In Praise of the Lowly Hamburger

First, apologies to my arteries: I had three burgers this weekend. Two of them were pretty bad and one was exactly what I expected and perfectly satisfying. That got me thinking about what I really like in a burger, and what I think actually makes a good burger.

The first, on Friday, was a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with Cheese. I'd taken part of the lunch hour touring one of our commissioners around several projects we have underway, and by 2:00 I was pretty hungry and grabbed it from the drive thru on the way back to the office. My mistake, I think, was waiting until I got back to the office to eat it: the bun had hardened a bit, the cheese had congealed and the meat was no longer really hot. Laura, the consummate cheese lover (rugged English cheeses and pungent French cheeses are fine with her) can't understand how I can even eat a cheeseburger but I ate it, but it reminded me that I didn't eat McDonald's for years because I didn't like the taste of their beef -- it often tastes gamey -- as if it tasted like a feedlot smells. Not all of the time, and usually their regular burger tastes just fine, and I have to admit that there are times that only a Big Mac will do.

On Saturday I was under the same time pressure at lunchtime, racing to meet my real estate agent at my house in the desert after driving for six hours. Del Taco was on the way, so I drove through and got a regular burger and a quesadilla. Not the Big Del burger or any double burger, but a simple, small regular burger with pickles and ketchup, no cheese. Perfect.

Finally, on Saturday night we were in Hollywood to see the Behemoth show at the House of Blues. I should have rolled the dice on the House of Blues menu, but wanted to spend an hour or so walking Sunset Strip, and decided to stop in an (unnamed) diner there for a bite before the show. Maybe I should have gotten the Thai wrap, but I was looking for a good diner burger. Instead got a truly mediocre chili burger. Sure, it wasn't what I ordered but thought it looked intriguing on the menu before I passed on it. I would probably have been better off sending it back in favor of the regular cheeseburger.

So that trio of burgers -- plus Xan's In N Out on Sunday -- got me thinking about what really works for me. As it turns out, smaller and relatively plainer, so that the meat/grease, bun, and condiments are all in balance, is the ideal. Like most food preferences, I think it goes back to my youth.

I'm not very nostalgic for home cooked burgers, as we didn't grill at home and pan-fried is, well, pan-fried. But in New England in the 1960's and 1970's, Friendly's ruled. Friendly's burger was served on toasted white bread, not a bun. And I think the toast was even buttered. (As a side note, there's a whole genre of food writing about Friendly's and Howard Johnson's hot dogs -- frankfurters -- grilled in butter.) If I remember correctly, the patty was square like the bread, and was larger than a McDonald's -- it was probably a quarter pounder. The patty was definitely juicy and came with ketchup and pickles, which worked great with the crunchy, buttery toast.

My real favorite burger from my youth came from an after-hours diner in Holyoke called Rene's (or Rainy's: there was no sign or menu so you never saw the name written anywhere -- I've always assumed that the local French-Canadian pronunciation of Rene was the actual name). Rene's was only open from midnight until 6 a.m. and catered to drunk high school and college kids and served lots of burgers. It was a small dining-car place with about 10 counter stools and a half-dozen two-seater tables and manned by a two grumpy men -- Butchy and Billy. By the time I moved back to Holyoke after college the business was gone and replaced with a more upscale catering business. I don't know if anything is there today.

It was a pretty limited menu -- not as limited as John Belushi's "cheeseburger, cheesebuger, cheeseburger" but not much more and the specialty was a cheesburger. I think a cheesburger was about $1.50 in 1978. They would lay the white American cheese (remember white American?) on the buns and put them into the toaster. The buns would crisp slightly and the cheese would melt and then they'd pop the perfectly cooked chuck patty onto it. You'd get it plain, and I think the only condiment handy was ketchup. No mustard, no pickles, no lettuce, no tomatoes, no thousand island, no relish, no onions, no bacon, no avocado. Just a perfectly cooked patty on a perfectly cooked bun.

I think there's a myth that old-school burgers were all bun and little meat. Reading the obituary for Al Bernardin, inventor of the McDonald's Quarter Pounder, who recently died of a stroke at 81, brought that home:

"Bernardin went to work at McDonald's corporate headquarters in 1960 and quickly rose to dean of Hamburger University, McDonald's training centre. Later, as vice-president of product development, he played a major role in the formation of McDonald's signature fish sandwich, french fries, and hot apple and cherry pies. But Bernardin's claim to fame came in 1971, when, as a franchise owner in Fremont, he introduced the Quarter Pounder, with the prophetic slogan, "Today Fremont, tomorrow the world."

