These are run by “global restaurateur” HMSHost, the mega-operator behind food and retail concessions in 116 airports and 99 of what they describe as “motorway travel plazas,” 12 of which are the exclusive providers of food, gas, and bathroom facilities to the good people traversing the New Jersey Turnpike. The one thing the Turnpike really has going for it are its service areas. The signage is atrocious and the urban planning is deranged you are never going to take the right exit for Newark Airport, but that’s okay, because there are three other rapid-fire exits that will get you there. It’s 122 miles long, bisecting the state on the diagonal - the southwest terminus is just short of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, where the turnpike is a blandly bucolic four-lane highway edged with dense wall of trees by the time you reach the northeast terminus, at the George Washington Bridge, it’s morphed into an asphalt-tentacle beast, engorged, at its widest, to 12 lanes on four distinct roads, surrounded by oil refineries and other forms of outer-city industrial sprawl, all of them plaited with exits and sub-exits and interchanges. The New Jersey Turnpike, like so many things in New Jersey, is horrible, which is also why it’s magnificent.

Walk around at a rest stop say