By PAUL LUKAS

It was Friday evening at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4591 in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, about 26 kilometers west of Manhattan, and the scene was a vegetarian’s nightmare.
About 350 men, seated at long tables, were devouring slices of beef tenderloin and washing them down with pitchers of beer. As waiters brought trays of meat, the guests reached over and grabbed the pink slices with their bare hands, popping them in their mouths.
Each slice was perched on a round of Italian bread, but most of the men ate only the meat and stacked the bread slices in front of them, tallying their gluttony like poker players amassing chips. Laughter and uproarious conversation were in abundance; subtlety was not.
As anyone in northern New Jersey could tell you, this was a beefsteak. The term refers not to a cut of meat but to a raucous all-you-can-eat-and-drink banquet with a rich history in Bergen and Passaic Counties of New Jersey.
The events, which typically attract crowds of 150 or more, with a ticket price of about $40, are popular as political events, annual dinners for businesses and civic groups, and charity fundraisers.
Caterers said they put on about 1,000 of them in the region last year.
“Once you start going to beefsteaks, it’s an addiction,” said Al Baker, a Hasbrouck Heights policeman. “You’ve got the tender beef, butter, salt, French fries, beer - all your major food groups. But it’s very unique to North Jersey. I go to other places and nobody’s heard of it.”
That would have come as a surprise to many New Yorkers of generations past. Back in the days before cholesterol testing, beefsteaks - boisterous mass feeds featuring unlimited servings of steak, lamb chops, bacon-wrapped lamb kidneys, crabmeat, shrimp and beer, all consumed without such niceties as silverware, napkins or women - held sway in New York for the better part of a century.
The ritual was documented by the writer Joseph Mitchell for the New Yorker magazine in his 1939 article “All You Can Hold for Five Bucks.” As Mr. Mitchell told it, the beefsteak came into being in the mid-1800s, became popular as a political fund-raiser and vote-buyer, and began a slow decline when women started taking part after being granted suffrage in 1920.
But just across the Hudson River, the Bergen-Passaic beefsteak scene has been continuing without New York attention for the past 70 years.
It’s not clear how the beefsteak migrated westward from New York .
But there appears to be broad consensus on the genesis of the New Jersey version: In 1938 - a year before Mr. Mitchell’s manifesto - a Clifton butcher and grocer named Garret Nightingale, known as Hap, began catering parties with a set formula.
He grilled tenderloins over charcoal, sliced them, dipped the slices in melted butter, served them on slices of white sandwich bread, added French fried potatoes on the side, and let everyone eat as much as they wanted. This he called a beefsteak. Within a decade, it had become a local phenomenon.
Hap Nightingale died in 1982. By that time he had passed the business on to his son, Bob, who turned it over to his son, Rob, in 1995.
Why did the beefsteak disappear from New York just as it was gaining popularity in New Jersey?
“I think that’s because the beefsteak is a very community-based thing, and today’s New Yorkers don’t always have a very strong sense of community,” said Waldy Malouf, the chef and a co-owner of the Manhattan restaurant Beacon, who in 2001 started holding an annual beefsteak .
“And as Manhattan eventually got more sophisticated and less blue-collar, the beefsteak may have become frowned upon here.”