9 Upstate New York Foods Locals Refuse to Apologize For

Half of upstate New York’s most-loved dishes sound like a dare.

They aren’t. Not to locals, at least.

Between Rochester, Utica, and the Finger Lakes, Upstaters have spent a century turning odd ingredients and stranger names into food they’d never trade.

These are the upstate New York foods locals refuse to apologize for.

1. Garbage Plate

In Rochester, someone piled up leftovers, named the mess after the trash, and turned it into a point of pride.

The garbage plate started at Nick Tahou Hots, where the counter still builds it the same way.

You pick two bases from home fries, macaroni salad, baked beans, or French fries.

On top go two cheeseburgers or two hot dogs, a ladle of spiced meat sauce, mustard, and chopped raw onions.

Then you dig in.

Nick Tahou trademarked the name, so every copycat around town has to call it a trash plate or a Rochester plate.

Students stumble in for a garbage plate at 2 a.m., and nobody has ever apologized for finishing the whole mess.

2. Beef on Weck

Buffalo’s signature sandwich starts with a roll most people can’t pronounce.

The weck in beef on weck is short for kummelweck, a kaiser roll a German baker in the city crusted with coarse salt and caraway seeds.

A carver shaves the rare roast beef thin and piles it high.

The top of the roll takes a quick dip in the pan juices, and a smear of horseradish brings the heat.

Salt on top, no apology.

Western New Yorkers eat it at church halls and corner taverns, and they’ll tell you a roast beef on plain bread misses the whole point.

3. Spiedies

Down in Binghamton and the Southern Tier, the cookout starts with cubes of meat that marinate for days.

A spiedie is chicken, pork, or lamb soaked in oil, vinegar, garlic, and herbs, then grilled on a skewer over charcoal.

The cook slides the hot cubes onto a slice of soft Italian bread, then pulls the skewer out through the bread like an oven mitt.

That’s the whole trick.

Every August since 1983, the Spiedie Fest and Balloon Rally floats hot air balloons over Broome County while the grills smoke below.

The Iacovelli brothers were grilling them around Broome County back in the late 1930s.

Now Upstaters buy the marinade by the jug and keep spiedies on the grill all summer.

4. Salt Potatoes

Around Syracuse, cooks boil baby potatoes in water salty enough to sting a cut, and call it a summer staple.

The ratio runs about a cup of salt to six cups of water.

All that salt raises the boiling point, so the little potatoes cook up creamy instead of waxy.

Cooks send them out drowned in melted butter.

Salt, butter, done.

Central New Yorkers trace the habit to Irish salt miners who boiled their lunch in the brine near Onondaga Lake in the 1800s.

Hinerwadel’s popularized the bagged kits, and now the potatoes turn up at every clambake, firehouse fundraiser, and State Fair stand.

5. Chicken Riggies

In the Mohawk Valley, folks from Utica and Rome agree on almost nothing, and chicken riggies are the exception.

Riggies is short for rigatoni, tossed with chunks of chicken and a mix of sweet and hot cherry peppers.

The sauce is the part people fight about.

A cook whisks cream and tomato with a splash of the pepper brine until the whole thing glows a pinkish orange.

Rich, then a kick.

Nobody can prove who cooked the first plate, so half the restaurants in the valley claim it as theirs.

Order riggies at a christening, a wake, or a plain Tuesday, and nobody blinks.

6. Utica Greens

Utica’s cooks didn’t stop at riggies.

The greens start with escarole, a bitter green most shoppers walk past.

Cooks braise the bite out with garlic, hot cherry peppers, chopped prosciutto, grated pecorino, and a handful of breadcrumbs for crunch.

The escarole mellows into something you scrape the dish for.

No bitterness left.

Restaurants around town built the dish in the 1980s, and now diners in Utica order the greens next to the riggies as a matter of course.

7. Sponge Candy

Buffalo’s candy shops sell a chocolate that collapses the second you bite it.

Sponge candy is caramelized sugar whipped with baking soda until it sets into a brittle gold honeycomb, then dipped in chocolate.

The soda is the magic, puffing the hot sugar full of tiny bubbles.

Bite in and it shatters, then melts.

Gone in seconds.

The rest of the world calls the same treat cinder toffee or honeycomb, but Western New Yorkers claim it outright.

Fowler’s has made it since 1910, and a Buffalo transplant will mail-order a box rather than settle for a candy bar.

8. Michigan Hot Dogs

Up in the North Country, Plattsburgh cooks named their favorite hot dog after a state they don't even border.

A Michigan is a steamed hot dog on a steamed bun, buried under a fine, seasoned meat sauce.

The name has nothing to do with the Midwest.

Eula and Garth Otis moved east from Michigan and opened a stand near Lake Champlain in 1927, and the name stuck to the sauce they brought with them.

Simple as that.

Order a Michigan "buried" and the onions hide under the sauce, or ask for them on top and they crown the whole thing.

Clare and Carl's still slings them from a drive-in window on Route 9, and no Plattsburgh native will let you call it a chili dog.

9. Grape Pie

In the Finger Lakes village of Naples, the bakers turn a grape most people only drink into dessert.

Every fall, at the peak of harvest, they cook Concord grapes down into pie.

It tastes purple and jammy, a little like the wine from the vineyards all around it.

Making a grape pie is a slog.

One grape at a time.

You slip the skins off by hand, cook the pulp, strain out the seeds, then fold the skins back in.