Some three and a half years after discontinuing, chef Michael Dimmer still receives requests to put his famed pickled onion rings back on the menu at Marble + Rye.
From the day the farm-to-table restaurant opened in 2015, the hand-cut rings—brined overnight, then breaded and fried to order—quickly became a fan favorite. The appetizer was so popular that staff even considered greeting guests with the slogan: “Welcome to onion rings, how would you like your burger?”
So their discontinuation during the Covid-19 pandemic came as a shock to customers, some of whom contacted the restaurant up to a dozen times per day inquiring about them. Why, patrons wondered, would Marble + Rye remove a menu item that helped put the restaurant on Western New York’s culinary map?
Dimmer had many reasons. He and his staff spent up to three hours per day making the rings, often needing to hand peel and cut seven to 10 25-pound bags of red onions each week in order to meet demand. The cost of flour and frying oil skyrocketed during the pandemic, and Dimmer was reluctant to pass those additional costs on to his customers. The labor-intensive rings also left a nightly mess in the restaurant’s kitchen.
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Its departure has provided Dimmer and his staff additional margin to innovate and create new menu items. “Everyone’s lives in the kitchen have gotten a lot easier with that not on the menu anymore,” Dimmer says.
The rings’ removal coincided with a time of transition for the Genesee Street restaurant, which reduced the size of its menu and pivoted to a lounge that specializes in Detroit-style pizza and a smaller selection of other scratch-made foods. But Dimmer is flattered to still hear about those onion rings, which he first debuted nearly a decade ago on his Black Market Food Truck that preceded Marble + Rye.
He’d initially conceived of pickled French fries to serve on the truck, but couldn’t get that recipe quite right, so he decided to pickle onion rings instead. When he overheard fellow chefs James Roberts and Steve Gedra raving about them outside of his food truck, he knew he was on to something.
The pickled onion rings remain a point of pride for Dimmer and the Marble + Rye staff, even if their time as a regular menu item has come and gone. So rather than lose those rings to the annals of Buffalo food history, Dimmer has provided his signature recipe for make-your-own rings.
“It was fun to do, and it was fun to see people’s response to it, and I love the fact that so many people fell in love with it and have a connection to it,” Dimmer says. “It’s hard for people to hear it, but sometimes good things come to an end.”
The recipes
