Vincentown Diner
2407 Route 206 South, Southampton 609-267-3033 vincentowndiner.com

Food Artisan: Donna & Company

Five years ago, when Diane Pinder told her husband she was going to leave her decades-long nursing career to make chocolate, “he said to me, ‘What’re you, nuts?’ ” recalls Pinder. She can laugh now. It wasn’t long before Pinder found herself in the enviable position of being a student in a chocolate-making school in Tuscany. And it was there she first encountered Slow Food, Italy’s now-global movement to protect traditional foods, local cuisine and small-scale processing.

Smitten with the concept, Pinder returned home and began making Tuscan-inspired chocolates with the meticulousness of a
true artisan and with locally sourced ingredients, like her chocolate- dipped sea salt caramels made with honey from Tassot
Apiaries in Milford. Not cloying like most caramels, Pinder’s bonbons possess a mellow sweetness that perfectly balances the
pleasant bite of dark Belgian chocolate. And that touch of sea salt adds a surprising, delicate crunch.

For Pinder, chocolate should be crafted with an eye to layers of flavor, so that it opens up the same way a good wine does.
Consider her balsamic ganache infused with fresh rosemary, with its hint of fruitiness, or her zingy bleu cheese chocolate,
spiked with Tellicherry black pepper and finished with a crust of crushed smoked almonds. Available through her Cranford shop,
her website and select retail venues, the chocolates are infused with the passion of an artist dedicated to her craft. It’s no wonder
devotees rave.

Donna & Company Artisan Chocolates 19 Eastman Street, Cranford 908-272-4380 shopdonna.com

Farm: Griggstown Quail Farm and Market

Not for nothing are the feats performed at Griggstown Quail Farm and Market considered well-nigh heroic by a growing base of adoring fans. First, there is the dizzying array of free-range and antibiotic- and hormone- free pheasants, quail, chickens, ducks and heirloom turkeys, prized by top-shelf purveyors like D’Artagnan. Then there’s the farm market, run by Culinary Institute of America–trained chef Matthew Sytsema, whose very mission it is to make your chicken sausages and fruit and potpies the very best they can be. And finally, there’s the farm’s thriving year-old CSA, offering naturally grown produce and herbs, and coming soon—a kids’ park, homemade ice cream stand, and pick-yourown flower farm.

Farm owner and founder George Rude and Sytsema agree: the hardest thing is the simple thing done well. “We don’t fancy anything up,” says Sytsema. “We do the best we can with what we have.” And by all accounts, what they’ve got is a lot.

Just ask Mariellen Keefe—who on a recent weekday drove over an hour to shop at the market—why such devotion, and she can hardly contain her enthusiasm.

“The chicken, it tastes like real chicken. And the potpies are outrageous... oh, and the sausage is so good … .”

But with its devotion to quality and a creative commitment to expanding its business model, the farm is doing more than just drawing
rave reviews from customers. It’s changing the perceptions and possibilities of New Jersey agriculture.

Griggstown Quail Farm and Market 986 Canal Road, Princeton 908-359-5218 griggstownquailfarm.com

Beverage Artisan: Cupa Cabana

Even for a little Italian girl, Jersey native Marianne Cordillo fell early and hard for espresso. By the time she was eight, she was guzzling the robust elixir by the mugful. “I was a hyper child,” Cordillo remembers with a laugh.

Fast-forward a few decades and Cordillo’s enthusiasm for all things coffee has not diminished, even if her portions have. Along with her husband Pat Cochran, Cordillo is now co-owner of Cupa Cabana, a coffee catering company that recently toted its brew to the “Miracle on the Hudson” one-year anniversary celebration of the safe landing of US Airways Flight 1549. A graduate of BEST Coffee School in Eugene, Oregon, Cordillo says, “Coffee really is a very civilized drink.” And her customers know it. Cordillo has seen coffee drinkers grow more discriminating in recent years. They’re now attuned to nuances of flavor, richness and roast, no longer content to swill any ol’ cuppa joe.

Cordillo sources her beans from some of the region’s best roasters, like Kobricks certified organic roasting plant in Jersey City, a family operation that has been roasting for four generations. And for her beloved espresso, Cordillo relies on the Hudson Valley’s award-winning Coffee Labs Roasters, about which she rhapsodizes, “Their beans produce some of the sweetest crema around.” For customers who gather round Cordillo’s coffee stations at events large and small, her coffee often provides a moment to stop and share, which just might be the sweetest thing of all.

Cupa Cabana Bridgewater 908-722-2877 cupacabana.com

Non-profit: Feeding the Hungry

Juanita Hines’ path to becoming what some view as a modern-day saint started with one man, whom Hines came across eating out of a trash can. “I told him, you don’t have to do that.” She bought him breakfast. And it got her to thinking.

That was 25 years ago. Today, the 78-year-old retired domestic worker is a familiar face to the homeless men and women who congregate in Newark’s Military Park to sip piping cups of her homemade vegetable soup and eat the bologna sandwiches she prepares every Friday night in her retirement community’s kitchen. With her church’s financial assistance and that of an award she won in 2008, Hines distributes soup, sodas, and 100 sandwiches every Saturday morning at dawn, rain or shine.

One in eight Americans—many of whom are newly jobless or who have seen their hours cut back—received some kind of food
assistance last year, a crisis that experts have compared to the Great Depression, and which makes the empathy of good samaritans, like Hines, so important.

Hines, though, is quick to point out that the service she does gives back much more than it takes.

“In all these years, I’ve never missed a Saturday. I really don’t intend to. I enjoy doing it.”

Editor’s note: As we tallied up this year’s voting in the Nonprofit category, we were struck by how many readers cast their votes for the local food banks, churches, soup kitchens, interfaith food pantries, individual volunteers and organizations that have helped to feed the hungry in their community over the past year. Ms. Hines is just one example of the many good food samaritans who make a positive difference in people’s lives throughout the Garden State. You can be, too. Get involved. Here’s a good\ place to start: njfoodbank.org. For a list of other worthwhile organizations, visit ediblejersey.com.