Hamburger America

by George Motz

  Both Pete and Cliff share time at the busy seasoned griddle cranking out excellent burgers. The menu is limited to burgers, hot dogs, and grilled cheese, but fresh-cut fries are also available. If you ask for milk, specify either “white” or “chocolate” or be pegged a tourist.

  The burger at Harmon’s is small but tasty. Pete buys fresh ground beef and uses a patty former at the restaurant to make two-ounce patties. “We made them by hand for the first six months,” Cliff told me. “That was enough.”

  A fully loaded burger comes with mustard, fried onions, and a signature sweet red relish. “Most people think it’s going to be hot because of its color,” Pete told me. A local bakery provides preservative-free buns that are steamed to limp. The bun creates an impossibly soft, warm pillow that cradles the perfectly cooked thin patty.

  The wait at Harmon’s, especially on a Saturday, can be up to 45 minutes. “We get backed up,” Pete said, “but to have the quality you can’t do more.”

  When Pete and Cliff first took the helm at Harmon’s, they decided to slightly alter the menu and offer a traditional Maine favorite—the lobster roll. The attempt backfired and the roll was pulled from the menu after only a few weeks. “This is a hamburger place,” Pete explained, and attributed the failure to the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  16

  MASSACHUSETTS

  MR. BARTLEY’S BURGER COTTAGE

  1246 MASS AVE | CAMBRIDGE, MA 02138

  617-354-6559 | WWW.MRBARTLEY.COM

  MON–SAT 11 AM–9 PM | CLOSED SUNDAY

  Bill Bartley is an original. He stands at the griddle at his family’s Harvard Square eatery shouting things at me like “We’re the BEST!” and “This is the greatest burger ANYWHERE!” He’s smiling and extremely energetic and has the kind of cocksure confidence and running dialogue usually reserved for someone like Muhammed Ali in his prime. Fortunately, all of it is true—the burgers at Mr. Bartley’s are unbelievable.

  “I’ve probably made over five million burgers in the last 30 years,” Bill told me as he shifted some thick patties on the 600-degree griddle, “All good ones too, all cooked to temp.” If you ask for medium-rare, that’s what you’ll get. Every burger goes out exactly the way Bill wants them to, which means perfect. If you ask for cheese it’s cooked separately from the burger. Where most chefs melt the cheese atop the burger as it nears completion, Bill cooks the perfect burger, tosses a thick slice of cheese directly on the griddle for a minute, then gently transfers it to the burger as it is dispatched to a table. As Bill eloquently explained, “The cheese is ambivalent to the temperature of the burger.”

  Mr. Bartley’s is a busy place. Just across the street is Harvard University, so you can imagine the crowd. The restaurant feels like a big broken-in bar, yet no booze is served and the walls are covered with Red Sox stuff, political ephemera, and the types of posters a student might have in their dorm room. Many tables, including a long communal one, and green plastic chairs complete the scene.

  The first time I visited, there was a line out the door at 2:30 p.m. on a Thursday. The man who started it all, Joe Bartley, was taking names outside, his wife, Joan, was managing the tables inside, and their son, Bill, was at the grill cranking out perfect burgers. “You don’t have a line outside because you’re slow,” Bill explained, “you have a line because you’re GOOD.” The turnover is quick and the service lightning fast.

  The burger selection is enormous. With the same seven-ounce patty, Bill and his team can add any one of the over forty dressing concoctions on the menu. Everything you can imagine on a burger is available here, from feta cheese to baked beans, but the big seller is the Viagra Burger. The Viagra is topped with creamy blue cheese and bacon, and the menu asks you to “rise to the occasion.” The reality is that these burgers need no condiments. They are that good and don’t even need a bun. Of course Bill put it best when he explained, “The bun is just the envelope for the good news that’s coming.”

  Mr. Bartley’s burger starts as fresh-ground chuck that comes from a local butcher daily. A special patty former in the restaurant is designed not to compress the meat too much as it creates the fist-sized burgers. “We use an Acu-Pat,” Bill told me. “It’s made of stainless steel so it doesn’t use heat during patty forming like most. Heat is the worst thing for an uncooked burger.” On the intensely hot griddle the burgers are seared to almost a burn to seal in the juices.

