Fat Cat

A student at a truck window on College Avenue asks for a Fat Cat and gets a heavy sub wrapped against the heat. Inside a split sub roll sit two cheeseburgers, their cheese slumped over the patties from the flat-top, with French fries packed in beside them and lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and ketchup over the top. The foil is warm enough to feel through a jacket, and opening it releases hot beef fat, fryer salt and ketchup in one cloud of steam. It is a whole truck plate folded into a single roll, a burger and its fries eaten in one bite.

The fries do real work. Laid in a layer between the burgers and the bread, they take up the juice the patties shed, so the roll stays intact for the length of a walk across the lot. Their crust softens within minutes as the steam gets to it, and that soft, salty, potato-heavy middle is what the eater tastes most.

The lettuce and tomato, cold from the cooler, give a cool snap against the hot cheese and keep the sandwich from tasting like one long fried note. Left to sit, the bottom of the roll goes limp and the tomato turns warm, so a Fat Cat is eaten immediately, with both hands, over the foil.

The trucks that sold it stood in a row on College Avenue for years, and then, in the early 1990s, moved across the street to a corner of a faculty parking lot, Lot 8. A line of lit service windows in an asphalt lot is the setting most Rutgers graduates attach to the sandwich: steam fogging the glass and an order handed down still too hot to hold for long. The Fat Cat was the bestseller there through the 1980s and 1990s, and it gave the whole genre its first word. Later Fat sandwiches keep the habit of piling a full truck menu onto a single roll.

That habit produced a naming game with its own history. Fat Darrell came from a student, Darrell W. Butler, who had little money and asked a truck for chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks and fries together on one piece of bread; people standing nearby ordered the same. The Fat Moon adds chicken fingers, bacon and egg with fries, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and ketchup. Each new combination gets a name and passes to the next customer, and the Fat Cat is the template the others follow.

Origin and history

The trucks' own timeline dates the first Fat sandwich to 1979, the year its debut is said to have been announced on campus and the sandwich named the Fat Cat; a newspaper mention also gives 1979 as a possible date. One account places the sandwich earlier, in the 1970s, at a local restaurant that predates the truck windows. No record names the cook, or the truck, that first wrapped one, so the date stays a reported figure.

What is documented is where it grew. The nine original trucks of the late 1970s worked College Avenue, the sandwich became a staple there through the 1980s, and in the early 1990s the trucks relocated to Lot 8, where they stayed about twenty years. In August 2013 the lot was cleared to make way for The Yard, a dormitory and retail building, and R U Hungry? now operates from its ground floor.

The Fat Cat held its place as top seller until 1997, the same year Darrell Butler's chicken-finger, mozzarella-stick and fries sandwich appeared on the trucks. That puts roughly eighteen years between the Fat Cat's reported debut and the arrival of the first challenger that students named after a person.