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Ten Great Breakfast Spots In (And Around) Harrisburg

December 4, 2011 / Jersey / No comments

To say “I love breakfast” is an understatement.

I really, really love breakfast.

If I could take a tomato, avocado and cheese omelet out to dinner, feed it some wine and take it home with me and watch a movie, I would.

If there weren’t a law prohibiting the fornication of a man and his English muffin, I’d probably have a litter of little baby English muffins running around my house today.

I love breakfast so much, that there have been days that I’ve had eggs in the morning, pancakes in the afternoon and waffles for dinner.

So any time someone new comes to Harrisburg, be it a band or a friend, I’m often quick to recommend a handful of great breakfast options. Because for as underwhelming a town that Harrisburg can be, we are fortunate to have a good smattering of breakfast choices.

Here, in no particular order, are ten great places to get a good breakfast in the Harrisburg area. (I’m not talking about brunch, which could be a post of it’s own. These are ten, solid, dependable diners, greasy spoons and corner shops to get a good cup of coffee, a couple eggs, toast and bacon)

1. Yankee Doodle Diner
902 North Front Street, Lemoyne, PA
(717) 731-9100

The first thing you need to know about this place is that it is NOT the Riverview Diner anymore. When this structure was known as the Riverview Diner, I swore it off for years due to terrible service, cold food and hair in my eggs. But under new ownership for about two years now, the Yankee Doodle Diner is one of my favorite breakfast spots. A creative menu featuring specials daily, burritos, omelets, waffles, pancakes, eggs, oatmeal and cereals served by a super friendly and always entertaining staff, this place keeps impressing me.

2. American Dream Diner
1933 Herr Street, Harrisburg, PA
(717) 234-5840

There’s nothing classy about The American Dream, both literally and figuratively, and this diner embodies all of it. It’s a classic train car diner perched at the intersections of Route 22 and Herr Street just north of Cameron in Harrisburg. Basic menu items like ham and cheese omelets, two-over with bacon and home fries and occasional baked oatmeal, but The American Dream is known for two locally-famous menu items – The Rope and The Annie’s Dream Omelet. The Rope is an emasculating piece of sausage served with two eggs and home fries. And Annie’s Dream is your cardiologists nighmare: a three egg omelet stuffed to the max with ham, peppers, onions, potatoes and topped with a few slices of American cheese. And the servers? Think the old Bounty commercials in the diner and you’re just about there. Get in early, though. They close at 2 daily.

3. Camp Hill Cafe
40 Erford Road, Camp Hill, PA
(717) 730-9887

My favorite part of this place is the Eggs Benedict options, specifically, the Crab Benedict. I’m not the kind of guy to judge, but it just irks me to hear someone say “Crab Bennie”. I know, I know. Stupid, right? Just a pet peeve. ANYWAY, this is another sort of off-the-beaten-path breakfast option that’s just up the road from the must-avoid Perkins at The Radisson just off of the Camp Hill Bypass and barely two minutes from the intersection of Front and Forster streets at the Harvey Taylor Bridge. Small and cozy, this is a nice alternative to some of the greasy spoons in the city. And the coffee is pretty great.

4. Flapjacks (Formerly known as Paul’s Pancake House)
9 N Us Route 15, Dillsburg, PA
(717) 432-8995

I wish this place was closer. It’s about fifteen miles south of Harrisburg on 15, but this list wouldn’t be complete without including this place. As the name would suggest, it’s known for pancakes. But what makes this little diner special is the beer selection. Tons and tons of microbrews lined up neatly in a few coolers just as you walk in the door, a full bar (for those Sunday morning Bloody Mary’s) and dozens of pancake options. It’s certainly not a quick stop on your Tuesday morning commute to work (unless you commute to Dillsburg…but who does that?), but for a weekend morning drive, it’s worth the trip.

5. Keystone Restaurant
1000 North 3rd Street, Harrisburg, PA
(717) 236-3273

I’m including the Keystone in this list because if I didn’t, my buddy Devin wouldn’t let me live it down. The Keystone is, at it’s heart, a greasy spoon with all of the glorious prestige that comes along with that designation. No frills, nothing fancy about the menu but it’s consistent, it’s quick and it’s filling. And the coffee is also decent. If you want quick, cheap and charismatic wait staff, pay the Keystone a visit.

