In Rochester, NY, where I grew up, there was a late-night diner that was legendary for the following item.
This right here is a Nick Tahou's Garbage Plate.
What is in a garbage plate:
Tons of home fries or french fries
Macaroni salad
At least two or three sausages or cheese burgers or hot dogs
Topped with onions, mustard, and a special hot sauce.
Douse in ketchup and dig in.
A lot of good stuff there. Actually, seeing that picture is kind of making me involuntarily salivate a little bit. A garbage plate was good when sober, but an orgiastic experience when drunk.
I had a friend who once claimed there was a record for how fast you could eat a garbage plate. Let's call him Grillo. Yeah, that sounds stupid. Perfect.
So this one night we're at Nick's all drunk and hungry, and Grillo decides he's gonna go for the record, which was, according to him, forty-seven seconds. So a whole gang of us crowd around a booth, somebody looks at their watch and says, "go," and this jackass digs in like a starving pig on a pile of pumpkin pies.
He's just jamming his hands in and shoveling all of it in his mouth at once, and of course we're all cheering him on, and of course I'm right in his face yelling encouragement at high volume, "come on, Grillo, you can do it! DO IT GRILLO! YOU CAN DO IT!" like I'm Knute Rockne or something, and he's stuffing it in and chewing madly and everybody's caught up in the excitement...it was insane! All eight seconds of it.
That was how long for it took until my ridiculous yelling and screaming in his face made him laugh. And of course, he had a big mouthful of crap at the time. And of course, out it all came. Fast. A large mess composed of various shades of brown consisting of many loose, semi-chewed, semi-gooey chunks. Garbage plate was everywhere. All over the table, all over me and all over at least half of the other idiots there. It was, in a word, awesome.
Grillo was an idiot. And so were we all. It was a good time to be alive.