  Even though the burger selection is daunting, your toughest choice will be deciding what to drink. Mr. Bartley’s serves up some of the city’s greatest frappes (milkshakes) and an amazing raspberry lime rickey. My advice? Get both.

  Joe Bartley ran a lunch counter seven days a week in the back of a pharmacy in Garden City, New York in the 1950s. “I was going to be a cop on Long Island, can you believe that?” He decided to move back to his native Boston one day and opened a grocery store in 1960 in Harvard Square. By 1962 he was making burgers because, as he told me, “When I started there wasn’t a good burger around.”

  As I stood and watched Bill’s genius at work, I tried to figure out what made these burgers so special. Without missing a beat Bill offered this insight: “The person who has this skill level thinks they should be doing something better. Not me. I make the best burgers anywhere.”

  WHITE HUT

  280 MEMORIAL AVE | WEST SPRINGFIELD, MA 01089

  413-736-9390 | WWW.WHITEHUT.COM

  MON–WED 6:30 AM–6:30 PM

  THU & FRI 6:30 AM–8:30 PM | SAT & SUN 8 AM–6 PM

  White Hut is one of the few remaining “White” restaurants in America. During the 1920s and 1930s America was blanketed with ten-stool hamburger joints with names like: White Tower, White Diamond, White Clock, and the one that started it all—White Castle. Placing the word white in your name conveyed a sense of cleanliness, an important tenet in a time when hamburgers were considered dirty food for wage earners. By the 1930s in America, thanks to the tremendous success of White Castle, the word white also became synonymous with quality fast food.

  And then along came White Hut. In the late 1930s, Hy Roberts opened a small three-stool hot dog shack on a busy corner in West Springfield, Massachusetts. A year after opening, Edward Barkett was asked by Roberts to run the stand for a few weeks. Barkett liked what he saw and negotiated the purchase of the business for $300. He bought a plot of land across the street soon after and built a tiny 600-square-foot burger counter. That same burger counter, over 60 years later, serves a thousand burgers a day and is still run by the third generation of the Barkett family.

  The interior of White Hut is a classic burger counter with 12 vintage stools facing a large flattop griddle, bare white walls, and a long counter supported by a wall of glass block. The floors are sprinkled with a generous amount of sawdust, giving the place an old-time meat market feel. “That’s so people don’t slip—this floor can get slippery,” manager Kathy told me. The place was built during the Depression, at a time when most building materials were scarce. “The White Hut was built with black-market lumber,” current owner and grandson EJ Barkett pointed out. “Nothing else was available during the war.” His grandfather was also forced to use the only flooring available, a slick beige terrazzo. Booths lined the back wall of the restaurant for the first few months, but were removed when Barkett noticed that people tended to hang around in them too long. “My grandfather needed the turnover and replaced the booths with a large table to stand around.”

  Don’t look for a menu—there is none. White Hut offers only three things: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and hot dogs. And, as of only a few years ago, fries. If you love onions, you’ll love the burgers at White Hut. Every morning a large pile of chopped Spanish onions is placed on the griddle. The onions cook slowly until they are translucent and limp, then hearty amounts are spooned onto the burgers. “We go through about 250 pounds of onions a day,” counterperson Roberta told me. Roberta is actually owner EJ Barkett’s mother and a fount of White Hut lore. White Hut
receives an order of fresh, thin, two-ounce patties every morning made of a special blend they have been using for years. “There’s less fat so there is less shrinkage,” Roberta pointed out.

  The daily lunch crowd is large and the method for ordering a burger at peak times requires well-tuned survival instincts. Order your burgers when a counterperson makes eye contact with you. Roberta told me, “People will stand four and five deep at the counter at lunchtime.” Nothing is written down and somehow everyone’s order is produced perfectly. Regardless of the hungry mob and apparent lack of order, the average dining experience at White Hut lasts only 15 minutes. A unique rule, imposed at the counter, may help. “No newspapers between 12 and 2,” Kathy told me, “because they are not paying attention.”

  White Hut is a family place, run by family and visited by families. A regular named Michael, in a suit, standing and eating a quick lunch told me, “I bring my kids here just like my dad brought me here years ago.” “We’ve had four generations sitting at the counter at the same time,” EJ told me, “I love to see that.” For many in this part of Western Massachusetts, White Hut is an enduring tradition that shows no sign of fading any time soon.