6. Roxy’s Cafe
274 North Street, Harrisburg, PA
(717) 232-9232

I’m not going to dog on Roxy’s, because, in my heart, I love Roxy’s. I do. My buddies Chris Hoke, Adam Kline and myself used to duke it out over the Foursquare Mayorship of Roxy’s. But since I’ve fallen in love with the Yankee Doodle, I haven’t been in Roxy’s as often lately. But that shouldn’t stop you from going. Weekends can be sort of slow, depending on how many servers are on and who’s cooking on the line, but for great coffee, a good Lyonnaise (mushroom and cheese) omelet and Midtown Harrisburg resident people watching, Roxy’s is a staple. The sourdough toast is a nice option too.

7. Capitol Diner
800 Eisenhower Boulevard, Harrisburg, PA
(717) 939-2279

There’s a reason the Summerdale Diner in Enola didn’t make this list. And that reason is – The Capitol Diner. Conveniently located just off of I-283 heading to the airport (or Target), this is another example of how a once sub par diner went under new ownership and became something pretty darn good. So good, in fact, that I’d think it could stand up next to any of the newer remodeled diners in the Motherland – New Jersey. The decor isn’t gaudy, per se, but it’s got lots of multi colored shiny tiles, a sort of grand entrance way and the standard dessert display case that’s chock full of desserts that look much better than they actually are. (That’s not a knock at the Capitol diner, it’s true of ALL diners…seriously).

8. Skyline Family Restaurant
7510 Allentown Boulevard, Harrisburg, PA
(717) 652-1780

Again, another place which I wish were closer to downtown Harrisburg, The Skyline Family Restaurant has it all. Dynamite soups, sandwiches and daily specials, but the breakfast is killer. I often judge a breakfast spot by their home fries. And where the Keystone and American Dream simply slice em up and throw em in a frying pan, the Skyline seasons their home fries. Great service and a somewhat creative offering of the standard breakfast faire.

9. Dodge City
1037 Paxton Street, Harrisburg, PA
(717) 236-2719

I’m gonna keep this simple, because that’s what you get at Dodge City: a surprisingly good and simple breakfast with the option of a hair-of-the-dog drink for your Monday Morning Hangover. Dodge City was recently featured on Restaurant Impossible and went through a menu and aesthetic overhaul, but fortunately, the breakfast went mostly unchanged. It’s another spot with great home fries that only need a dollop of ketchup.

10. Hi Life Diner
4890 Carlisle Pike, Mechanicsburg, PA
(717) 737-7700

While this breakfast guy often longs for the more unique and creative breakfast offerings of some of the bigger city haunts like Pamela’s in Pittsburgh, The Blue Moon Diner in Char0lottesville or Honey’s in Philly, the sad reality of breakfast in Harrisburg is that we simply don’t have many of those options. Sure, there are a few pretty awesome brunch spots, but those are resigned to weekends. But for 7 day a week breakfast, The Hi Life Diner rounds out this list. It’s good, they’ve got a fishtank in the foyer and the service is consistent.

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5 Ways To Hear About Great Shows Coming To Your Town

November 20, 2011 / Jersey / No comments

I can’t count how many times I hear “oh man…THEY were playing? I wish I knew it! I woulda been there with, like, twenty of my friends!”.

Which, oftentimes, is the most annoying thing a concert promoter can hear.

Most times, I try to take sort-of a “soft sell” approach to marketing my shows. I’d rather be polite and gentle about it than annoying and over zealous. Facebook posts usually go up when a bigger show is announced, about once a week for calendar updates and then again the day-of the show to give a last minute reminder. Obviously, every show is different and, depending on how big the show is or how well (or not well) the show is selling, I’ll push it a little bit harder. But more often than not, I’m somewhat conservative with the marketing of Greenbelt Events shows.

Even with the email list, we’ll only put out two or three emails per month. I don’t know if that’s helped or hurt our unsubscribe rate, but we maintain a pretty decent open and clicks percentage.

