Fattys Morristown

A Fattys employee prepares a late-night fat sandwich for a customer. Owner Mike Dey, not pictured here, hopes to bring the Rutgers University grease truck experience to Morristown.

(Brendan Kuty/NJ.com)

The late-night crowd packs into Morristown's Fattys for fat sandwiches — long rolls stuffed with all kinds of greasy munchies.

— You're a fatty. Mike Dey knows.

"We're all fatties at heart," he said.

Dey, 32, opened Fattys exactly two weeks ago at the busy corners of Morris and Spring streets.

He said he hopes his sandwiches — long rolls stuffed with munchies like mozzarella sticks, french fries and chicken fingers and given funky names — capture some of the magic he felt the first time he ordered from the famed RU Hungry grease truck at Rutgers University.

With menu offerings such as the Fat Cat, Fat Sam and Fat Koko — all Rutgers grease truck staples — Dey said he wants to bring the New Brunswick feel to Morristown.

But by featuring different concoctions he created with the help of hungry friends, and offering uniform prices — each so-called fat sandwich costs $8.75, and all drinks are 32 ounces — Dey said he believes Fattys will set itself apart from the area's dining scene.

"If you keep it really simple, and good, and consistently stick to your guns and be in the right spot," he said, "your menu can outlast any trend."

Open from 6 a.m. to 3 a.m. every day, Fattys — which goes by the slogan, "Every day is a cheat day" — also offers breakfast sandwiches and deep-fried desserts all day. Those concerned about their diets do have an option: there's a vegetarian "fat" sandwich available, too.

Dey said including the veggie sandwich was a must.

"It straddles the line of being indulgent and being purely vegetarian," he said. "There was one lady who had us chop up the veggie patty like a cheese steak. That was one thing I thought I should offer to make some people happy."

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Dey said he wasn't worried too worried about appealing to everyone, however.

"We don't try to be everything to everybody," he said. "We're not pretenders. What we're trying to do is just give everyone an awesome product."

Fattys doesn't freeze any of its food and bakes all its bread on location, Dey said. The location, which seats nine, had been empty since a fire ripped through the second floor of a three-story residential and business building in 2009.

Dey, of Parsippany, said he decided he wanted to open the restaurant after driving down Morris Street with a friend — a former Rutgers graduate. After telling her his plans, and hearing her encouragement, Dey, who attended New Jersey Institute of Technology for two years but never Rutgers, contacted the landlords.

He signed the lease about a year later, and then sold his two national sandwich franchises, which he had owned for several years.

But the idea of Fattys was born sooner, Dey said. He still remembers his first time at a grease truck at Rutgers. He said that was in September 1998. "It changed my life," he said.

Perhaps without that visit, Farleigh Dickinson University student Nick Core wouldn't have stuffed down a Fat Mikey around 2 a.m. one day last week before shocking his friend, Jake Hazen.

Core, his styrofoam tray empty, looked at Hazen. "That was a pretty good snack," Core said. "I could probably have another."

"Snack?" Hazen said. "Are you kidding me?"

A few feet away, standing against the wall, Dey nodded his head in approval.