Who’s Hungry for a Garbage Plate?

Nick Tahou’s
320 W. Main St.
Rochester, NY







I sure hope New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg never runs for Governor.

For the sake of the loud f-bomb-dropping black guys manning the griddle at Nick Tahou’s.

For the sake of generations of hung-over University of Rochester frat boys.

And for the sake of suit-wearing junk food addict business travelers like me.

That’s because the Nanny State Dictator-In-Chief down state who actually passed a law banning soft drinks over pint size would surely shut down Nick Tahou’s by executive order on his first day in Albany.

In The People’s Republic of Bloomberg, if a Seven Eleven Big Gulp is a dire threat to the health and safety of New Yorkers, than a Nick Tahou’s Garbage Plate is a weapon of culinary mass destruction.

That’s why I was excited as Anthony Weiner at a sorority slumber party when the counterman slid me my Styrofoam plate of kaleidoscopic greasy goodness.

Ah, the moment I’d been waiting for all day.

It had been 24 hours since I’d eaten. Nearly twelve hours since my alarm woke me at 4:30am for my flight to New York.

One TSA groping, two flights, several meetings later, I was ready to tackle Rochester’s most celebrated contribution to humanity -- the infamous Garbage Plate.

Invented for drunk and/or hung over partiers, the Garbage Plate is one of those epicurean items from which most sober people would recoil.

A base of fried potatoes and macaroni salad topped with skillet fried hot dogs, chili and onions, Nick Tahou’s has been serving its infamous Garbage Plate at morning, noon and night since 1918.

As a child, I would have refused to touch such a monstrosity.

Young Suit757 had one of those food mixing phobias -- no one food item could possibly come in contact with another.

Somehow, over the years, I’ve managed to get over that.

As it turns out, macaroni salad, potatoes, onions, chili and hot dogs all mixed together taste pretty darn good -- even stone cold sober on a Monday afternoon.

Work with me on this one.

You cannot minimize the role the law of gravity plays in this dish.

Grease from the chili sinks to the bottom of the Styrofoam, saturating the fried potatoes. Add a little salt and ketchup and you’ve got yourself a tasty, greasy pile of fried potatoes.

The sting of raw onions and spicy chili perfectly compliment the skillet-blackened hot dogs -- known here in Rochester as Texas Hots.

This is no ordinary Oscar Meyer microwaved dog, either. A little kick of spice buried in the meat tube, split open and grilled brown on the flattop, this is a high end processed meat.

Just when the spices start to tingle my palette, the cool refreshing tang of macaroni salad helps to counter-balance the heat.

Of course once I started to dig down into the bowels of my Garbage Plate, all the various elements began to mix -- much to the horror of any staunch segregationist -- or picky seven year old eater.

As it turns out, the dreaded “mixing of the ingredients” isn’t so bad after all. Chili, grease, ketchup and onions mixed into macaroni salad tastes pretty good all mashed up.

Even sober.

Like its signature dish, Nick Tahou’s isn’t much to look at.

Situated in a mostly boarded up long-abandoned old brick building on the not-so-good outskirts of downtown Rochester, the folks here put about as much thought into the naked white-washed décor as I do to the latest innovations in vegan cuisine.

Noticing that I polished off every last morsel of my Garbage Plate, the gruff counterman asked me how I liked it -- knowing the answer full well.
I happily obliged his compliment-fishing endeavor.

“Outstanding!”

Just don’t tip off Mayor Nanny State. Or you will surely be out of a job.

Rating: Seriously Thought About Buying Shirt.

An Indoor Cook-Out Means Summer’s Never out of Reach

LDR Char Pit
4753 Lake Ave.
Rochester, NY



If somehow you really ticked off the gods and are sentenced to live the remainder of your life in up-state New York, you could do a lot worse than settling here on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Just think, for an entire five or six weeks per year you could enjoy the sand, sun and fun of this beachfront enclave 15 miles north of downtown Rochester, NY.

Just don’t even think about jumping into that water – I’m pretty sure Lake Ontario doesn’t ever warm up to wetsuitless temperatures.

Of course my visit to Rochester didn’t coincide with that five or six week interval of sun-splashed frivolity.

Of course not.

Try early November.

It was cold down along the beach and I couldn’t help but feel like I was living through a Springsteen song on the Jersey shore with the wind whipping down the boardwalk.

Or maybe it was like Santa Cruz in the off season with nobody on the road and nobody on the beach. I could feel it in the air. The summer was out of reach.

Empty lake and empty streets, the sun goes down alone in November on Lake Ontario.

Yep. Henley’s “Boys of Summer” were long gone (not that he was singing about Rochester, NY anyway).

All the arcades and custard shops might be “closed for the season”, but there is one institution here at the shore’s edge that has a loyal enough following that it stays open year round.

LDR Char Grill.

This place is like an indoor cook-out.

The scent of the marriage of charcoal and beef permeates the entire restaurant.

The thing to get here is the steak sandwich. With onions.

What makes this sandwich so amazing is its simplicity. Thin sliced beef, char grilled for a minute or two, at the most, on each side, folded onto a bun. With a few sautéed onions, if you want.

That’s it.

Tender, beefy, delicious.

It doesn’t need any seasonings or sauces.

The greasy drippings from the charcoal-kissed meat produce this sandwich’s own condiment.

I admired the pool of brown grease on my tiny paper plate and the flame-kissed meat being flipped on the grill in front of me and dreamed about my backyard grill.

Why is it that charcoal-seared beef tastes so good at home, but is so hard to find in restaurants?

Could it be the neighbors don’t want to deal with commercial-sized plumes of charcoal smoke?

What is wrong with these people? I could smell that for eternity. In fact, I’m pretty sure I will. I have it on good authority that heaven (if I make it) for Suit757 will smell like char-broiled burgers.

But that’s what makes LDR Char Grill such a shirt-buying-worthy destination.

The meat grilled here is almost as good as in my back yard; the only difference being Suit757 has beer on tap at home.

Listening to the sizzling meat made me crave one of LDR’s delicious-sounding burgers. Those have got to be good!

And their char grilled “hots” – a distinctly Rochester term for hot dogs. And their red, white and blues plates of various sausages piled on top of home fries and macaroni salad – LDR’s version of another Rochester hang-over staple – “The Garbage Plate”.

And what about those homemade pies?

Ah, so much good food to try and so little stomach vacancy.

I did manage to find room for a cup of LDR’s pumpkin soup.

Sweet enough to qualify as dessert, this soup wasn’t just a thin runny pumpkiny kin to a more traditional tomato soup.

No. This soup was chock full of chunks of sweet gourds.

Topped with a swirl of whipped cream, the brown sugar and nutmeg brought me back to visions of a fresh-from-the oven pumpkin pie being passed around the Suit757 dinner table on Thanksgiving.

After paying my $10 tab for my soup and sandwich, I walked a block down to the beach.

As the ice cold waters of Lake Ontario lapped against by bare feet, I slipped into some pretty deep philosophical thoughts.

Like, why do people live the way the do?

I mean, if you like the sand and sun and water, why live here by the shores of Lake Ontario, where you can only enjoy it for 10% of the year?

Why be 90% miserable?

Sure, Ontario Beach beats the hell out of downtown Buffalo, I suppose. But why bother? In this ever more mobile society of ours, why not just hop the ‘Hound and move to Florida?

Then I caught a whiff of the charcoal smoke wafting down the beach.

I suppose some things are worth sticking around for.

And just think, only 34 more weeks until summer’s back in reach.

Rating: Bought the Shirt!