A whole baked trout, head, skin and all, was big and full-flavored with its stuffing of bread crumbs, garlic and tiny shrimp and a topping of chopped tomatoes and onions. No wonder the Red Wolfe (the name, the Walzes say, belonged to a disreputable Irish Republican) attracts its share of gentleman bikers. The Red Wolfe proudly serves escargots and frog legs, and the salad dressing is still homemade - though the kitchen should go easy on the vinegar. Walz, the head chef, grew up in Bergen County, and she remembers Friday dinners at her French grandfather's home, where the white wine was Chablis with a capital C and the salad was served with homemade dressing. There is a small but respectable wine list, with reds from Ferrari-Carano and Kenwood's Jack London Ranch, among others. Besides those 75 bottled beers - from producers like Stella Artois, Hacker-Pschorr and Corsendonk - are 18 on draft. The food and drink, though hardly haute, are several levels above burger and brew. (Sometimes a losing battle if you can't tolerate secondhand smoke, this is not the place for you.)
The staff is attentive, the restrooms are neat, the long bar glistens in the reflected light of a refrigerator that holds 75 kinds of beer and high-powered blowers carry cigarette smoke out of the restaurant. Inside is a dining room furnished in what you might call rec-room gothic, with a low ceiling, a worn red carpet, framed beer posters and hanging light fixtures that appear to have been assembled from many barn sales: a bugle with a band saw, a scythe with antlers and a violin.īut though the place is supremely casual, it is also comfortable and carefully tended. Around back is an enclosure in which four slightly standoffish but unthreatening wolf hybrids pad back and forth. If the ramshackle quality sounds like part of the charm, it is. The back roads here are edged with cornfields, orchards and Christmas tree farms, but also with body shops, abandoned churches and adult-video stores. This isn't exactly unspoiled New Jersey it isn't Hunterdon County, say, or the outskirts of Princeton, which owe their rolling, preserved-in-amber beauty to wealth and zoning codes. Jenny Jump and Worthington State Forests are thick with woods and hiking trails.
46 is actually a pleasure to drive: it hugs the plunging, silvery Pequest River on its way through tiny forgotten hamlets like Bridgeville and Buttzville, Sarepta and Manunka Chunk. Warren County, especially the western reaches that look across the Delaware River to Pennsylvania, is New Jersey before the era of the corporate campus, before the McMansion, before Target. AT THE RISK of sounding like a paid advertisement for the Chamber of Commerce, I urge you to take a drive to this corner of the state - unless you already live here, in which case the following will not come as news.
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