Garbage Plate

A Garbage Plate is built from the plate up, not the bread out. Half the plate gets a pile of home fries, the other half a scoop of cold macaroni salad, and the two halves are set side by side rather than mixed. Two griddled cheeseburger patties go across the top, or a pair of red or white hots split lengthwise, and over the whole thing goes a ladle of fine-ground, spiced meat hot sauce. A squiggle of yellow mustard, a handful of raw chopped onion, and a couple of slices of soft white bread and butter on the side finish it. The bread is not the wrapper here; it is the mop, brought in at the end to chase the sauce around the plate.

The sauce is the idea that ties the plate together. It is a loose, fine-textured meat sauce, closer to a thin Greek-diner chili than a thick American one, spiced to be the loudest flavor on a plate whose starches are deliberately plain. Ladled hot over the cold-and-hot bed, it pools into the home fries, seeps down into the macaroni salad, and slicks the patties, so that nothing on the plate is eaten dry and every forkful pulls a little of everything. Take the sauce away and a Garbage Plate falls apart into its parts: a side of fries, a side of macaroni, and some griddled meat sitting next to each other with nothing to make them one dish.

The bed has to be built in the right order or it collapses into mush. The macaroni salad goes down cold and the home fries hot, on purpose, so the plate carries a temperature split and a texture split before the sauce ever lands, the cool mayonnaise-dressed pasta against the soft starchy potato. The patties or hots are griddled hard, with a real seared crust, precisely so they can stand up under a wet flood instead of dissolving into it. The raw onion and the stripe of mustard are the sharp, acidic cut against a plate that is otherwise rich, soft, and starchy corner to corner. Skimp on the sear and the meat goes slack under the sauce; skip the onion and mustard and the whole plate reads as one heavy, samey note with nothing to break it.

It arrives steaming, the sauce smell hitting first, meaty and spiced, with the sharp top-note of raw onion over it. The plate is a deliberate mess of temperatures: the fries hot and soft, the macaroni still cold under the sauce that is cooling it, the seared crust on the patties going slack where the flood has soaked it. You eat it with a fork in one hand and a folded slice of buttered white bread in the other, the bread dragged through the sauce and used to clear the corners of the plate. It is built to be wolfed fast, before the hot half and the cold half meet in the middle and the whole thing settles into one lukewarm temperature.

The Garbage Plate is late-night Rochester food with its own ordering rhythm. The proper name is trademarked, so other Rochester counters that make the same thing sell it under their own labels, the Trash Plate, the Dumpster Plate, the Sloppy Plate, a small thicket of synonyms that all point at the same Nick Tahou original. You order it by the protein, cheeseburger plate or hot plate, then call your sides off the short list, then say everything on it, which means hot sauce, mustard, and onions. It belongs to a city built on diner and drive-in food and is eaten most at the end of a night out, the plate sized to soak up a long evening.

The variants are all swaps on the bed, not the frame. A cheeseburger plate, a hot plate of red or white hots, a fried fish or chicken-tender plate, a steak or egg plate, and a meatless plate all keep the home fries, the macaroni salad, and the hot sauce fixed and change only the protein on top. What is not a Garbage Plate is the chili-and-bun dish it gets compared to: a chili dog or a chili-cheese fry plates the same sauce on a different structure entirely and answers to a different name. The Garbage Plate's nearest kin are the other smother-and-mop hot plates, like the open-face hot beef sandwich, where a single starch base is flooded with something wet and worked over with a fork.

The trademarked plate at Nick Tahou Hots

The dish comes from Nick Tahou Hots, a Rochester institution founded in 1918 by Alexander Tahou, a Greek immigrant, in a stand first called West Main Texas Hots and later housed in the old Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway station on West Main Street. The original plate was plainer than the modern one: hots, home fries, cold beans, and two slices of buttered Italian bread, a cheap workingman's combination known around the counter as hots and potatoes. The signature spiced meat sauce came in under the founder's son, Nick Tahou, who ran the place for decades until his death in 1997.

The current name is younger than the dish and came from the customers. By the 1980s the counter was a fixture for college students leaving the bars, and the story the family tells is that students kept asking for the plate with all the garbage on it. The Tahous resisted the name at first and then gave in to it. In 1992 the restaurant trademarked Garbage Plate, which is the reason every imitator across Rochester has to call its version something else.

Nick Tahou Hots trademarked the name Garbage Plate in 1992, seventy-four years after Alexander Tahou opened the counter in 1918 selling hots and potatoes off the old West Main Street railway-station floor.