A Dumont Landmark, on the Record

A look back at almost a quarter century on Knickerbocker Road: the 1975 opening by Peter and Stacy Panagiotou, the Senior Nights and Super Thursdays that built the reputation, and the ice cream once made on the premises by Cass Luhmann of Bergenfield.

The piece follows the room through the years it ran as an Italian restaurant and picks up with Sandy Panagiotou reopening it in 2003 and renovating the space, with her father in an advisory seat. She had waited tables here as a teenager. The most requested entrée at the time: the monthly German sauerbraten. Breakfast — whole-wheat pancakes, waffles, French toast, omelettes — was always on.

A regular of more than twenty years puts the appeal simply: the staff, the service, and feeling at home.

Where most new restaurants set out to offer something new, sisters Sandy Panagiotou and Kathy Kontopanagiotis set out to bring something old back. The Knickerbocker Road room had been their father Pete’s Tri-Valley before it became Intermezzo, and people kept telling them they missed it.

Restoring the homey diner took four months — the building had been extensively remade for a more formal restaurant — and the result was a room lined with spacious booths and bordered by a long serving counter. The menu kept the diner favourites, burgers and salads, and added paninis and wraps; the homemade ice cream stayed on, just as it had when Pete manned the counter.

An early review from the first Tri-Valley years, when Pete and his father had grown the Northern Valley Ice Cream Parlor into a full breakfast-lunch-and-dinner restaurant serving Greek, American and Italian food, with chef Etiene Urbino in the kitchen.

The draw then was the famous two-dinners deal — entrée, soup and salad, generous portions, prime rib and Yankee pot roast among the regulars — in a 120-seat room that often had a line out the door. A salad bar with Greek salad, gardiniera and olives, and ice cream made fresh on the premises, rounded it out. The advice at the end still holds: when the sick-of-cooking feeling comes over you, remember Tri-Valley.