Barbary Coast Food: The Hangtown Fry

Filed under: History, Food and Drink, North America, United States

Take a few eggs, fry them up, and then slap on some oysters and lay a couple strips of bacon across it. You wouldn't be wrong to think this was a late-night, bong-hit-induced home dinner. But it's really a Barbary Coast-era rich man's meal.

Meet the Hangtown fry. This mishmash of seemingly incongruent ingredients originated in the ominous-sounding Hangtown (today's Placerville, CA.), smack in the Gold Rush country. It's said that a minor, who had just found a motherlode of gold, went into a restaurant and asked for the most expensive meal they could cook up. Eggs were something of a delicacy because they had to be transported (very gently) from afar; same with oysters, which came on ice from San Francisco; and bacon was brought all the way from the East Coast.

After that one (possibly apocryphal incident), the Hangtown fry was born, truly a California dish, conceived at the same time the state came into the union. Mission District restaurant Foreign Cinema sometimes has it on the weekend brunch menu (though not at the moment) and Comstock Saloon turns the dish into a very snack-able toast (see photo). But the closest to the original might be at the Tadich Grill in downtown San Francisco. Opened in 1849, it's the oldest restaurant in California and they've been serving up the Hangtown fry for as long as anyone can remember.

Barbary Coast Food: The Hangtown Fry originally appeared on Gadling on Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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