  17

  MICHIGAN

  HUNTER HOUSE HAMBURGERS

  35075 WOODWARD AVE

  BIRMINGHAM, MI, 48009 | 248-568-9911

  WWW.HUNTERHOUSEHAMBURGERS.COM

  MON-WED 8 AM–10 PM | THU 8 AM–12 AM

  FRI & SAT 8 AM–3 AM | SUN 11 AM–9 PM

  Hunter House is not a roadside burger joint or a fading relic of the past. It is a thriving 60-year-old diner in a Detroit suburb that probably looks the same as it did on opening day in 1952. What’s more, in keeping with its status as a surviving, historically accurate mid-century burger joint, Hunter House is located on Woodward Avenue, the first paved road in America. In 1904, when Detroit became the center of automobile production in America (thanks to the Ford Motor Company), it was inevitable that paved roads would follow.

  The interior of Hunter House looks impossibly clean for a diner this old. It’s clear from first glance that the stools, the long counter, the basket weave tile floor, and the enamel steel walls that this diner is no imitation. “Everything in here is original,” charming owner Susan Cobb told me with a smile. The line of refrigerators and vintage appliances behind the counter are eye candy for the lucky ones that grab a stool, though apparently repairs to these beauties is not easy. Susan told me, “Servicemen come in here [for repairs] and always start by saying ‘I’m not going to have parts for these.’” It’s not uncommon for Susan to have parts fabricated for ailing appliances in order to keep Hunter House original.

  The hamburger is the main attraction on the limited menu at Hunter House. “When you come here you need to order the burger the way we’ve always made it,” Susan told me with a smile. The way they’ve always made the burgers is with paper-thin sliced Spanish onion cooked with the burger. If you don’t want onion, you have to ask for no onion, but the flavor profile of this burger is equally about the onions as it is the beef. Just about everyone orders theirs with onions and as the server’s T-shirts aptly explain, ONION BREATH IS BETTER THAN NO BREATH.

  A flattop griddle sits at one end of the counter adjacent to a functioning carry-out walk-up window. The burgers start as 80/20 chuck that comes to the restaurant as fresh-ground beef formed into “pucks,” or tall patties. The puck is pressed thin into a patty on the griddle and covered with sliced onions. When the burger is flipped, the grillperson places both halves of the bun atop the patty (or patties if you are getting more than one) and with a squeeze bottle full of water sends a thin stream that encircles the patty. Not surprisingly this sends up an explosive vapor cloud. As grillman Bret explained to me, “We do that to steam the buns.” It looks like they also do it for fun. Who wouldn’t want to spray cold water on a hot griddle and see what happens? “It’s amazing,” Susan told me, “The buns poof right up.” The result is a bun-and-burger combo that arrives impossibly soft and tasty.

  The double is the way to go because the single patty, weighing in at 3 ounces, is just a snack. There are crazy eating records on the wall that go beyond the standard notion of the number of burgers consumed. One note gives props to a guy that ate 6 quadruple burgers in 8 minutes, 10 seconds, and another exclaims that “The Blue Burke” once ate “7 hamburger patties in one bite!!!” Other accolades go to kids, one only 5 years old who polished off 4 cheeseburgers, fries, and an Orange Crush with his parents watching. “The people that compete are not what you’d think,” Susan told me. “They are smaller than me!”

  On the third Saturday in August every year, Woodward Avenue is transformed into the world’s longest, largest classic auto show in the form of the Woodward Dream Cruise. Over 35,000 vintage cars and one million visitors descend to “cruise” a section of Woodward that extends from Detroit out to the suburbs. The event is crushing to the tiny hamburger icon so Susan shuts down the restaurant and sets up flattops outside in the parking lot to feed the masses. “We use the restaurant for the crew to take breaks,” Susan explained. During the Cruise, Hunter House has served up to 40,000 burgers to hungry car enthusiasts.

