Not every diner order needs to be a full plate. Onion rings, chicken nuggets and the smaller sides that sit alongside them exist for the moments when you want something to pick at, share across the table, or add to a main dish without turning the meal into two courses.
Onion rings: battered, fried and older than you'd think
The battered, deep-fried onion ring as it is eaten today is largely an American development, though fried onion dishes go back much further. Food writers point to recipes from English cookbooks in the early 1800s that describe cutting onions into rings, coating them in batter and frying them, but the dish most people recognise, thick-cut onion, a seasoned batter or breadcrumb coating, fried until the outside is crisp and the onion inside turns soft and sweet, took its modern shape in American diners and drive-ins through the twentieth century. The appeal is the contrast: a crunchy shell giving way to a slippery, slightly sweet interior, which is exactly why onion rings work so well as a shared starter rather than a solo dish.
Chicken nuggets: a food science invention
Chicken nuggets have an unusually well-documented birth. Robert Baker, a food science professor at Cornell University, developed the technique for forming ground chicken into a coated, uniform shape in the 1950s, and he published the method as an academic paper rather than patenting it, which let the idea spread freely through the food industry. Fast food chains picked up the format decades later, and by the early 1980s it had become one of the most ordered items on American menus. On a diner nibbles board, nuggets usually travel with a dipping sauce on the side, which keeps them closer to a snack than a meal.
Building a sides and nibbles order
Most diners group their smaller dishes so you can mix and match rather than committing to one. A typical nibbles section pulls from:
- Onion rings, usually ordered on their own or stacked next to a burger
- Chicken nuggets, served with a dipping sauce
- Smaller portions of the same potato sides covered on the fries page, scaled down for sharing
- Simple vegetable sides, when a plate needs something lighter against all the fried food around it
Why sides matter on a diner menu
A diner's sides section is really where you can read how a kitchen treats detail. Anyone can fry something in oil, but the difference between an average onion ring and a good one usually comes down to batter thickness and oil temperature, not the recipe itself. The same goes for nuggets and tots: consistency across a whole tray of them says more about a kitchen than any single dish does. That is also why sides rarely sit alone on a menu. They are built to go with a combo meal or to round out whatever else lands on the table, which is the whole point of ordering a nibble instead of a main.
Nibbles as a starting point, not an afterthought
Treating the nibbles section as an opening course rather than a throwaway add-on changes how a diner meal plays out. Ordering onion rings or nuggets to share while the rest of the table decides on mains gives everyone something to eat straight away, instead of waiting on the kitchen for a single big plate each. It also works the other way around: a smaller appetite can build a full meal out of two or three nibbles and a drink without ever ordering a main dish at all, which is exactly the kind of flexibility this part of the menu is designed for.