""I felt there was a void in our menu vis-a-vis the adult who wanted a higher ratio of meat to bun," he said in 1991." This was long before McDonald's introduced the Angus third pounders. (And don't get me started on why I think the fast food industry has latched on to Angus beef as a way of distracting attention from concerns over mass-produced beef leading to e. coli scares -- as if Angus is a different product produced differently, more carefully.)

That thinking, of course, helped unleash two generations of ever-larger burgers, including the recent introduction of The Big Carl by Carl's Jr. (I like Carl's commercials as much as most guys, but they normally don't entice me to go buy their burgers. I've outgrown the demographic of "cravers" that supports the burger industry -- men 16-35 that will eat there at least twice a week.) Wendy's seems to allow you to add an unlimited number of patties to any burger, and Jack in the Box has several huge burgers. Jack poked fun at this a few years ago with their commercials for the "beefy cheesy" burger -- two huge patties and at least two slices of cheese, when they showed Jack watching a focus group where one of the participants said, "I like the meat and cheese, but if you could get rid of the bun..." Jack flips out, saying "you'd be eating meat with your hands" to the unfazed guy, and then promises to look into it. The ultimate Bernardin's ratio: 1:0.

Eric Schlossr's Fast Food Nation goes into a lot of gruesome detail about the production of meat and other foods for the fast food industry and as a result has a lot of praise for the In N Out chain, which does things quite differently. They have a really good burger, of course, but at its essence it's a relatively modestly-sized burger. Fresh (never frozen) beef makes a big difference in the quality of the burger.

But then are gourmet burgers better? Sort of. The Kobe burger at the Viceroy, for example, is juicy and flavorful, but because of what a higher-end restuarant charges you (hence the "Six Dollar Burger" campaign by Carl's) they tend to serve you a really large burger -- up to 8 ounces in a lot of places. It may make paying $12-$16 feel worth it, but I think it unbalances the Bernardin ratio by making it too high. Add to it fancier buns, like an onion brioche, and intensely flavored toppings (jalapenos, chipotle dressing, bleu cheese) and you end up with something unrecognizable as a simple burger.

Which brings me back to the second unsatisfactory burger above: the chili burger. Somehow migrating from the childog to the chili burger causes the appeal of chili to wane. The best chili burgers are served open-faced (a la the "Chili Size," which meaning is said to take its name from the "hamburger size" ladle that legendary Los Angeles chili parlor proprietor Ptomaine Tommy used decades ago to spoon chili over the open-face burgers he served) and use a real bowl-ready chili, not beanless hotdog chili.

If you order a chili burger and it's served like a burger, wrapped in paper to be eaten by hand, it's just not right. Worse is if it has other hamburger fixings, like tomato and pickles, like mine did. Then it feels like the chili is an afterthought. Billy Reed's in Palm Springs does it right: a nice grilled burger patty served open-faced on a bun, smothered in a pretty good homemade chili. Add some cheese, onions and green Tabasco and you're on your way. The Billy Reed's patty is of the "larger" variety, but I consider a chili burger a different dish than a regular burger. You can even skip the bun and save the carbs. It's a little charbroiled and may be sirloin and not chuck.

The classic burger meat is chuck, though, and not sirloin. As a matter of fact, some of the most satisfying burgers -- White Castles -- may not even be as good as chuck. They meat is so finely ground and so thin that it's the essence of beef that the diner gets. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle only resonated because there are millions of people that know that exact craving -- drunk, stoned or sober. Even the editors of Gourmet (or maybe it was Bon Appetit) did a photo shoot of White Castles a few years ago and the editor talked about the really visceral experience that the staff had to the photographer walking in with the warm "suitcase" of White Castles. (I think that's a case of 24, right from the restaurant.) Tummies rumbled. One staffer said they looked like "meat petit fours." The perfect snack.

So, finally Saturday's Del Taco burger. There's a lot about Del Taco I really like, and I think they do a relatively good job of preserving the feel of a Southern California taco and burger stand, even though they are a relatively large chain. They even recently introduced chili fries (which sucked, but their heart was in the right place). Their larger burgers are okay, but it's the plain hamburger I love. They don't even show it on the menu, except in the kid's meal, and I think it's under a dollar. I think it you cut a 2 inch by 2 inch square out of the middle you'd come close to a White Castle, except for the sesame seed bun. It's where the heritage of the lowly burger is, and we'd do well (and maybe live longer) to eat these smaller, simpler burgers. Meat petit fours, indeed.