“Do I dare ask what’s in the garbage plate?” So queried my older brother out on the West Coast, a fellow fan of Formica countertops and coffee cups of a certain ceramic heft, scuffed and pitted from decades of diner use.
I’d just told him that three years after my eldest daughter first told me about this Rochester delicacy, I had at last sampled one. Or rather, ate till winded at a beery establishment beside the slow-moving waters of the Genesee River.
Behold the glory: a base of home fries and baked beans topped with crumbly open-face hamburger riddled with diced onions, dashed with hot sauce, laced with yellow mustard.
And/or, I learned later with a measure of regret from that self-same daughter, traditionally another ingredient, macaroni salad. Not mac-and-cheese, mind you, but salad, which is of note to illustrate the “whatever’s in the fridge” nature of the dish. She’s been known to tuck into just such an iteration at a place in Geneseo called University Hots, or affectionately UHots, which serves a college crowd late at night after college kids do what college kids will.
In fact, there it’s called a college plate, at least in part because the term “garbage plate” was apparently trademarked by its originator, Nick Tahou Hots in Rochester, Nick, back in his day, having ingeniously catered to, yes, hungover college students.
This trip had to do with the Division III national indoor track and field championships at nearby Nazareth University, or, as the announcer for the N.C.A.A. live-stream could’ve put it, “the most beautiful campus you’ve never heard of.”
On the way downstate after an exciting, smoothly run two days of competition, a Sunday breakfast at the Water St. Cafe in Geneva revealed a so-called garbage plate that was really a carefully selected skillet dish and not at all a scrap heap from the kitchen — just scrambled eggs and potatoes topped with sausage gravy.
Still, I was satisfied, and I’ve now got my sights set all the way west in our fair state, provided my diet doesn’t stop me dead in my tracks first. What’s this I hear about Buffalo’s beef on weck?