DINING IN TH E BERKSHIRES, DAY 2

For day 2 in the Berkshires, we decided to have breakfast at Joe's Diner. I'd noticed this place while driving over to Tanglewood and thought it'd be a nice place to pick up a quick cheap bite before heading off to do some hiking. Little did I know how famous Joe's Diner actually is.

Well, first let me tell you about our experience there. When we arrived, there was a small line of people. They were able to snag a table and while waiting, I got to watch the kinda funny interaction between the waitress and her regular customers. After waiting about 10 minutes, we were able to grab some seats at the counter. (pictured below).
The place seemed to be full of locals and some tourists. So that was kinda cool, but then things started to go awry pretty quickly. Turns out that there was only one adult waitress. The rest of the places was being manned by teenagers (and younger). The little girl standing and washing dishes was probably 12. Needless to say, they were truly not interested in helping us at all. After sitting there for a good period of time, I had to ask for menus. During this time, i was able to observe the inordinate number of large house flies buzzing around us. Oh, and all the newspaper articles about the place. It took another long wait before we were even approached to place our orders. And after we'd ordered, strangely enough the food from the two couples next to us, who had arrived and ordered after us, arrived before we got our food. Basically, service was crap. The fact that there were teenagers manning the place was no excuse. You're still in food service and we're still paying.

I ended up ordering a little mix of stuff. Here are my eggs, toasts and home fries. I also got a side of french toast. Really, it's hard to screw this up. I was just annoyed that we had to share all our condiments with the neighboring couple because i knew if I asked the "waitress" for anything else, we'd just be stuck waiting for it.
Tom got an order of the corned beef hash. I think he found it ok. Not great. And again, it's breakfast, one of those difficult meals to truly screw up. We were finally able to get out check and get out of there. Luckily it was cheap.

So to give you a background on Joe's Diner, it's particularly famous because of this Norman Rockwell Painting called the Runaway which is set inside the diner. The place has been around forever, and was run by the same family for like 50 years. However, in 2000, Joe decided to retire. And since then, it's changed ownership. You can read all about it here. From what I've read, the place now is nothing like it used to be. So even though they keep up all those old new articles, expect a totally different, and pretty crappy, experience.

After a little hike in the hills around Lenox, we were ready for lunch so headed into town to walk around and grab a bite. We felt like getting something casual and had noticed someone walking around with a pizza box, so hopped into Betty's Pizza Shack.

The place was a little funky, with its beach themed decor. I liked the bar that had seats made out of metal trash cans and the funny pink flamingos on the walls.

We placed our orders with the waitress (again, teenagers and after having teenagers as my servers twice in a day let me just say that i would never, ever hire teenagers to work for me.)

I just ended up getting a slice of cheese pizza while Tom ordered a pizza with Chicken, Cilantro, Jalapenos, Avocado, Mozzarella. And the the waiting began. Which was ok at first, but then it felt like it was taking forever. We watched one customer get super pissed off about the wait. And actually, his complaint wasn't so out of place. Plus the teenager handled it very very poorly. What was bad was his complete belligerence. Turns out that there was this one big order that the kitchen had to make and meanwhile, everyone else had to wait until that order was completed before getting any other food. This took about 20 minutes.So here's Tom's pizza (i think you all know what a cheese pizza looks like). His was actually pretty good. A bit unusual with the toppings, but the addition of the avocados helped turn down the heat of the jalapenos. My pizza was also fairly decent. Overall eating in Berkshires was not amazing. It was pretty good, but I was glad to get out of the city for a while and just relax for a day.