But we’re thorough. The website is updated daily. Our email list has a solid number of subscribers and a respectable open rate. Our street team hits a 30 mile radius with plenty of posters and handbills. And we do our fair share of print and radio advertising.

So when someone tells me that they didn’t hear about Band X playing somewhere until after the fact, I scratch my head. The public is bludgeoned with information about things to do and places to go almost every minute of every day. Nearly every single THING that happens has an event invite somewhere on Facebook. Be it baby shower, rock show or community art day, each one of my friends probably gets as many event invites as I do…which is a lot.

So how does one sift through the clutter and hear about great live music events coming to their city? Here are a few of my personal favorite tools that allow me to never miss a great show when it comes to town…

1. Songkick – I LOVE Songkick. It works like this – install a weightless little app on your computer, it syncs to your iTunes (or whatever media player you use) and sends you automatic email updates whenever an artist in your iTunes library announces a show coming to an area near you (you specify where you live and what radius you want to hear about shows in). It’s free and simple and pretty accurate. And with most people having dozens of gigs worth of music (har, har), you can specify how often you want to be notified of new events. (I have mine set to weekly).

2. Jambase- It’s been around for years. And oftentimes, I’ll forget just how great Jambase is for finding shows in virtually any city I visit. But the neat thing about Jambase these days is the location detection on the main page that displays concerts coming up in my immediate region. I don’t need to enter my zip code or subscribe to anything (but I still can, if I choose to) and dozens of shows in an area about sixty miles around is displayed right on the main page. Combine that with some live show reviews, giveaways and ticketing services, it’s a nice, robust place to find out what shows are coming to town.

3. Pollstar – It’s bland. And more of an industry go-to site. And considering how much money Pollstar charges for a subscription to it’s print or web publications, one would think the site would be much more slick than it is, but Pollstar is an industry standard for not-quite-mainstream live and touring music news, industry trends and tour announcements. Again, a search by city option makes this site quite useful for even a moderate live-music fan. And despite it’s bland appearance, Pollstar often has more of the commercial and bigger-name acts listed, often many months in advance of the date and sometimes even before a tour is officially announced.

4. Venue Websites, Stupid – There’s always the obvious way to find out what music is coming to your town or city: look at the venue’s website! In this region, Chameleon Club, The Brass Lantern, Reverb, Crocodile Rock, Spy Club, Championship, The Strand Capitol, Whitaker Center, State Theater, Gullifty’s, The Abbey Bar, Midtown Scholar Bookstore, Cornerstone Coffeehouse and dozens more list their events daily.

Obviously, visiting venue websites one-by-one on a daily or weekly basis could become time consuming. So, the final suggestion on this list (and my personal favorite way) of ways to hear about live music events near you is…

5. The good, old fashioned email list subscription – Any venue worth visiting has one. And any band worth seeing is either playing those venues or probably maintains its own mailing lists. Sure, sure…everyone gets tons of email, but with folders now built into Gmail and Yahoo and Hotmail, it’s simple to just add those email addresses to a specific folder in your inbox labeled something creative like “live music email” or “venue emails” and they’re sitting there…ready to be digested by you at your leisure.

Seeing live music is fun and easy and, in most locales, in no short supply. You just need to know where to find it. What are some of your favorite ways of hearing about live music?

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My New Girlfriend, Roku

November 15, 2011 / Jersey / No comments

I’m in love.

My relationship with Cable has been volatile for years. Back in the early turn-of-the-century, things were mostly fine. There were sixty or seventy channels, predictable programming, moderately affordable rates and I was still able to steal cable relatively easily.

We were comfortable.

I guess it was when things started getting digital when Cable became more high maintenance and needy. There was more offered, sure, but she got more expensive. Suddenly, our cute one bedroom with a twenty seven inch Magnavox just wasn’t good enough. The neighbors all got flat screens and some fancy new thing called “on demand”.

And demanding she got.

Needless to say, the past few years with Cable haven’t been the most enjoyable. Yes, there are literally thousands of television shows, movies, classic films and documentaries available “on demand”, but for some reason, I feel like I rarely get the true value of the nearly two hundred dollars per month I spend on my package.

