Fat Moon

Among the Fat sandwiches of the Rutgers grease trucks, the Fat Moon is the one that put breakfast in a sub roll. Where its siblings stacked burgers on burgers or fried things on fried things, the Fat Moon runs chicken fingers down a long roll alongside bacon, a fried egg and french fries, then finishes the load with lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and ketchup. The egg and the bacon are the tell: this is the menu's all-day-breakfast entry, a diner plate of eggs and a basket of chicken tenders folded into the same held loaf and eaten at the hour when those two cravings tend to arrive together.

The build follows the grease-truck logic that nothing gets plated on the side. The fries lie the length of the roll, under the chicken and the egg, where they go soft as they take on the yolk and the mayonnaise and the rendered fat off the bacon. The chicken fingers carry the structure, crisp and salty; the broken egg runs warm and rich into the starch below it; the bacon threads smoke through the middle. Lettuce and tomato are the one cool note in a sandwich that is otherwise hot, heavy and fried from the first bite to the last.

Most of the Fat menu was named after people. The Fat Darrell took its name from Darrell W. Butler, the student who in 1997 walked up to the window and asked for chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, fries and marinara on one roll; the Fat Romano was Rich Romano's cheesesteak-and-Taylor-Ham idea. The Fat Moon is not a person. It belongs to the menu's other naming streak, the colorful and the nonsensical, and that distinction turned out to matter. The trucks knew their fame ran on those names, enough that the rival operators fought over them: the company behind R U Hungry? went to court over the word "Fat" itself, alleging that a competing truck's use of the Fat-sandwich names trod on its trademarks.

The names also got the trucks in trouble closer to home. By the mid-2000s the menus carried a strain of deliberately crude entries, and in 2005 the university leaned on the vendors to sanitize them as a condition of keeping their campus contracts. The bluest names were swapped for near-homophones, the offending sandwiches reborn as tamer-sounding versions of themselves on the posted boards. The Fat Moon sailed through that purge untouched. It was always a quiet name, and it stayed exactly what it had been while louder ones around it were quietly renamed.

It is enormous, and it is meant to be. These were the orders placed at one in the morning by students leaving a night out, when one large, hot, salty handful of food is the whole errand. You eat it standing or walking, peeling back the foil, the roll heavy and warm and apt to spill from the open end. Sharing one is common. Finishing one alone is the kind of thing people mention afterward.

The trucks in Lot 8

The grease trucks grew from vendors who began working the College Avenue area in the early 1980s and consolidated by the early 1990s into a parking lot known on campus as Lot 8, the address generations of Rutgers students knew by heart. The original Fat sandwich was the Fat Cat, two cheeseburgers with fries and salad on a bun; the Fat Moon, with its chicken fingers, bacon, egg and fries, sat among the early additions to that line. Ownership of the genre was genuinely contested. One truck billed itself as the original grease truck and dated its claim back decades, while R U Hungry? built its reputation on the Fat Darrell and the Maxim headline that followed.

That headline landed in August 2004, when Maxim magazine named the Fat Darrell the top sandwich in the nation and trained a national spotlight on the whole grease-truck family. The Fat Moon rode in that wake rather than drawing the attention itself, a peer on the same menus, ordered by people who wanted eggs and chicken fingers at once and were not waiting for a magazine to tell them it was good.

The trucks did not stay put. In August 2013 the university cleared them from Lot 8 to build on the site, and the vendors scattered to new addresses around New Brunswick, the Fat sandwiches going with them. The lot is gone and the row of windows is gone, but a Fat Moon today is still a sub roll stuffed with chicken fingers, bacon, egg and fries, sold under the same name it kept when so many others had to change theirs.