  Susan’s parents, Al and Martha Cobb, bought the vintage burger joint when it came up for sale in 1982. They were the third owners and ran the place until 2005 when Al sold Hunter House to his daughter. Fortunately she hasn’t really changed a thing, with the exception of adding a catering trailer for parties. “It’s booked every weekend spring to fall,” Susan explained. I guess the trailer was a good idea.

  Hunter House is a comfortable, pleasant place that serves high quality burgers. Go there to meet the ridiculously friendly staff and if you are lucky you’ll get the impossibly extroverted server Chelsea. The future of Hunter House is secure too. “We just had a family meeting and discussed the future,” Susan told me. “The kids never want to sell.”

  KRAZY JIM’S BLIMPY BURGER

  551 SOUTH DIVISION ST | ANN ARBOR, MI 48104

  734-663-4590 | MON–SAT 11 AM–10 PM

  SUN NOON–8 PM

  A visit to Blimpy Burger can be a daunting but rewarding experience. Theatrically, the cooks behind the counter engage in a sort of Soup Nazi berating of customers who do not follow the cafeteria-style rules of ordering. “Just answer the questions I’m asking you,” grill cook Brian told a group of newcomers the first time I visited. In reality, the rules are there to help you, not scare you. They are there to allow the cooks to get your food to you fast, which is a good thing because you’ll need this burger in your mouth as soon as possible.

  Blimpy Burger is on the edge of the University of Michigan campus, surrounded by student rental houses with mud lawns. For students, the positioning of this decades-old greasy spoon could not be better. The interior of Blimpy Burger is wholly utilitarian and the opposite of a comfy dive. A low drop ceiling and greenish fluorescent lighting give the place a construction trailer feel. A collection of vintage cast-iron swivel stools bolted to the floor serve most tables. The original owner, Krazy Jim Shafer, purchased the stools from a department store that had gone out of business in the 1950s for $1.75 apiece.

  In 1953 Jim Shafer turned a corner grocery into a burger stand to sell cheap burgers to University of Michigan students. At his previous burger venture, shoehorned into an alley in downtown Ann Arbor, a friend at a neighboring business called Jim “crazy” for selling food for so cheap. The moniker stuck, as did the famous phrase that greets customers at Blimpy Burger: “Cheaper Than Food.” Current owner Richard Manger told me, “Back then it was cheaper to buy a 20-cent burger than to eat at home.”

  Richard bought the restaurant in 1992 from Krazy Jim, who was already in retirement. Jim and Rich had a past together at that point—Rich had worked as a cook flipping burgers in the late’60s for Jim at Blimpy, had met his wife, Chris, there (also a student), and had designed the Blimpy logo that is still used today. It’s a drawing of a seated, chubby bear smiling and hoisting a burger. “Jim
wanted me to draw a cow. I told him ‘I don’t draw cows. I draw bears.’”

  Richard’s menu design is an elaborate piece of R. Crumb-inspired line art that is suitable for framing. It lists a dizzying assortment of comfort foods and toppings for the burgers. Rich told me, “When Jim opened he only had burgers, American cheese, pie, and coffee.” Not so today. The selection of toppings and burger sizing is so vast it prompted a math student to deduce that there are more than 2,147,483,648 possible burger combinations.

  The fresh chuck that is used for Blimpy burgers is ground daily in the back. When you ask for a burger, you tell the grill cook how many you’d like (up to five, a “quint”) and he’ll grab that number of one-and-a-half-ounce balls of beef. The balls are tossed onto the hot griddle and smashed together, creating a sloppy, misshaped, flat patty. The burgers are pressed and pressed until they can get no thinner, flipped, pressed some more, then tossed on a bun. You’d think these guys had pressed the life out of your burger, but relax; you are in good hands. The result is a glorious grease bomb—a pile of loose, griddled meat that is crunchy in parts and soft in others. The meat is so loose it’s practically pebbly. A grill cook once told me, “These things are held together by hope.”

  The choice of roll for your burger, toasted on the griddle, includes pumpernickel, onion, or kaiser, the latter offered with or without sesame seeds because, as Rich explained matter-of-factly, “Some people have diverticulitis.” The onion roll is hands-down one of the best I have ever eaten, soft and tasty and able to soak up the copious amounts of grease a Blimpy burger produces. “Onion rolls most places suck,” Rich told me bluntly. “These really are great rolls.”