Increasingly frustrated, I tried to give her more. HBO? Sure! I’ll watch Boardwalk Empire and Sopranos reruns. You want me to have a landline phone again also? Well, let’s do the “Triple Play” and fold high speed internet into it too. What’s that, baby? It’s gonna be almost two hundred a month with taxes and fees? Anything for you, baby.

The more Cable wanted, the less I seemed to get. My channel surfing had dwindled to Seinfeld on basic cable, Boardwalk Empire on HBO and marathons of Man Vs Food and No Reservations.

The land line phone? I get more wrong number calls looking for a woman named Esmerelda than I’d like to admit answering.

And the internet? Well, the way out of this dead-on-the-vine relationship seems to lie right within it.

I don’t remember exactly when or where I first heard of Roku, but it couldn’t have been more than five or six months ago. The best way I can describe Roku is “a way out”.

At the core of it, Roku is a tiny little box that hooks up to your TV and finds your wireless network and streams video content from The Internet. Much of it is free, but the good stuff, obviously, costs money. But not much. And certainly not nearly as much as my monthly Cable bill.

The box itself (I got the Roku 2 XD) is tiny and weighs practically nothing. It’s currently snuggled up next to my big, clunky cable box on the shelf beneath my TV. The user manual (which is entertaining in and of itself with it’s clever writing) says that, even with the box perpetually powered on (there’s no “on/off” button), it still uses LESS energy than a nightlight. Setup is as easy as plugging my iPod into my laptop and the actual activation practically handles itself.

And then the fun begins. Right now, I’m watching an episode of Family Guy. (Sure, I know, I can do that on Fox). But right before this, I surfed to a film produced by CBS showing Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House on the Archive.org channel. Before that, I watched an episode of the J Report on the Jewish Channel (yup. they have one of those). And earlier tonight, I watched only the good clips from this weekend’s Saturday Night Live (The Devil talking about Penn State? Hysterical.)

The interface of this thing might not be as slick as your standard on-demand menu. In fact, it sort of makes me think of a hotel room on demand system. There’s a channel store where you pick out the content you want at your fingertips and it displays sort of like the album cover scroll view in iTunes.

But the magic is in the savings. Once you get used to the change (it doesn’t take long to get used to watching exactly what you want to, exactly when you want to), it becomes pretty apparent that the days of traditional Cable television may be numbered. As I mentioned earlier, I’m paying almost two hundred bucks a month for what’s really a sub par service. And with Roku, I get what I want, when I want it and for almost nothing at all.

The box itself costs eighty bucks. (There’s a cheaper model, but I went for the middle option). And beyond that, the only costs are the subscriptions. With both Hulu Plus and Netflix at $7.99 a month, I’ve got probably just as many options as I have on my Cable plan…but without all of the extra bullshit. (Actually ,the bullshit is there too, but I don’t feel as bad about it because I’m not PAYING for it)

Now yes, I do still need internet. And that’s going to run about sixty bucks a month. For local programming, the Over The Air converters are free and I hear the quality of the signal for the local affiliate channels is more than sufficient. But to break these chains of love with Comcast, there’s only one way out.

It’s Roku.

(PS – I just changed the channel…with the $0.99 app I installed on my iPhone.)

(PPS- I just found that the “channel store” is only the beginning…there are also thousands of user-created “private” channels out there as well)

 

 

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Off The Record – Version 2.0

July 22, 2011 / Jersey / 2 comments

Has it really been two years? Two whole years since the last time Sara Bozich and I sat down at our super, top-secret location, drank a bunch of liquor and talked shit into a microphone for about an hour?

To the four of you who have been missing this wonderful part of Harrisburg in your lives, we’re back.

But it’s not gonna be like the first time…. baby, I can change! We’ll occasionally get together, rap about all things Harrisburg and share it here…for all to hear. DOWNLOAD or stream it below -

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How Harrisburg’s American Music Fest Failed

July 4, 2011 / Jersey / 5 comments

This was originally posted July 8, 2010. I would have wrote a new post about the 2011 Harrisburg Jazz And Multi-Cultural Fest, but it would have been redundant. It seems the only thing that changed from last year to this year is there were fewer attendees.

