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Trolley Car Diner & Deli
Rating Details »
Categories: Diners, American (Traditional), Bagels
Neighborhood: Chestnut Hill7619 Germantown Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19119
(215) 753-1500
10% Off All Deli Items!
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- Hours:
Mon-Thu. 7:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Fri-Sat. 7:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m.
Sun. 8:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m.
- Attire:
- Casual
- Accepts Credit Cards:
- Yes
- Parking:
- Street, Private Lot
- Price Range:
-
$$
- Good for Groups:
- Yes
- Good for Kids:
- Yes
- Takes Reservations:
- No
- Delivery:
- No
- Take-out:
- Yes
- Waiter Service:
- Yes
- Wheelchair Accessible:
- Yes
- Outdoor Seating:
- No
- Good for:
- Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
- Alcohol:
- Full Bar
20 reviews for Trolley Car Diner & Deli
For a diner, this place is great! They attempt some fancier options, but I would suggest sticking to the normal diner fare.....
I live down the road from this place and I have to say, this is one of my favorite haunts.
There can sometimes be a wait on a weekend morning, but its not bad.
I love having weekend breakfast here...everything is always good. On a recent trip, I did order the potato pancakes with my omelet and was kinda disappointed to find that they were a mini oniony version - more like flat tater tots. Still tasty, but confusing.
I have been here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner....all great. The staff is usually wonderful and quick. They certainly go a bit overboard with the kitschy 50's flair, but its forgivable.
The diner has a trolley car out front which is also their ice cream stand in the summer time. They serve Edy's ice cream there, so it is always creamy and delish.
The diner is a bit more pricey than the diners I grew up in, but I think that is more the Chestnut Hill influence than anything else.
I only wish they were open super late as with traditional diners.
When people ask me where to lunch in my hood I usually take them there for a meal and they are always happy. When I move in a few months, this is probably going to top my list of things I will miss.
I was shocked to see this only has 3 stars??? I have eaten here a dozen times and each time the service was always good, the food was always brought to the table in a timely manner the way I ordered it, and all the staff unbelievably friendly. If your in the mood for a sandwich or breakfast this is a must try for the area.
This was in walking distance from the SG's old place before we shacked up together so we went often. I think I was hoping it would be like the Country Club diner of my youth. Not so much.
The coffee is like water. It has no kick or body water so ever. Just water.
The veggie burgers are soft piles of mush. I'm being kind.
We hve our best luck with dessert- hot chocolate for the kids and pudding or jello with whipped cream. Basic but it works.
The place is hit or miss.
I'd give it 3.5 stars. Trolley Car Diner is not bad.
The place serves breakfast all day so that's a plus for people like me who like pancakes at night once in a while.
I tried an interesting and good sandwich with french toast as the bread. You can order a little container to dip the sandwich in syrup. Yum.
The turkey burger isn't that good and I may not be ordering it again. It's not bad but there's something about it that isn't right.
They have a nice beer selection, and some milk shakes with alcohol.
Overall, the place is satisfactory, and it's a nice option when you can't find a seat at another restaurant on a crowded Friday evening.
Low quality food, spotty service and the most revolting hollandaise I've ever encountered. If there's no where to go, I guess it's hard to screw up an omelet, but the overall quality of the food is just so very sub par compared to pretty much every other diner in Philadelphia. I guess it suits the need for the after-church crowd to flood in there on the weekend for brunch, but I can't see any reason to go there over one of the good diners nearby in Roxborough. They do have a good take-away beer selection, and once I had a bourbon-sauce burger that was pretty decent, so I guess that warrants a second star. But, really, its a convenient place for tourists and the nondiscriminating eaters and it's probably exciting for your grandmother, but in a city with hundreds of diners, this one is dramatically inferior.
Went for dinner around 5pm on Tuesday... note to self: only go for breakfast!. Service was bad. waitress took her time getting our orders. The cheeseburger was good/fresh but the fries were like little grease balls! yuck! but the apple pie a la mode is still up to par....
1 Previous Review: Show all »
-
6/18/2009
Absolutely love this place. It doesn't matte what you order everything is good and they give you… Read more »
My first time eating at the Trolley Car Diner wasn't as good as I expected. Slow service was primarily the let down. The atmosphere is typical of any diner and the food selection is good too. Located on Germantown Ave in Chestnut Hill/Mt. Airy, this diner was easy to get to.
Our waitress even though colorful and very kind, couldn't get the kitchen on the ball. Plus the order wasn't exact which basically sent this review to 2 stars.
The food was excellent though!
Aww, man, this seriously bums me out to write this, especially since I have been all up in arms (along with the rest of the community) over the fact that the road in front of the business has been closed due to all that crazy roadwork on Germantown Avenue.
Long story short...the road directly in front of the diner has been re-opened. And I've been going here since the place opened a few years ago; that is, until I came to my senses and realized that the service was always terrible, the food sub-par and the prices a bit steep. But I rallied around the fact that it was a neighborhood business, and my aim in life is to give them my support.
So since my dad is in town, I made the executive decision to go back to Trolley Car so we could show them some solidarity. After a 20 minute wait (no worries...) we were seated in the section of a lovely waitress who actually remembered my family - awesome! But then it all went downhill. It took 45 minutes for our breakfast to come, half the things we ordered were missing and the taste, well, let's just say that we all stopped at the local coffee place on the way home for some treats.
Trolley Car Diner, I'm pulling for you. We all are. But being local just isn't enough. Your neighbors are pulling out all the stops to support you. I hope you guys do the same to show us that you're working hard to keep us coming back, traffic problems be damned!
xo to the waitress, though. That lady was working her fanny off.
