Works cited in this post:
Time Out's 55 Best Burgers in Chicago
Hamburgers & Fries, by John T. Edge
I am a dance-with-the-gal-that-brung-ya type and, confronted with Erik's photos of the (very admirable when it comes to breadmaking) Nancy Silverton's big puffy
meringue of a pizza, my response is to chuckle "What will those wacky Californians think of next" and give thanks that I live in Chicago, where pizza weighs 5 lbs. on the hoof and a slice of deep dish could feed a family of four for a week-- or
shelter them, for that matter. Nosiree, you won't catch me praising LA over Chicago, Chicago, my kind of town Chicago is...
...then he posts pictures from a
swanky burger joint and my whole facade crumbles. For cryin' out loud, we once killed more cattle here than anywhere on earth, why don't we have more great burgers? Why is LA a great, I do mean great, burger town and we aren't?
That we aren't may surprise some, especially coming off Time Out's 55 Best Burgers issue, which indeed found many fine burgers in Chicago's hipper precincts. That is, it found many fine burgers in the vicinity of $8.95 or higher. Many of Chicago's fine chefs and steakhouses have turned to the burger with gusto and the result is indeed an admirable creature; from restaurants like Erwin, David Burke and Sweets and Savories to bars like Kuma's, Riverview Tavern and Darwin's, these mighty hunks of meat on a bun rightly deserve Time Out's praise.
But lop $7 off that price and it becomes much harder to find a burger that's more than serviceable. The cheap burger in this town is mainly what I've come to call the Greek joint burger, even though they're as likely to be run by Koreans or even Indians (beef taboo aside) these days. It's a frozen patty, grilled on a gas grill or griddled, and then stuck in a bun with (like the Chicago hot dog) a full meal's worth of condiments-- thick slices of pickle, tomato, lettuce, and onion. To be honest, it's not a bad burger, but it tastes mainly of char-grilling, first, and then of pickle and salad.
So what is it that I wish a burger tasted of? Beef. Fresh beef, fried on a griddle till the edges are browny-crisp. It's the freshness that makes all the difference-- a frozen patty is like a meatloaf or a meatball, it has an rubbery outside skin and interior, where fresh ground beef splatted onto a hot grill has the texture of, well, fresh ground beef. It is what it is. Being thin and crumbly like that, it is best served with a light hand on the condiments-- what I've often called the "30s-style hamburger" restricted them to mustard, pickle and onion, and not that much of any-- so that beef flavor may shine through and enhance the whole, imparting beefiness to each of the rest.
And compared to that monster up above, it doesn't exude grease like a case of Pennzoil used for target practice.
It's that lack of fresh beef (and the restraint in condimentation that it all but mandates) that keeps so many Chicago burgers from achieving greatness. I notice that Time Out pays tribute to Susie's Drive In on Montrose in their article-- but they do so by honoring their
fries. Susie's is a place that has everything a great ramshackle hamburger joint could ask for-- except a great piece of beef at the center of the bun. Somehow Chicago's hamburger culture came to accept the dull frozen patty as the measure of the hamburger. That's not how it is everywhere.
When I read John T. Edge's
Hamburgers & Fries at first I was mildly miffed that he spent time in dubious hamburger states like Mississippi but skipped straight past Kansas for Oklahoma. Where the hell does he think cattle are raised, in deltas? What does he think they fatten on, cotton? Kansans take pride in local legends of the burger (that is, the modern mustard-pickle-onion burger) being invented there, and who knows, they
could be true. But as I read Edge's section on Oklahoma, I had to admit that for all practical purposes he had visited the same culture-- Oklahoma produces televangelists and Kansas produces libertarian vice presidential candidates, but otherwise, they're basically the same part of the world (or "microclimate" as Edge puts it), and Edge's descriptions of serious burger joints in places like Ponca City (where Citizen Kane-like oil baron E.W. Marland controlled 10% of the world's oil supply from his Renaissance palazzo) rang true as mom's cooking for me.
And thus the circle comes complete. Oklahoma, 30s-style burgers... what do we all know about Okies in the 1930s? We know that they moved to California to harvest the grapes of wrath, that's what we know. Chicago's southern migration came from Appalachia and the deep black South, its other immigration came from sausage-making countries, and it's a hot dog town, certainly a far better one than L.A. (speak to me not of Pink's). But California's migration came from the Dust Bowl midwest, and that's why Los Angeles to this day is dotted with good authentic hamburger joints, why it has spawned In'N'Out and Fatburger and Tommy's and so many other well-beloved local joints and chains. They don't all make a fresh burger-- Tommy's doesn't for one-- but a lot more of them do there than they do here.
Perhaps it was our place as the final processing point for cattle that facilitated the rise of an industrial product-- the frozen hockey puck of beef-- over the handformed patty of freshly ground chuck popular in farm country. Whatever the reason, what we need now is for one of those chefs making a $10 burger to find his way back to the $2 variety (okay, $3 or $4). The wild success of contenders (or pretenders) such as Hamburger Mary's and Patty's surely means there would be a market for it here. Where is our Hot Doug of hamburgers to raise the standard and wrap lines around the block with freshly griddled, Wilshire-and-Sepulveda-by-way-of-Ponca-City classic American burgers?
Burgers depicted in this post:
Max's Italian Beef, 5754 N. Western Ave. Chicago, IL 60659, 773-989-8200.
Bionic Burger, Wichita.
You can read a portion of Edge's book here, in which, ironically enough, a Chicago chef-- Louis Szathmary-- offers some especially sharp insights into the hamburger as a product of immigrant workforces.
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