It’s easy to be a “Monday Morning Quarterback” after watching any event fail. But being someone who makes his living booking, promoting and presenting nationally touring bands nearly two hundred nights per year, I feel that my opinion on the abysmal failure of the “Harrisburg Jazz and Multi-Cultural Festival” and how it could have been better is clearly both valid and warranted.

Yesterday, I had lunch with an unnamed source who was close to the inner-workings of this years festival and, combined with the information I was given from my source and the knowledge of the industry I hold, the following are my assertions on how the festival failed and how to ensure that never, ever, EVER happens again.

First and foremost-

1. Changing of The Name
Harrisburg’s American Music Fest – despite it’s lackluster calendar- was an annual event that hundreds of thousands of people from the region attended. What’s in a name? Well, simply put, the American Music Fest was called the American Music Fest because it was a pretty good choice of a pretty broad representation of music. No one can argue that the lineup for the previous years American Music Festivals weren’t varied. World, Blues, Gospel, Rock, Country, Bluegrass, Singer/Songwriters were all represented. And if that isn’t “multi-cultural” in itself, then I don’t know what is.

Additionally, I heard from several vendors, attendees and even performers that “Jazz and Multi Cultural Festival” …how do I say this…sounds pretty, um…urban? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but when factoring in the demographics of the greater 200,000 people living in a 30 mile radius, I’d want a festival to have a welcoming name. And really, what was wrong with “American Music Festival”?

What it boils down to – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

2. Mayor Thompson either fired or lost her top fundraisers for Parks and Rec
Gloria Giambalvo and Tina King were a dynamic duo of fundraising awesomeness for the many programs held throughout the year in the city. I don’t have the exact figures, but Gloria and Tina certainly raised considerable amounts of dough for festivals like Kipona and the American Music Fest. And without them on her payroll, who was going to raise the money? Festivals like this are great exposure for corporate contributors and, while there were the usual, low-hanging-fruit like Comcast and Blue Cross, the festival lacked the long-tail funding that it has had in years past.

So, in a nutshell, you get what you pay for. $160,000 isn’t nearly enough to stage a three day, outdoor, riverfront festival designed to bring in a couple hundred thousand attendees.

3. Chuck Schulz- acting director of Parks and Rec- resigned two weeks before the festival.
Word on the street is that the Parks and Rec department whittled down from five or six people in the office to only one – Chuck – and one man simply cannot keep all the plates necessary spinning.

4. There weren’t any local bands on the bill
If you book twenty local acts on a festival like this, they’ll create buzz strong enough to garner the attention of the community. That’s how the Stage on Herr stage at Artsfest succeeded. Regardless of budget or how much (or how little) the acts were getting paid, having a couple dozen local acts playing throughout the weekend equals a couple dozen acts (of four or five people each) telling their entire mailing lists, Facebook friends, Twitter followers and word-of-mouth benefactors where they are going to be.

5. Save the preachers for the churches
I got a text message from a friend at 3:40PM on Saturday the 3rd which said “Main stage had some guy talking about God and the savior. No band. Just prerecorded backing country music. He was inviting members of the 20 people there on stage to share their love of Jesus”.

[facepalm]

Nobody wants to see that at a city-sponsored event. Period.

6. There’s nothing wrong with admitting defeat. In fact, it’s more respectable.
My sources tell me that Linda was urged on multiple occasions to just cancel the event. Save the money and the embarrassment and simply call it off. That would have been the prudent thing to do. But based on the recent departure of the final of her top-level cabinet staff, all signs point to “Linda don’t listen to nobody but Linda…and God” and that’s no way to run a city.

None of these six points contained anything other than realistic, honest-to-goodness analysis. Sure, it’s her first term in office and she’s going to make a few mistakes…but this is getting out of control. It’s time to batten down the hatches and start to admit that she has faults…or the same body who elected her will remove her from office sooner than she can yell “Praise Jesus!”

Addendum one – Read this story about the state-funded Philly Jazz festival and it’s failures.

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