Rochester’s Garbage Plate is the Epitome of Choosing your own Adventure

Text by Maggie Hicks

The Garbage Plate is the ultimate choose your own adventure experience.

The dish, which originated at Nick Tahou Hots restaurant in Rochester, has become a staple in the Rochester community. Restaurants across the city honor the tradition of the Garbage Plate, and each seems to have its own take on the recipe. The only requirement is that there is a lot of food, and customers have several options for what will go on their plate.

The earliest version of the Garbage Plate emerged when Alex Tahou opened Nick Tahou Hots in 1918, naming his business after his son, Nick. At the time, the restaurant called the dish

“hots and potatoes," and served it with potatoes, two hamburger patties, a choice of two sides off the menu and ketchup and hot sauce layered on top.

Nick Tahou later took ownership of the restaurant, and deemed “hots and potatoes” the Garbage Plate. According to local Rochester legend, Nick Tahou concocted the name after some University of Rochester students came into the bar late one night and asked for a plate with “all the garbage on it.” Customers who order the Garbage Plate from Nick Tahou Hots today are served a dish with their choice of home fries or french fries next to baked beans and macaroni. Then, they can choose two sides, which consist of almost everything in the kitchen — cheeseburgers, hamburgers, red hots, white hots, Italian sausage, chicken tenders, haddock, fried ham, grilled cheese, steak or eggs — topped with onions, mustard and the restaurant’s signature meaty hot sauce.

Today, Nick Tahou Hots deems itself as “the home of the Garbage Plate.” The restaurant trademarked the name in 1992, forcing other establishments across the city to change the name of their own Garbage Plates. Even the restaurant’s website is listed as garbageplate.com, and only includes a statement from the restaurant claiming the dish as their own.

"Nick Tahou Hots is a Rochester, NY landmark restaurant famous for its Garbage Plate,” the website states. “Despite many regional variants all based on the same theme, Nick's is widely regarded as the original Garbage Plate."

But trademark laws haven’t stopped restaurants across the state from serving some version of the dish. Bill Gray’s, a burger joint with locations across upstate New York, has several variations of the “Great Plate,” including a cheeseburger plate, the chicken tender plate, the red or white hot dog plate or the veggie burger plate. Each comes topped with two sides and a dinner roll.

DogTown Hots, a hot dog restaurant in Rochester, serves its take on the Garbage Plate as well — the Junkyard Dog Plate. Customers have

their choice of hot dogs, sausages or cheeseburgers as their base along with two sides, including home fries, macaroni salad, french fries, baked beans, or coleslaw.

But other restaurants in the city do more than just change the name of their dishes.

Stingray Sushifusion, an Asian fusion restaurant based in Rochester serves the Thrasher Plate — a bed of sushi rice topped with beer batter shrimp, grilled steak, bacon, cucumber, tomatoes, scallion, sweet bell peppers, fried garlic, onion crunches, ponzu, ginger mayo, sriracha and stingray sauce.

And customers at The Red Fern can order the compost plate, a vegan take on the Garbage Plate that includes a choice of a lentil burger, spicy buffalo tempeh, lemon maple tofu, Italian sausage or seitan steak that is then topped with mac and cheese salad, sweet potato salad, spicy meat sauce, balsamic field greens and focaccia toast.

The University of Rochester’s Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity hosts Nick Tahou’s Run, a charity event for the Mount Hope Family Center, a research center at the university to aid children affected by violence in their home or community. The event includes groups of three students that run 2 miles from the University of Rochester’s campus to Nick Tahou’s Hots, where one eats a Garbage Plate as fast as they can. Then a third teammate runs back to campus to complete the race.

Students at the Rochester Institute of Technology are also invested in the Garbage Plate and its legacy. Every year on Jan. 10, Nick Tahou’s birthday, a group of students visits his gravesite and eat Garbage Plates in honor of him and his restaurant.

Although the Garbage Plate hasn’t made it much further than upstate New York, it has still gained name recognition across the country through features in the New York Times, The Huffington Post and the Cooking Channel. Recipes for the Garbage Plate have also emerged, including various ways to recreate the dish at home. But many of the recipes have a similar consensus: there’s no exact way to eat a Garbage Plate.