Joe Seriale didn’t set out to own a diner, but friends and neighbors, after years savoring his camp breakfasts, cook-outs, luaus and other feasts, told him he’d be a natural. And they wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Joe and Joan Seriale had been taking their family to camp out on the beach for years on spring break vacations. In April 2010, 60 hungry friends and neighbors followed them.
“They made me cook, and by the third day they were on me,” Joe said. “They said, ‘Joe, you’ve got to open a restaurant, and there’s only one name.’ ‘What’s the name?’ I asked. They said, ‘Joe’s Diner.’ I looked it up and couldn’t believe the name was available.”
He and Joan opened Joe’s Diner that August, in a hot rod shop on 16th Street. “It was an absolute moon shot,” he said.
“This was at the time of the 2008 crash, and one thing I could see was that people who were at the high end weren’t making it. The $9 and below menus were.” That set the menu – classic diner dishes for breakfast and lunch, with some upscale additions including house-made croissants, crepes and avocado toast, to name a few.
The basics are there – meatloaf, burgers, hot pastrami and tuna melts, classic club and Monte Cristo sandwiches, omelets, biscuits and sausage or chorizo gravy, waffles and buttermilk pancakes. Those pancakes, topped with house-made lemon curd, vie with Joe’s classic Number 2 breakfast – two eggs, two slices of bacon, two sausage patties and a side of pancakes, potatoes, biscuit and gravy, French toast or Belgian waffle – as customers’ number-1 favorite.
A carne adovada bowl is the newest addition, with spicy pork over scrambled eggs and breakfast potatoes. There’s also a “cowboy benedict” with an open-face biscuit topped with sausage patties, eggs, gravy and potatoes or fruit. Classic Benedict is served on Saturday and Sunday only.
As much as possible, dishes are made from scratch, Seriale said. “We make six jams, all in-house. We used to make nine, but it got out of hand.”
Blueberry buttermilk pancakes with lemon curd (photo by Darryl Webb for North Central News) Seasonal berry crepes with mascarpone filling (photo by Darryl Webb for North Central News) French toast combo plate (photo by Darryl Webb for North Central News) Biscuits with chorizo and sausage gravy (photo by Darryl Webb for North Central News) Adovada with scrambled eggs and breakfast potatoes (photo by Darryl Webb for North Central News)
Eventually, the hot rod shop went bankrupt, and the Seriales went looking for a new location, settling on the former South China Buffet building on 7th Avenue in the Melrose District. They opened in July 2013.
The diner capped a long culinary career for Seriale, who started out at age 11 washing dishes and busing tables for his grandmother, who owned a combination dining hall, café, lounge and motel in Welton, a small agricultural town about 35 miles east of Yuma.
“I lived across the street,” he said. “She was short-handed one day for the Kiwanis meeting, and she called up and said, ‘Can Joe come over?’”
Later, he went to the University of Arizona to study engineering, working his way through by waiting tables, and after three years, he decided engineering wasn’t a good fit.
“I had been working at restaurants steadily all that time and decided that was where I was comfortable,” he said.
That led to studies at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, with an externship at a Club Med in Martinique in the French West Indies. When his professional knife set disappeared at the Martinique airport, he was left working with a very basic batterie de cuisine.
“It taught me to do a lot with nothing,” he said. “It really humbles you, after all that high-end education, to work in a jungle in an open-air kitchen, with people who spoke a different language. Working with people when you have to communicate in other ways, you find that if you work shoulder-to-shoulder, they’re more apt to buy into whatever you’re trying to do.”
After the academy, Seriale began a peripatetic career, including working in the kitchens of posh hotels and a luxury yacht, and he opened several restaurants, getting them through the rough spots before moving on.
“Working on the yacht gave me a chance to actually explore my food,” he said. “I had a very small repertoire at that point. There was no Food Network, it was three food magazines and your cookbooks, and that was all there was.”
He also worked as a live-in chef for wealthy clients, one of whom owned the old Hills Bros. Coffee mansion in Piedmont. “I stayed in the butler wing with my own library,” he said. “It was so far beyond a farming kid’s dreams.”
One of those clients invited him to be his private chef in Illinois, making him a great offer: work in his home for a year, then he’d help him open his own place. That first venture was a “rude awakening to reality,” that failed miserably, Seriale said. But it taught him an important lesson: learn the business fundamentals of running a food company.
Seriale finally moved back to Arizona to care for his father, who was ill at the time. When his dad recovered, Seriale moved to the Phoenix area, where he worked at various locations, eventually moving to Tom’s Tavern, where he met and married Joan. When their first child was on the way and the family needed medical insurance, Seriale moved to the food service industry, eventually working for Sysco until that fateful beach vacation and his move to his own place.
Today, “We’re a family owned, scratch restaurant,” Joe said. “We’re family oriented, a great place for kids. I take care of the kitchen and business logistics, but Joan’s the one you remember. My wife is the reason we have a good dining room. Not only will she remember your name, she’ll remember your dog’s name. All of my servers are moms. Empathy is baked in.”
Joe’s Diner, 4515 N. 7th Ave., is open daily from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. For information, call 602-535-4999 or visit www.joesdineraz.com.
