On TODAY Aug. 4, Al Roker met New Jersey couple and diner devotees Jon and Karri Ricklin. The pair, who have been married for 39 years, started a journey in 2015 — to visit every diner in the Garden State.
“Our quest is to eat at every diner in the state of New Jersey. We have more diners in New Jersey than any other state,” Jon tells Al, adding that New Jersey is known for its. “We just thought that it would be cool just to drive around the state and sample and eat at every one of them. And it’s turning out to be a bigger quest than we probably originally anticipated.”
“We were ordering and Karri just said, ‘Let me take your picture.’ I was holding the menu, and she just snapped a picture of me holding the menu,” Jon says. “Half jokingly, I said, ‘It would be really cool if we could take this exact same picture at every diner in the state of New Jersey,’ at the time having no idea how many there were.”
“This is 212,” Karri says of the diner they ate at with Al. Only 203 to go — a piece of cake, or cherry pie a la mode, perhaps.