Oh Trolley Car, why you got to make it so hard to love you? I try to go here every 6 months to a year to see if it has gotten better. In theory, Trolley Car should be my go to place every weekend, but sadly it's not.
After a longish wait for a table there there's nothing I like better than my server leaving half way through out order to grab something at the pick up window or start another tables order. Then there is always a really long wait for the food, which as evidenced by the painfully dry omelet and the dried skin on the cheese grits (which the cheese was in stealth mode) had been sitting under the heat lamp for a while. Oh, also, it took four trips back and forth with the server to get all our items (drinks ,toast, etc). One last thing, I had to ask repeatededly to have my coffee topped off. I think that about sums it up.
Trolley Car suffers from the Chestnut Hill/Mt. Airy problem, they rely on the locals not wanting to travel, so they deliver bad service. I am so sick of the lame businesses in this area, its just really sad.
I'm giving them on star, because they sell six packs of beer and pretty good beer at that. So from this day on I have given up on Trolley Car working out the kinks and the only go back to grab a six pack.
I have never had anything other than breakfasts here, but I'm a huge fan of diner breakfasts. I like to go with the "Mt. Airy": two eggs, some bacon, toast, and home fries. Oh, and coffee and juice. All at a reasonable price. I can't speak for the rest of the menu (which is huge) because I'm a breakfast-all-day kind of girl when I go to a diner.
I've always had good service and not too long of a wait, as I tend to go on weekday mornings. I enjoy the retro look of the new menu, and the fact that there is a deli and a six pack shop inside. A nice place to have in your neighborhood.
Great food.
But the best part, for me, was a very nice beer selection. We stocked up on an assortment of interesting bottles from their take-out section.
This is my favorite diner. Good food, good prices, good service. During the week I like that they have breakfast specials named after the neighborhood train stations (though I don't like the food in the special named after my train station).
It's a great place to go for breakfast and dinner. And I too love the ice cream trolley out front. Now here's hoping that the construction on Germantown Ave won't hurt it too much!
This is an all-around GREAT diner.
Here's why:
1. You can eat in a trolley car turned restaurant. ('nuff said in my opinion)
2. The menu is HUGE and everything is served all day.
3. Moderately priced, above average quality food. (esp the waffles!!)
4. Friendly service (not up in your face, not ignoring you, refilling your cokes without asking)
5. There is an ice cream trolley car outside, which is open during warm months.
6. There is a (free) parking lot!!
[My Yelp picture was taken here.]
please note this review is for the ice cream trolley car only, NOT the diner.
my husband and i walked up to the trolley car last night around 8:45 for some ice cream. we made sure to leave time as we know it closes at 9. as we walked up we saw another couple walking away with their frozen treats.
when we got up there all of the lights were on and the sign illuminated. the guy working in there, though, was too busy cleaning up to notice us. we didn't want to be rude and knock on the glass, so we waited.
while we were waiting, another guy wearing a trolley car diner t-shirt, walked over from the diner, passed us, and very clearly saw us. we even made eye contact. we continued to wait and figured when he went in he would alert the clerk to our presence.
wrong! he completely ignored us, walked in and shut the lights off! neither of them looked up or acknowledged us.
this was appalling. we live two blocks away and have been going there all summer. never, ever have either of us been ignored and we were always served right up until closing time with no problems.
since the couple before us was served somewhere between 8:45-8:50 we know they did not change the closing time to 8:30. in fact, by the time we got home it still wasn't 9:00 pm.
i want to emphasize that this is not the clerk's fault, he just didn't see us. the guy who walked over from the diner, however, has absolutely no excuse.
I really like this place. Since I've been having a hard time finding really good and not super expensive food in G-town and Mt. Airy (without traveling to Chestnut Hill) I was so happy to eat here. They have really great mostly seasonal offerings (plus some standard diner fare), a pretty great beer selection, and a huge back room if for some reason you need that for something.
I was off put by a few things:
-The price--but only a little bit. I had originally walked in thinking this was a normal diner, but alas I was gladly wrong.
-I was confused by the "salad bar" that was included in our meal: a bowl of lettuce and 3 dressings to choose from...oh! and croutons.
-and our poor waitress was really young and obviously had just started so she kept forgetting things (i.e. my boyfriend's side dishes).
The food was really good though, and I had soft shell crabs which can be disastrous when done badly. It was served with a really yummy dipping sauce trio and a mango chutney. They had a half fried chicken (yes, half a bird) that my boyfriend ordered, and though it was good, I wasn't blown away. It had crazy sauces, too, which definitely made the dish.
Plus, as Susan L. mentioned, you get to eat in an old school trolley car diner and you can get ice cream from a trolley car in the parking lot.
I went to the Trolley Car one Sunday for their brunch offering. It was pretty cool that the diner is actually in the shape of a car. The buffet was nothing special. But, since I have heard raves about this Diner, I suppose I should go back for any non-buffet fare.
i've been here many times, i'd have to say they are OK, but just a tiny smidgen below IHOP. and i like IHOP so i'm biased LOL, but really, this is an OK substitute if you're looking for a change of scene.
I went to the Trolley Car just because I thought the name was cool. The food was good, the atmosphere cute, and my waitress was very nice. Super family friendly, and I'm sure it's busy on the weekends!
The ol' reliable Diner. Decent food (improving) friendly folks, and a great neighborhood vibe. All day breakfast and a liquor license--what else could you ask for?
This is a classic style diner. It has the typically decor of a diner featuring diner food. I had the New Yawk hot pastrami sandwich. It tasted excellent, however the pastrami sandwiches I've had in New York were much larger. Overall, the diner was a little more than I expected.
