ROCHESTER—Michelle Cardulla lived in or near Rochester for 40 years before she went to Nick Tahou Hots and had her first “garbage plate.” Now, she says, she could become addicted.

Bill Goglia lived in Rochester three decades before he made his first visit to Tahou’s restaurant and consumed his first garbage plate. “If I get visitors from out-of-town,” Goglia said, “this is not where I’m going to take them.”

The difference in reaction to Rochester’s most famous food between Cardulla, executive director of Rochester’s Museum of Kids’ Art, and Goglia, a retired college English teacher, is the same difference that divides much of the city and many of its visitors.

Sometimes I asked students in my college writing classes what they thought of “garbage plates,” and almost always the class divided along two lines: Those whose reactions could be summed up, “Yuk, the very thought of it is disgusting” and those who loved them. The “Yuk” group tended to be better spellers who submitted neater papers. The writing of the garbage plate lovers was often more daring and adventuresome.

The “garbage plate,” as practiced at Nick Tahou’s, consists of a pile of rather dry macaroni salad, home fries and baked beans topped with two hot dogs, which in turn is topped with a mixture of mustard and chopped onions. That can be topped with a meaty hot sauce. Sometimes french fries replace the home fries. Often hamburgers, cheeseburgers, a steak, fried fish, eggs or something else replaces the hot dogs. Some people like one hot dog and one hamburger. Cheeseburgers seem to be the most popular meat.

Veggie garbage plates are available (veggie here means only no meat, so it’s still not exactly a health food offering). It’s served with two slices of homemade Italian bread.

The food is piled on the plate so everything blends into everything else, and the resulting appearance, more than the contents, justifies the dish’s name.

In the mid-1990s, I introduced Tahou’s to travel writer William Least Heat-Moon, who observed that the garbage plate was a good deal like a filled dish at a typical backyard picnic.

Hots and po-tots

The restaurant traces its history back to 1918, when Greek immigrant Alexander Tahou opened it on the west side of Rochester’s downtown area. Tahou offered a dish of pretty much the same ingredients that customers referred to as hots and potatoes, or, sometimes, hots and po-tots. The restaurant eventually moved to its current location in the 19th century terminal of the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway at 320 West Main St.

The restaurant, which for many years was open 24 hours, became popular as a late night and early morning stop for college students. So many students asked for the dish “with all that garbage,” that in the 1980s, Nick Tahou, who took over the restaurant when his father died, started calling it the “garbage plate.” (Tahou’s is now open Monday through Saturday from 8 a. m. to 8 p. m.)

The name not only stuck, the idea spread. Dozens of Rochester- area restaurants now offer similar concoctions they call trash plates, dumpster plates, messy plates, sloppy plates, or by some other garbage-sounding moniker.

For a while, the Horizons bar at the upscale Lodge at Woodcliff in the suburb of Perinton offered a Plat du Refuse, which included either bison hot dogs or elk burgers. The macaroni salad contained grape tomatoes. The cost was $15.75. It no longer appears on the Horizons menu.

The price tag and contents of the Plat du Refuse, of course, ran counter to the very idea of the garbage plate, which at Tahou’s costs from $6.50 (the grilled cheese topped plate) to $8.50 (for the chicken or haddock versions). With red hots, white hots or hamburgers on top, the cost is $7. With cheeseburgers, $7.50.

More important is the social milieu of the place. As Nancy Martin, an archivist at the University of Rochester library, wrote in an article about the garbage plate for The Encyclopedia of New York State: “Part of the original’s success lies in the ambience of Tahou’s, which approximates street theater at its best, dispensing with social class distinctions and encouraging all to intermingle on an equal basis.”

It’s not unusual to see men in business suits sitting in a booth next to someone who, based on appearance, might be homeless.

Following the swearing in of Eliot Spitzer as governor of New York in January 2007, one of the dishes available at the inauguration parties was the Nick Tahou garbage plate.

Daredevil’s demise

Tahou’s is a little more than a half-mile from Frontier Field, where the Red Wings play Triple- A baseball in the summer, and about a mile away from the High Falls/Brown’s Race area.

High Falls is where America’s first daredevil, Sam Patch, met his death. Patch made his living by jumping over waterfalls. After several successful jumps at Niagara Falls, Patch, on his way home to New Jersey, decided to leap from High Falls, in downtown Rochester. About 6,000 people showed up for the jump on Nov. 6, 1829. He successfully made that jump and advertised a second jump a week later, on Friday the 13th.

Patch should have known better, but some observers thought he was drunk. Ten thousand people watched as he leaped. His body wasn’t found until March, near the mouth of the Genesee River.

Today, the Point de Rennes pedestrian bridge, just north of the falls, provides an excellent view of High Falls.

On the west side of the falls is Brown’s Race, where the first grain mills in the area were built. A race, in this context, is a man-made channel for water diverted from the falls to power the mill. A small museum, the Center at High Falls, details Rochester’s earliest history. Admission is free.

About four-tenths of a mile west of Nick Tahou’s is the Susan

B. Anthony House, and half a block away from her house is a bronze sculpture of Anthony and Frederick Douglass sitting at a small table and drinking tea. The sculpture is by Pepsy Kettarvang. Almost certainly, no such event ever took place, although Anthony and Douglass knew each other. And both are known to have boarded trains at the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway station that now houses Nick Tahou’s. For two people so associated with the idea of equal treatment for everyone, it’s nice to think, had they lived in a different era, they would have shared a garbage plate together.

If you go:

To reach Nick Tahou Hots, take the I-490 exit from the Thruway to downtown Rochester; take Exit 12 (Brown Street), then turn slightly left onto Allen Street, turn right onto West Broad Street, and right onto West Main. Nick Tahou’s is on the right. There is plenty of parking behind the restaurant. Check out

www.garbageplate.com

for a $2-off coupon. The Center at High Falls is open Wednesday through Friday, 10 a. m. to 5 p. m.; Saturday, noon to 6 p. m., and Sundays, 1 to 5 p. m.

To reach the Susan B. Anthony House from Tahou’s, exit onto West Main Street, turn right, drive four blocks, turn right onto Madison Street. The Anthony House is on the left. The statue of Anthony and Douglass is another half block, on the right.