Chickie’s & Pete’s will pay the Atlantic City Expressway tolls for an hour on Friday
This year's promotion will be an hour earlier than in previous years. Earlier in the day, Chickie's & Pete's will host a festival at Farley Service Plaza.
Continuing a Memorial Day weekend tradition, sports-bar chain Chickie’s & Pete’s will pay the Atlantic City Expressway tolls (cash and EZ-Pass) for motorists headed east through the Egg Harbor Toll Plaza between 4 and 5 p.m. Friday.
This year, the giveaway will be an hour earlier than in previous years to accommodate a shift change, said Chickie’s & Pete’s owner Pete Ciarrocchi, who will ride a cherry picker at the toll plaza and wave a race flag to start the promotion. “It’s my favorite promotion of the year,” he said, adding that being three stories in the air can be harrowing.
Ciarrocchi said he was not sure of the cost to his company, given the difference in tolls for cars, trailers, and trucks. “They’ll give us a bill afterward,” he said.
For decades, Egg Harbor was popularly known as “the dollar tolls.” Inflation has driven the auto toll to $4.70 this year, up from $4.55 in 2023 and $4.40 in 2022.
Earlier that day, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Chickie’s & Pete’s will host a festival at the expressway’s Farley Service Plaza (Milepost 21.3) with animals from the Funny Farm rescue sanctuary, Dalmatian puppies for meet-and-greets, and demonstrations by the New Jersey State Police K-9 team and Atlantic City International Airport’s fire and rescue equipment, and other organizations, vendors, artists, and exhibitors, as well as live broadcasts from radio stations.
There will be free orders of Chickie’s & Pete’s Crabfries plus food and drinks from Hershey’s Ice Cream, Mars, Carlo’s Bakery, Applegreen, and Monster Energy.
Chickie’s & Pete’s has been doing this since 2013, minus the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021.
Ciarrocchi said he chose Memorial Day weekend as a way to remember his family’s military tradition, including his father, Pete Sr., and uncles Bo and George. He said George Ciarrocchi, his restaurant mentor, received the Silver Star for valor. Chickie’s & Pete’s was founded in 1977 in Northeast Philadelphia by Pete Sr. and his wife, Henrietta, whose nickname was “Chickie.”
Crabfries? They’re a thing.
Ciarrocchi probably was not the first person to sprinkle Old Bay seasoning over crinkle-cut french fries, but he was the first to apply to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to register the name “Crabfries.” For 17 years, his company’s lawyers have gone after businesses using variations of the name, even those that heap actual crab on their fries. Even “Crabby Fries” got pinched years ago.